Att leva med missbrukare : En studie om medberoende kvinnor från Sydostasien

The purpose of this essay was to examine female immigrants of South East Asia who have lived together with a drug addict and how they were affected and let themselves be influenced by that, and to study their reactions to such situations. The main questions were: · How do the women describe their personal relationship matters with their husbands with focus on abuse / co-dependency? · How do they show their co-dependency in actions? · How do the women handle their co-dependency? I chose a qualitative method because my purpose was to get a comprehension and hopefully find a pattern in the life situation in this specific target group. Regarding the collection of data I used both primary data in the frame of interviews with persons connected to the problem, and secondary data in the form of earlier studies in that field. As the main result I found that these women lived in a severe stress. They were affected both psychically and physically by the abuse of their partners. They developed different strategies of survival to stand the reality and to save the family. It was very hard for these women to liberate themselves from their horrible situation. Factors that often contributed to that were their view of marriage and the limited economy they had