The underlying premise of this chapter is that histories are open to change. The ability to rewrite the past is an ongoing enterprise engaged in by us all in conversation when telling others about the past. This idea of reauthoring, or restorying, the past is not new and therapists have long since used this technique to encourage people to think differently (and tell different stories) about their past (see Furman, 1998, for a powerful exploration of this). My aim here is to take a slightly different angle to these approaches, however. I illustrate how people use their life history to articulate meaningful accounts of difficulties within the current care relationship.

This chapter presents an argument for asking about a person’s family history to gain a fuller understanding of how relationships are accounted for. This includes looking at how people construct the development and maintenance of relationships, and exploring how accounts of the past can shed light on the way difficulties are articulated in the present. The ideological work that this talk performs, in facilitating or impinging on the provision of care and talk about difficulties within that relationship, is also noted.

The analysis of participants’ spoken biographies and constructions of their family takes three strands. This includes (i) previous care exchanges (both within and outside of the family), (ii) positioning work in past care exchanges and (iii) broader accounts of features of the person’s history. Each of these feeds into the discussion of the importance of the past on the present relationship in general terms, and also relates specifically to accounts of care and difficulties.

Within family care relationships there are two main routes of mapping the influence of the past on the present. One stems from care-participants who have a complete shared history with the other member of the dyad (for example siblings and adult children with their parents). The other is where temporal/character overlap occurs for only part of their lives (spouse and friendship dyads).

Where participants have shared histories that go back into childhood there is more scope for analytic work comparing the accounts. Shared experiences based entirely in adulthood may still include relevant childhood events, and details of the individual’s biography remain germane to understanding how the current care relationship is expressed. However, there is less scope for mapping accounts and interpretations of experiences onto each other.