Sitting in the Soup – Negotiating the Challenges of Being an Insider in Qualitative Health Research

Abstract

Insider research refers to research conducted by individuals who are members of the group being studied. This reflexive article explores the personal and methodological journey of being an insider researcher investigating firefighters’ experiences of suicide exposure, while being both an active firefighter and someone with lived experience of suicide bereavement. Through first-person narrative, the article traces evolution from positivist certainty to embracing the metaphor of ‘sitting in the soup’ of uncertainty as essential to skilled insider research. Drawing on Consoli’s life capital framework and affect theory scholarship, the article demonstrates how healing from personal trauma became a methodological prerequisite, enabling conscious engagement with the affective entanglement inherent in insider positioning. Central to this approach is recognition that reflexivity must operate as core practice prior to and throughout the entire research process. The article proposes that insider positioning is paradoxical and dynamic rather than fixed, and that thorough self-knowledge transforms embedded subjectivity from methodological liability into epistemological strength. When conducted with sophisticated reflexive competence, insider research enables deeper, more nuanced understanding of human experience while maintaining academic rigour.

Sitting in the Soup: The Insider Researcher’s Compass

I was sitting on my psychologist’s couch on the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia, in 2009 when they commented ‘You’re very sword like Tara. You need to learn to sit in the “soup” of uncertainty’. I did not meet this with a large degree of enthusiasm at the time. I recall an inwardly directed eye roll and a sense of ‘really? Do I have to?’. I would spend the next 15 years exploring what learning to ‘sit in the soup’ meant and the associated discomfort it evoked. It was only when I embarked on my doctoral research in 2018, however, that I realised how this metaphor of ‘sitting in the soup’ was central to insider research. It not only afforded invaluable insight into the messiness and ambiguity of qualitative research but more importantly it bestowed the insider researcher with a compass that could help guide them through their journey into the unknown.

There is much research and discussion relating to the inclusion of qualitative researcher lived experiences across each step of the research process: from the initial identification of a research question to design, data collection, analysis, and beyond (Maple & Edwards, 2010; Minichiello et al., 2008; Mishler, 1991). This reflects a broader epistemological turn towards lived experience research within health research (Beames et al., 2021; Dembele et al., 2024), with growing recognition of its value in improving both research methods and data quality, and a concomitant expansion in the number of ‘insider’ researchers within the field. An insider researcher is defined as a person who conducts studies with populations, communities, and identity groups of which they are also members (Kanuha, 2000). The researcher is therefore embedded within the research and possesses an a priori intimate knowledge of the community and its members (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2013), such that the intimacy of the relationship between the researcher’s lived experiences, those of participants, and the research itself becomes deeply and intricately entwined (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009).

By its nature, this challenges post-positivist research which seeks and defends objectivity and poses a unique set of methodological and ethical challenges due to the researcher’s dual role as both a member of the research setting and an investigator. Yet, the challenges of insider research extend beyond the familiar concern about objectivity. As this article demonstrates, insider positioning is not a stable or straightforwardly advantageous status, it is paradoxical, multidimensional, and shifting. The same elements of a researcher’s positioning that create access and trust can simultaneously generate unexpected distance, role confusion, and affective entanglement that demands sophisticated navigation. While lived experience research has become increasingly commonplace in qualitative health studies, there remains limited methodological guidance on how insider researchers can skilfully navigate this complex terrain.

This article addresses that gap through first-person narrative, tracing my own journey as an insider researcher investigating firefighters’ experiences of exposure to suicide, while being both an active firefighter and someone with lived experience of suicide bereavement. It argues that skilled insider research requires three interlocking competencies: recognition that insider positioning is paradoxical and dynamic rather than fixed; deep self-knowledge developed through intentional healing work as a methodological prerequisite; and reflexivity as a core practice throughout the entire research process, not merely as an afterthought. Drawing on Consoli’s life capital framework (Consoli, 2022) and scholarship on affect and relationality (Boden et al., 2016; Helman et al., 2024), the article proposes that the insider researcher’s embedded subjectivity, when consciously known and reflexively engaged, transforms from methodological liability into epistemological strength, and that sitting in the soup is not something to be endured but a research orientation to be cultivated.

The Journey to Becoming an Insider Researcher

From Sword to Soup: A Personal and Academic Evolution

The narrative that follows draws on autoethnography’s capacity for systematic re-examination of formative experiences, moving beyond simple autobiography towards theoretically grounded reflexive inquiry (Pinner, 2017). In presenting my personal history here, I position researcher subjectivity not as bias to be minimised but as emic and contextually situated insight, examining how my own journey through trauma, healing, and professional development fundamentally shaped my capacity to conduct skilled insider research.

My research evolved from and is grounded in my personal and occupational exposure to suicide as a professional firefighter. It was this very positioning that generated the passion and thirst for knowledge which drove me to initiate and conduct my doctoral research. At the start of 2018, as a complete novice to qualitative research, I embarked upon my PhD exploring the impact of suicide on firefighters. ¹ Being an insider led me intuitively to my research question. It lit the fire within me to understand the impact of suicide on firefighters within their cultural and organisational context, the complexity and often cumulative nature of their experiences of suicide exposure in their personal lives, through the loss of colleagues, and through attending suicide-related incidents in their role as protectors of life. This led me to my research question: ‘How do firefighters live with and through the experience of exposure to suicide in their personal and professional lives?’ (Lal, 2024, p. 5). ¹

I was 17 when my brother took his own life and the world as I knew it was obliterated. My mother had died four years before from cancer and my father had lived with severe mental ill health for my entire childhood. It was my brother’s death though that defined a ‘before and after’ in the way I experienced the world, who I was as a person and who I became. The world no longer felt safe or trusted. I became anxious, grief stricken, fearful, and lost. I desperately sought safety, solidity, and wholeness. The ‘sword’, a metaphor for my black and white approach to decision making and life, gave me some fragile semblance of control and certainty. It was only in my early 30s that I embarked on a journey to make sense of my life, myself, and my story. I revisited my childhood, peeling back the layers of myself that I had created in an unconscious attempt to keep myself safe. It was effortful, painful, and challenging, and involved me writing my entire life story as well as engaging in many other creative and diverse ways to better understand myself and my life. Through this process, my entire world view shifted, enabling it to emanate from a place of ‘knowing’ of myself and my truth. It afforded gentle solidity and grounding, a knowingness from within as opposed to any attachment or need for a knowingness from without. I could let go of the certainty of the sword and embrace the messiness of the soup.

The sword and the soup are not merely personal metaphors; they map onto a broader epistemological shift that qualitative researchers have long identified. The sword captures the positivist impulse towards singular, objective truth (Crotty, 1998): a search for certainty that forecloses ambiguity and positions the researcher as detached observer. The soup, by contrast, captures the constructionist recognition that reality is multiple, shifting, and co-constructed, and that uncertainty is not a methodological problem to be solved but an epistemological condition to be inhabited (Burr & Dick, 2017). My personal journey from sword to soup, it turns out, was also an ontological one.

My academic journey very much mirrored this personal evolution. As a young undergraduate, I studied Physiology and then Physiotherapy, with the intent of finding answers to how the body worked. Science suited my way of being in the world, black and white, right and wrong. Ambiguity was not an option I had any desire to entertain, for I experienced uncertainty as a threat to my ability to function given the context in which my life had evolved thus far. It was only through my time working as a physiotherapist, in tandem with my own personal journey to healing, that I loosened my grip on the sword. I changed the course of my professional life, from physiotherapist to firefighter, and then I wrote an autobiographical book about my own experiences of grief, trauma, and suicide. After an 18-year hiatus from formal academic study, a period that saw me shift perspective from science, positivism, and a desire verging on a need for absolute truth, I found myself intuitively sniffing out qualitative research. I found joy rather than fear in the inherent messiness and ambiguity of narrative inquiry.

My own journey of healing and personal growth enabled a methodological openness to more complex and uncertain ways of knowing. This capacity to embrace methodological ambiguity mirrors, and indeed emerged from, the capacity to sit with personal uncertainty. The journey from sword to soup was the same journey, lived on two planes simultaneously.

Philosophical Foundation: How Subjectivity Becomes Strength

For insider research, philosophical foundations do more than contextualise methodological choices; they must actively justify the researcher’s embedded position and reframe subjectivity from limitation to epistemological resource. The framework I describe here serves this purpose, and it informs every dimension of the research practice explored in the sections that follow.

Constructionist Foundations and the Insider’s Dilemma

My research question explored lived and living experiences of firefighters and therefore required grounding in philosophical principles that acknowledge how reality is experienced as a human being. I adopted a constructionist ontological perspective, which posits that reality is constructed through human interaction with the world via subjective, complex interactions involving individual, organisational, societal, historical, and cultural experiences (Burr & Dick, 2017). This perspective recognises that no absolute truth exists; rather, multiple shifting truths are constructed through engagement with multiple realities (Crotty, 1998).

This ontological stance directly addresses what I call ‘the insider’s dilemma’, the concern that researcher subjectivity compromises objectivity and therefore compromises the research itself. Within a constructionist framework, the concern dissolves; if reality is always constructed through human interaction with the world, then the insider researcher’s intimate knowledge of the cultural context, language, and lived experiences is not a bias to be minimised but an essential component of knowledge creation. Drawing on both constructivism and social constructionism, I recognised that my personal belief systems, shaped by suicide bereavement and trauma, influenced how I constructed meaning from participant narratives, while my embedded position within firefighter culture meant the knowledge generated was inherently shaped by our shared social context. Rather than eliminating these influences, the philosophical framework enabled embracing them as fundamental to the process.

From this foundation, narrative inquiry became a natural methodological home. Narrative is how humans organise experience and make sense of the world, with meaning achieved through story, scheme, and interpretation (Bruner, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1988). Narrative inquiry explicitly acknowledges that the researcher influences how the storyteller perceives and presents their reality. As Mishler argues, researchers must ‘invite [respondents] into our work as collaborators, sharing control with them so that together we try to understand what their stories are about’ (Mishler, 1991, p. 249). This collaborative epistemology aligns directly with insider positioning, transforming potential methodological concerns into strengths.

The shared language of firefighter culture, the technical terms, the dark humour, the unspoken understandings, was not simply a convenient communication tool but an epistemological gateway. My fluency in this cultural language enabled access to meanings that might have remained hidden or unexpressed with an outsider researcher. This is the insider’s dilemma resolved in practice; shared experience and language, far from contaminating knowledge, opened the door to it.

Life Capital as Epistemological Resource

Constructionism and narrative inquiry provide the philosophical justification for insider research; but they do not, on their own, explain the mechanism by which lived experience is transformed into methodological strength. For this, I draw on Consoli’s concept of Life Capital, a ‘wealth which can be understood through the richness of one’s life experiences… and entails memories, desires, emotions, attitudes’ (Consoli, 2022, p. 1401). Consoli argues that, through reflexivity, ‘the researcher’s life capital becomes an important, all too often ignored, source of precious data which may represent research findings in a much more nuanced light’ (Consoli, 2022, p. 1405).

This framework provides theoretical language for a central claim of this article; that self-knowledge must precede insider research, because therapeutic and deep inner work develops the reflexive awareness of life capital necessary to transform lived experience into a methodological resource rather than an unconscious source of bias. My own life capital, forged through childhood trauma, sibling suicide bereavement, a 15-year healing journey, and professional experience as both physiotherapist and firefighter, did not simply accompany me into the research. It constituted the biographical substrate through which I could attune to participants’ experiences in ways an outsider researcher could not.

Crucially, however, life capital is not static content that researchers ‘possess’ and manage. Integrated with scholarship on affect and relationality (Boden et al., 2016; Helman et al., 2024), it is more accurately understood as dynamic relational potential, something enacted in research encounters rather than contained within individual researchers. As Boden and colleagues argue, feelings in research encounters are co-constructed in the intersubjective space between researcher and participant, requiring a critical ‘reflexivity of feelings’ that empowers the researcher to become an instrument of their research (Boden et al., 2016, p. 1081). Life capital circulates. In any given research encounter, the same biographical history can activate differently, creating resonance with one participant, unexpected distance with another, and disruption with a third.

This has an important implication for how we understand the therapeutic preparation I advocate. It develops not mastery over one’s life capital, not the capacity to separate one’s responses cleanly from participants’ experiences, but rather what Chadwick theorises as staying with discomfort, ‘dwelling on its texture, implications, viscerality and resonances’ (Chadwick, 2021, p. 564), the ability to remain present with how life capital activates and circulates in research encounters without prematurely resolving the uncertainty this creates. This is precisely what the soup metaphor names. Sitting in the soup requires developing biographical knowingness, conscious awareness of the patterns, histories, and emotional textures of one’s life capital, held in productive tension with relational uncertainty about how that life capital circulates and activates in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled.

It is this integration of constructionist foundations, narrative epistemology, and life capital theory that transforms insider positioning from a methodological liability into an epistemological strength, and that underpins the reflexive practices explored throughout the remainder of this article.

The Complexity of Insider-Outsider Positioning

Dancing Within a Web: When Inside Meets Outside

Insider-outsider positioning has historically been oversimplified, conceived as a binary or linear continuum that misses the lived complexity of insider researcher roles (Chavez, 2008). Naples offered an early corrective, describing insider-outsider positioning as ‘ever-shifting and permeable social locations that are differentially experienced and expressed’ (Naples, 1996, p. 373). Yet, even this dynamic framing does not fully capture what I came to understand through my own research; that insider positioning is not merely complex but fundamentally paradoxical. The same element of a researcher’s positioning can simultaneously create access and distance, understanding and blindness, and resonance and discomfort. As Ademolu observes, speculating about ‘sameness’ must occur across all stages of research and across all dimensions of identity, not just lived experience, but age, class, gender, and organisational role, with the researcher moving like a pendulum between insider and outsider repeatedly as the research unfolds (Ademolu, 2024).

I entered this research appearing to be a clear insider on two fundamental levels: as a professional firefighter with 17+ years of experience and as someone with lived experience of suicide bereavement. ² This dual insider status, rather than resolving questions about positioning, immediately intensified them. How does one navigate being simultaneously ‘too’ inside, sharing the very trauma being researched, and ‘not inside enough’, being of different rank, different gender, occupying a different organisational history? My experience within the paramilitary world of Fire and Rescue New South Wales (FRNSW) revealed that insider-outsider positioning exists not on a continuum but within what I came to understand as a multidimensional, shifting web of cultural, organisational, and affective relationships. Three dimensions of this web proved particularly significant.

Rank, Power, and the Paramilitary Hierarchy

Fire services operate as paramilitary organisations with strict hierarchical rank-based structures that fundamentally shape all interactions. My rank as a senior firefighter, a relatively low position within the organisational hierarchy, meant my insider-outsider positioning shifted dramatically depending on whom I was interviewing. When I interviewed officers of significantly higher rank, our shared firefighter identity was immediately inflected by organisational protocol that dictated I address them as ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’, immediately establishing a power differential that positioned me as an outsider despite our shared culture and language. With six participants holding officer ranks significantly senior to mine, I found myself navigating a complex dance between my role as researcher, which required a degree of conversational equality, and my organisational positioning as a subordinate.

There is an unspoken understanding within firefighter culture that anyone wearing the uniform with at least 15 years’ experience possesses knowledge and understanding that affords a ‘knowing’, a sense that we ‘speak the same language’. Yet, this shared understanding was constantly mediated by rank-based expectations that both enabled and constrained what became speak-able in our encounters. My relatively low rank, paradoxically, also worked in my favour with some participants; it positioned me as operationally credible but outside management, which built trust with firefighters who were sceptical of organisational authority (Brannick & Coghlan, 2007). The insider advantage was real, but it was never stable and never simple.

Gender and the Masculine Culture of Firefighting

My positioning as a female firefighter added another crucial and paradoxical dimension. In an organisation where 93% of permanent firefighters are male, my gender simultaneously marked me as an insider, wearing the uniform, speaking the language, understanding the weight of a 24-hour shift, and as an outsider, representing a minority experience within a deeply masculine culture.

This gender dynamic influenced participant narratives in subtle but significant ways. With male participants like Matt, ³ my female presence appeared to enable emotional expression that might have been more difficult with a male interviewer. When Matt broke down describing his nephew’s suicide, there was a sense that my gender allowed him to access vulnerability without threatening his masculine firefighter identity, that my outsider-ness on the dimension of gender paradoxically created safer insider-ness on the dimension of emotional permission. Yet, this same positioning meant that certain aspects of firefighter culture, particularly around masculine stoicism and the specific ways male firefighters navigate emotional labour, were partially opaque to me and could not be assumed. I was simultaneously insider and cultural interpreter, never fully one or the other.

The Peer Support Officer Complication

My role as a peer support officer within FRNSW, a volunteer role involving supporting colleagues experiencing psychological distress, added a further layer of complexity that was perhaps the most difficult to navigate in practice. Three of my participants were also peer support officers, which created a unique form of professional camaraderie and deepened the sense of shared language and purpose. But this shared role also brought acute risks.

During emotionally difficult moments in interviews, I found myself ‘sliding’ out of my researcher role and ‘slipping’ into providing support, a tendency I had to consciously monitor and manage. My training and instincts pulled consistently towards comfort rather than inquiry. In my reflexive journal during one interview with a male participant, I wrote, ‘I find it hard not to just give him a hug’. This impulse was not merely personal warmth; it was the activation of a professional identity that had its own deeply ingrained relational script. To maintain research integrity required the ability to notice myself appearing in the emotional entanglement and to deliberately hold my researcher positioning, not by suppressing care but by recognising when care was pulling me away from the participant’s story rather than towards it.

This peer support complication illustrates something important about insider positioning more broadly; that researchers bring not one insider identity but multiple, and these identities carry their own relational scripts that can pull in different directions simultaneously. Managing this required not resolution but ongoing, conscious navigation.

Navigating the Web: Skilled Positioning as Practice

Rather than viewing this multidimensional complexity as a methodological problem, I came to understand it as a defining feature of insider research requiring skilful navigation. The multiple dimensions of my positioning provided access to different layers of firefighter experience: cultural credibility, emotional permission, and operational legitimacy, while simultaneously creating challenges that demanded ongoing reflexive attention.

The challenges were real and required active management. The dual insider status heightened the risk of over-identification, potentially leading to over-emphasis on shared experiences (Chavez, 2008), overlooking taken-for-granted assumptions (Asselin, 2003), and difficulty maintaining analytical distance from participants whose experiences closely mirrored my own (Mercer, 2007). To navigate this, I developed specific strategies from the outset: explicit role clarification, being transparent about all my roles (firefighter, peer support officer, and researcher) and clearly delineating boundaries; conscious management of environmental cues, including never wearing my uniform to interviews and conducting interviews outside the workplace where possible; continuous reflexive journaling to track shifting positioning and its impacts; and therapeutic support to process particularly activating interviews.

These strategies did not resolve the tensions inherent in insider positioning, nor was resolution the goal. What they enabled was what I term ‘skilled positioning’, the ability to consciously navigate the complex, multidimensional, and temporal nature of insider-outsider dynamics. This involves positional awareness – recognising in real time how multiple identity factors interact to shape what is possible in a given encounter; adaptive navigation – moving fluidly between degrees of insider-ness and outsider-ness as the research moment requires; boundary management – maintaining role clarity while leveraging the benefits of shared experience; and reflexive processing – continuously examining how positioning shifts impact the knowledge being generated.

The knowledge produced through this research did not emerge from a fixed insider or outsider position but from skilled navigation of a relational web that was both complex and dynamic. This approach challenges the simplified notions of insider research as simply studying one’s ‘own people’ and instead reveals it as a sophisticated methodological practice requiring specific competencies and ongoing reflexive engagement. The complexity is not a problem to be solved but a resource to be skilfully inhabited, which is essentially another way of describing what it means to sit in the soup.

Reflexivity as Core Practice

Within the qualitative research paradigm, reflexivity is often relegated to a brief methods section acknowledgment, a gesture towards transparency rather than a genuine practice of central importance. This approach fundamentally misunderstands its role in insider research, where reflexivity must be embedded as a core practice throughout the entire research process (Etherington, 2020). Reflexivity has been defined as ‘a dynamic process of interaction within and between ourselves and our participants and the data that informs decisions, actions, and interpretations at all stages’ (Etherington, 2020, p. 78). For insider researchers, it shifts from an optional consideration into the primary tool enabling ethical, rigorous knowledge creation (Etherington, 2020), and it begins, crucially, long before the first interview.

The Therapeutic Foundation: Why Self-Knowledge Precedes Research

Reflexive competence for insider research requires what I came to understand as embodied self-knowledge: the ability to recognise, tolerate, and work with one’s own emotional responses at a visceral level. As Attia and Edge observe, ‘the continuing growth of the whole-person-who-researches is central to the research process’ (Attia & Edge, 2017, p. 34). This capacity is particularly crucial when researching trauma-related topics, where trauma itself creates disconnection from emotional experience, a tendency towards black and white thinking, and a heightened need for control (Van der Kolk, 2014); what I have called, in this article, the grip of the sword.

My 15-year journey of therapeutic work and deepening self-knowledge was not separate from my methodological preparation; it was my methodological preparation, although I did not know it at the time. Drawing on Consoli’s life capital framework (Consoli, 2022), this therapeutic work developed conscious awareness of my life capital; the complex constellation of memories, emotions, and embodied patterns formed through childhood trauma, sibling suicide bereavement, and the long work of healing. Through extensive therapy and writing my own life story, I moved from a default state of emotional numbing, where anger and joy were largely inaccessible and sadness was my primary emotional register, to the capacity to feel and work with the full spectrum of emotional experience. Without this awareness, my life capital would have operated as unconscious influence, denying my ability to effectively use the co-created relational, embodied, and emotional aspects of my participants’ stories (Boden et al., 2016), while also putting my own mental health and wellbeing at risk.

This embodied self-knowledge enabled me to use my body as a ‘tuning fork’, a sensitive instrument for detecting emotional resonances both within myself and in participants. My training as a physiotherapist had taught me to ‘listen to bodies’, to understand lived experience through somatic cues and expression. In insider research, this translated into the ability to sense when interviews were activating responses in me and to use those responses as valuable data rather than being unconsciously driven by them. As Consoli (2022) argues, when researchers develop conscious awareness of their life capital through reflexive practice, they enrich findings rather than contaminate them (Consoli, 2022). Therapeutic engagement prior to commencing insider research is therefore both a methodological imperative and, as Doucet and Mauthner frame it, an act of ‘knowing responsibly’ (Doucet & Mauthner, 2012).

Reflexive Journaling as Analytical Method

Reflexive journaling in this research was not an afterthought; it was a primary analytical tool operating throughout the entire research process (Braun & Clarke, 2019), with multiple dimensions and temporal rhythms that enabled deep engagement with the material.

Immediately after each interview, I engaged in what I called ‘body brainstorming’, writing freely about what I felt in my body, noting sensations, tensions, emotional responses, and immediate reactions before cognitive processing took over. Alongside this visceral writing, I recorded comprehensive field notes (Schwandt, 2015) capturing not just logistical details but the emotional energy of the encounter, what might have remained unsaid, and how the interview had shifted or challenged my previous assumptions. Over the hours, days, and sometimes weeks that followed, I returned to these journals as deeper understanding emerged, a temporal layering that allowed initial somatic awareness to develop into cognitive and analytical understanding.

This journaling process was essential to what I came to understand, through the lens of affect theory, as attending to affective circulation, recognising how emotions and responses moved between myself and participants in ways that resisted neat attribution. Boden and colleagues describe this as navigating the in-between spaces where researcher and participant feelings mingle in intersubjective dialogue, requiring careful and lengthy unpicking rather than immediate resolution (Boden et al., 2016). Rather than rushing to determine what ‘belonged’ to me versus what ‘belonged’ to the participant, the reflexive practice I developed involved remaining present with this entanglement, dwelling in the uncertainty of the soup long enough for its analytical yield to become visible.

Anger as an Epistemological Gateway: Three Interviews

The methodological value of this reflexive practice is most clearly demonstrated through three interviews in which the same emotional register, anger, activated my life capital in profoundly different ways, generating different forms of analytical insight in each case.

Luke: When Externalised Rage Creates Repulsion

Luke was a Leading Station Officer with 23 years of service who shared openly about organisational bullying, his own mental health struggles, and an incident in which he had intentionally placed himself where he could have ended his life instantly. His anger and mistrust were palpable throughout our two-and-a-half-hour conversation:

It’s the bullying and harassment that has done more damage for me, in Fire and Rescue New South Wales. I’ve had two breakdowns … that’s what bullying and harassment does … Two of those [suicide deaths of colleagues], without question in my mind, if they were handled differently by Fire and Rescue NSW and specifically the bosses, I’m convinced they would not have happened. (Luke, Leading Station Officer)

By the end of our conversation, I felt a familiar tightness across my chest and throat, a somatic response I had learned through therapy to recognise as anxiety masking deeper, unprocessed emotion. My reflexive journal captures what I was sitting with in the days that followed:

Luke’s anger feels vicious and dangerous to me; revengeful. It’s jolting on a somatic level. I’m suddenly taken back to a conversation with my father many years before about my brother’s death that left me with the same sensations. My father blamed others, even good people, for Adam’s death. His was passive rage that made me want to vomit. It felt toxic in the same way that Luke’s anger feels toxic. I felt his anger and blaming as a threat to my faith in the inherent ‘goodness’ of people. His interview confronts me with all that I reject in myself.

The reflexive processing this required, over days of journaling and sessions with my psychotherapist, was essential for several reasons. It enabled me to identify what was activating: specific elements of my life capital, my own suppressed anger forged through childhood trauma, and a learned belief that anger and love could not coexist. But to describe this as simply ‘distinguishing what belonged to Luke versus what belonged to me’ would oversimplify what was actually occurring. As Boden and colleagues observe, the feelings that emerge in suicide research encounters resist neat separation (Boden et al., 2016). Luke’s externalised rage activated my patterns around anger, yes, but my presence as a female firefighter willing to hear his story without judgment may equally have shaped how fully he expressed that rage. The tightness in my chest was simultaneously mine, his, and ours, emerging from the affective field between us. This is life capital operating through circulation rather than containment.

Had I not undertaken this reflexive work, my discomfort might have led me to minimise the significance of anger in my analysis. Instead, it opened an analytical question: what role does anger, and its suppression, play in how firefighters make meaning of suicide exposure? Luke’s interview, processed reflexively, became an epistemological gateway.

Liam: When Suppressed Anger Creates Resonance

Where Luke’s anger overwhelmed, Liam’s drew me in. Liam was a Senior Firefighter with 19 years’ experience whose grief for two colleagues lost to suicide was quietly devastating:

Probably the biggest thing [sigh], not knowing what to do, not knowing how to help. The fact that they’re gone [pause]. You know, Ben [Pseudonym] used to ring me every day, and [pause] just stopped [crying, voice cracks]. So that’s probably the hardest thing to deal with. (Liam, Senior Firefighter)

My reflexive journal entry after this interview reveals a different quality of activation entirely:

I can hear a pinching in his voice at times when he’s talking about the loss of his two friends. It’s as if his throat is closing off trying to stop the real emotion from erupting. I can hear this because I’ve heard it in my own voice. I notice that he never mentions anger, and there is no anger in his voice. This resonates with me at a deeply unconscious level. It is only months later that I realise why. I swallowed my anger for years and I hear the same from him. The things left unsaid, his heavy energy and the tone of his voice when it pinches. Is part of the ‘heaviness’ I feel from him the weight of anger turned inwards, morphing into and manifesting as depression?

What is significant here is the movement towards curiosity at the end of the entry, from somatic attunement to hypothesising. The question I posed was not simply personal reflection; it was the beginning of an analytical insight about how suppressed anger shapes grief trajectories in firefighter culture. My life capital, specifically, my own history of swallowed anger and the therapeutic work of reclaiming it, gave me access to a dimension of Liam’s experience that might have remained invisible to a researcher without similar biographical history. This is how life capital enriches rather than contaminates findings (Consoli, 2022).

Anne: When Shared Experience Creates Unexpected Distance

Anne was an on-call firefighter with 10 years’ service who had, like me, lost a brother to suicide. On the surface, our shared experience might have suggested the deepest insider connection of all my interviews. What I encountered instead was instructive:

What he did was selfish I feel, as a brother, very fucking selfish and I’m angry … Why Tom [Pseudonym]? Why? (Anne, On-Call Firefighter)

My reflexive journal entry is brief but telling:

Anne’s story resonates with me, but its in the past, not the present. It is played in a different key. Despite surface similarities, both losing brothers, both firefighters, both female, her way of being with anger is different to mine. I don't feel emotionally activated. Rather I feel distant.

This unexpected distance is itself a methodological finding of significance. It challenges the assumption that shared experience automatically creates insider connection, one of the most important complications this research surfaces. Anne’s anger and blame were the emotions I had worked hardest to move through in my own healing journey. Where Luke’s rage had activated repulsion through proximity, Anne’s activated distance through difference. The same emotional register, anger at a brother’s suicide, expressed so differently that our shared biography created separation rather than resonance.

Together, these three interviews illuminate what the reflexive practice enabled, not clean discernment between self and other but sophisticated attunement to the relational dynamics through which affective knowledge emerged. The analytical insight that anger, expressed, suppressed, and differently metabolised, reveals the emotional landscape through which firefighters live with suicide exposure did not come from the interviews alone.

It came from the intersubjective space between myself and these three participants, mediated by life capital and made legible through reflexive practice. How emotion is quarantined or expressed, how trauma compounds grief, and how suicide constitutes a particular and cumulative kind of loss within an already trauma-saturated culture, these findings emerged not despite the affective entanglement of insider research but through it. This is sitting in the soup, remaining present within affective entanglement long enough for its epistemological gifts to become visible.

Knowingness: The Goal of Reflexive Practice

What this process developed, over the course of 20 interviews, months of journaling, and ongoing therapeutic work, was what I term knowingness; a deep familiarity with my own patterns, triggers, and ways of processing experience that enabled me to recognise when my life capital was activating and to work with that activation somatically, emotionally, and analytically rather than being unconsciously driven by it.

This knowingness operated across several dimensions: somatic awareness – learning to read my body’s responses as data about the relational dynamics in interviews; emotional literacy – the capacity to work with the full spectrum of emotional experience, including emotions I had previously suppressed; pattern recognition – understanding my own psychological patterns well enough to notice when they were being activated; and relational awareness – sensitivity to the interpersonal dynamics through which narratives were shaped.

Critically, however, knowingness is not mastery. As Helman and colleagues caution, no amount of preparation eliminates the emergence and unpredictability of research encounters, and their ‘jarring encounters’ (Helman et al., 2024) are jarring precisely because they disrupt preparation. My responses to the three interviews described above could not have been fully anticipated. What therapeutic preparation developed was not a fixed toolkit but rather the capacity for dwelling in discomfort – the ability to remain present with affective entanglement without prematurely resolving it (Chadwick, 2021). Biographical knowingness held in productive tension with relational uncertainty; this is the reflexive competence that skilled insider research requires, and it is, in the end, what sitting in the soup demands.

Practical Guidance for Insider Researchers

Recommendations for Navigating the Soup

The insights gained from this research have crystallised into practical recommendations for others embarking on insider research, particularly in trauma-related fields. They are offered not as a prescriptive checklist but as principles distilled from the experience of sitting in the soup, and from recognising, in retrospect, what made that possible.

Before Research: The Therapeutic Foundation

The most significant recommendation is perhaps the most unconventional; developing deep self-knowledge through intentional healing work prior to commencing insider research is a methodological imperative, not merely a personal wellbeing consideration. For me, this took the form of sustained therapeutic engagement over many years, but the essential requirement is not therapy in any particular formalised sense. It is the willingness to engage seriously and honestly with one’s own wounds, patterns, and biographical history through whatever means are accessible and culturally meaningful; whether through therapeutic relationships, creative practice, community support, spiritual engagement, or the kind of sustained self-reflective writing I undertook prior to and throughout my research.

What matters is not the form this healing takes but rather what it enables – the development of conscious awareness of one’s own life capital and the capacity to work with it reflexively rather than being unconsciously driven by it (Consoli, 2022).

This therapeutic work need not be complete before research begins; indeed, it is never complete. But it must be sufficiently developed to enable one to know responsibly through the capacity to recognise when one’s own history is activating in a research encounter and to work with that activation as an analytical tool that enables the researcher to be an instrument of their research without being led by it (Boden et al., 2016). The goal is not resolution of one’s connection to the research topic but conscious awareness of how that connection will shape the research process. Researchers must also be able to distinguish between using research for personal validation and using personal experience in service of knowledge generation, a distinction that requires the kind of honest self-examination that therapeutic work develops.

During Data Collection: Emotional Activation as Data

When insider researchers experience emotional activation during data collection, this should be understood as significant methodological data rather than a problem to be managed or eliminated. Somatic responses, tightness in the chest, waves of sadness, and a sense of unease, contain important information about the relational dynamics of the encounter and the affective dimensions of participant narratives. Developing protocols for capturing these responses immediately after interviews, before cognitive processing takes over, is essential. Body brainstorming, writing freely about physical and emotional sensations directly after each interview, combined with reflective field notes capturing the emotional energy of the encounter, what remained unsaid, and how the interview shifted previous assumptions, creates a temporal record that deepens in analytical value over days and weeks as we circle through and around our data.

Alongside this, therapeutic support specifically for processing research-related activation is not a luxury but a structural necessity. Particularly activating interviews require dedicated processing, not to eliminate the researcher’s response but to understand what it is telling them about both their own life capital and the participant’s experience.

During Analysis: Embodied Analytical Practice

The reflexive practices developed during data collection must extend into and through the analytical process. When working with transcripts, the same somatic attunement that operated during interviews remains a valuable analytical instrument, noticing physical responses to particular passages, attending to what resonates and what creates distance, and using these responses to identify patterns and meanings in the data that cognitive analysis alone might miss. The capacity to move fluidly between empathic engagement and disentanglement, between being with the data and stepping back to examine it, is the core skill of the insider researcher, and it draws directly on the embodied self-knowledge developed through therapeutic work and sustained through reflexive journaling.

Supervisory Relationships: Beyond Traditional Academic Mentoring

Finally, and critically for the field, insider research requires supervisory relationships that extend beyond traditional academic mentoring. Supervisory teams working with insider researchers, particularly those studying trauma-related topics, must develop structures for ongoing reflexive support that go beyond data and argument. This includes explicit agreements about the role of personal experience in the research, protocols for debriefing emotionally activating interviews, and recognition that the researcher’s emotional processing is not separate from but integral to the analytical process. Institutions and doctoral programs must recognise these not only as pastoral concerns but as legitimate methodological competencies requiring support. To treat them otherwise is to misunderstand what skilled insider research requires and to risk the quality and integrity of the knowledge it can generate.

The Gift of the Soup – Embracing Uncertainty as Methodological Strength

In 2009, sitting on my psychologist’s couch on the northern beaches of Sydney, I resisted the invitation to sit in the soup of uncertainty. I wanted the sword, the clear sharp edges of certainty that had helped me navigate a world that had become unpredictable and threatening long before I understood why. What I could not have imagined then was that learning to relinquish the sword would become not just personally transformative but methodologically essential. The capacity to dwell in uncertainty, to remain present with complexity rather than rushing to resolve it, became, quite literally, a research superpower.

This article has traced three interlocking arguments. First, that insider positioning is not a fixed status but a paradoxical, multidimensional, and temporally shifting web of relationships; one that simultaneously creates access and distance, understanding and blindness, and resonance and discomfort. Second, that navigating this complexity with rigour requires deep self-knowledge developed through intentional healing work, not as preparation for transcending affective entanglement but as preparation for dwelling skilfully within it. Third, that reflexivity must function as core practice throughout the entire research process, not an afterthought, not a methods section gesture, but the primary instrument through which insider positioning is transformed from liability into epistemological strength.

Running through all three arguments is Consoli’s (2022) concept of life capital, which this article has used to theorise the mechanism by which lived experience becomes methodological resource. Life capital understood as the biographical constellation of memories, emotions, and embodied patterns a researcher brings to every encounter does not contaminate insider research when it is consciously known and reflexively engaged. It enriches it. Integrated with scholarship on affect and relationality (Boden et al., 2016; Helman et al., 2024), this article has further argued that life capital is not static content to be managed but dynamic relational potential that activates and circulates in research encounters in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled. The soup, understood through this lens, is not merely a metaphor for uncertainty in general, it names the specific affective entanglement in which insider researchers are inevitably immersed, and within which the most valuable knowledge is co-created.

The implications for the field are significant. Qualitative health research must move beyond treating insider positioning as a methodological compromise to be acknowledged and minimised, towards recognising it as a sophisticated approach requiring specific competencies and offering unique epistemological opportunities. This requires changes at the level of research training, supervisory practice, and institutional recognition, an understanding that lived experience is not bias to be managed but a research qualification to be developed and supported.

The gift of the soup, it turns out, was not something I could have welcomed at the beginning of the journey. It required the long work of learning to stay, with uncertainty, with complexity, and with the discomfort of not knowing, long enough for what the soup contains to become visible. For insider researchers willing to undertake that work, the rewards extend far beyond personal insight. They open pathways to understanding human experience that remain, from any position of assumed certainty, largely out of reach.