Transcript

Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration, a path to authenticity. In this Quick Bite episode, Chris and I are talking about autoethnography and the value of writing about and examining your own life. We talk about what's involved, the value of doing the work and some methods and techniques of how to get it done. Autoethnography can be a great tool in your own development and can be the launching pad for the work that you can do in yourself on your path to authenticity. Hello, amazing listeners, and welcome to Positive Disintegration. I'm Emma Nicholson.

Chris: I'm Dr. Chris Wells.

Emma: And Chris, today this Quick Bite is on autoethnography, which I know you are a complete subject matter expert in.

Chris: I'm not sure if I'm a subject matter expert in autoethnography, to be honest. I don't think I have a solid grip on it like I do with the theory. But well, today I wanted to talk about autoethnography because it's been a method of self-education and auto psychotherapy for me. I know that there are plenty of people out there who listen to the podcast who are interested in this topic. I know because people have reached out and said they want to know more about it.

It's really been on my mind over the past couple of months because it was ten years ago, in February that I embarked on the journey of autoethnography, really. I mean, that's how I look at it at this point. I think when I did get started with it, I thought it was going to be this one research project I did and then it would be done. I didn't realize that it would become a way of life for me and that I would take it up in a way that made writing a method of inquiry for me. which is really kind of an interesting thing to consider. Like I said, it was 10 years ago in February that I started it for the first time, and honestly, I feel like I've been kind of working on it this whole time.

Emma: Now, you're going to have to explain, what exactly is autoethnography? Because it sounds really technical and really hard. So, can you explain it to us all?

Chris: Sure. It's a research method, so that's part of how I discovered it. I was reading a book about qualitative inquiry and research methods 10 years ago as part of my dissertation. I knew that I wasn't going to use autoethnography for my dissertation, but when I discovered autoethnography, I was like, oh my gosh. I had written autobiography before discovering this term, autoethnography, where you're looking at yourself not as an isolated individual in a vacuum, but in your social and cultural context and trying to understand yourself within systems.

Looking at your life and thinking about how systems have impacted you, what kind of oppression you may have experienced, what kind of privilege you had. So all of these things would be a part of it. And then the writing part, it really is a method of inquiry. And so there's also an important component of autoethnography called reflexivity.

Autoethnography is interesting because it's extremely individual and everybody seems to approach it in a different way to some extent. It's different compared to regular research writing that's very formulaic where you introduce your study, you talk about your literature review, you talk about your methods, you share your findings. Some people perform their autoethnographies. There's one person I know who is using art as part of the autoethnography. There was one Interesting Quotes post I did in the fall, Volume 10, where I talked about autoethnography and I included a lot of quotes in there that would be helpful.

Emma: Okay, so what I'm hearing, let me play this back to you so I make sure I understand it. It's a method of writing about yourself, but not just like an autobiography, like here's my stories, and not just like writing in a diary your thoughts and feelings. It's about going back and writing about episodes in your life, keeping in mind your cultural context, as you said, any biases, privileges, oppression, trauma, things. and doing it with a lens of, I guess, self-reflection, to be able to examine yourself and take learnings away from that.

So, whether or not that just involves writing or other art forms, I guess it's an exercise in self-reflection and also trying to view yourself a little bit objectively.

Chris: That's right. You're looking at the importance of race, gender, class, you know, the things about you that are part of you that influence your life and, you know, the circumstances that you've dealt with. You look at your family history. Where did you come from? What are the traumas that your family went through? Not only your traumas, but you're looking at yourself from a higher elevation or a broader perspective of what happened to you.

You're trying to understand a fuller, broader picture of things. You're looking at turning points. That's a really important part of what I did especially to figure things out in my own story because I had such a huge amount of personal data to work with. I remember coming to the autoethnography literature and seeing that turning points were important, epiphanies, and I thought, well, gosh, what are the epiphanies? What were those moments when I turned things around?

It was really fascinating to think about that over time and to think about it from the framework of unilevel and multilevel within the theory of positive disintegration. You know, it was really fascinating for me to be learning about autoethnography kind of at the same time I was learning about the theory because I actually discovered the theory during that first couple of months when I was working with autoethnography for the first time. And it was a massive project.

One of the reasons why I wanted to record this with you, if I'm being honest, is that I wanted to already have written about it on Substack. I wanted to write a post that was going to come out on the 10-year anniversary of me kicking off the first work I did using this method. That didn't happen. February 28th came and went, and I did not manage to do it yet. And the reason why I'm struggling to get this post written is because I have this massive amount of work that I've done. It's this huge story. Just capturing that in a Substack post has been harder than I thought it would be.

I thought maybe if we talked about it on this episode, it would help me get my head around it in a way that would interest people in reading about it once it does come out. Also, I thought if we had a conversation about it, we could make it more tangible and I could talk a little bit about what I learned, how I applied it in my life. And I know that you have done work that is very much in alignment with what I've done, even if you didn't have this terminology.

Emma: The thing that strikes me is, like, Dabrowski also talks about doing autobiography as a way of doing your own auto-psychotherapy and working on yourself, and you touched on this. When you write about your life and what's happened, you can apply the lens of positive disintegration.

So, for me, one of the exercises that I did was went back and looked through the moments of my life, and I was looking for periods of disintegration, looking for dynamisms, and looking for manifestations of overexcitability as well. And the whole thing was really insightful from a development perspective, even though I didn't have the language, and I didn't particularly know what I was doing, but It allowed me to not only get a better grip on where I've been and who I am, it also helped me figure out how I wanted to move forward.

It also helped me make peace with the past because now that I had these lenses of looking at stuff like, say, for example, when I was a kid and I'm like, oh, that was my overexcitability trying to burst out of me. And then, as you said, like in the cultural context, thinking about, well, what did my parents know about that back in the day? Nothing. So, some of the things that I went through with them, I could start to forgive them and forgive myself. It's not only helpful from a perspective of understanding the theory better, because you're now really applying your own experiences to it, but it helps you with that stuff insofar as being able to move on, being able to make peace with stuff. So, yeah, I've found the experience really helpful, even though I didn't have this understanding of the mechanism.

Chris: I attended a conference in 2021 with Dr. Carolyn Ellis, and there's just one sentence that I want to share now that I feel like goes well with what you just said. She believes that autoethnographers “work to connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural and social by privileging concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection.”

While you were talking, I heard a lot of that, and I know that that's a lot of what I went through. I did this study. I presented the first part of it in October that year in 2014, and then I did a second part at another conference in January 2015. It's hard to capture how much was going on. I think that some of the healing happened during that year, but it was honestly like it was just nonstop. I had such a hard time disengaging from the work itself. While I was awake, I was thinking about it. I was wanting to work on it. My son was homeschooling at the time, and we shared an office and I feel like that's the only reason why I was able to make it work as a homeschool parent. Me constantly thinking about what I was doing with this work of trying to figure out the past and trying to figure out who I was.

My research question that I came to autoethnography with was, what is this experience of giftedness and mental illness? Because it's really important to remember that when I embarked on autoethnography in 2014, I saw myself as mentally ill. Like I had a serious history of mental illness. I was trying to reconcile that. I had discovered the term twice exceptional, and I thought, whoa, when I discovered twice exceptional as a term, meaning gifted and disabled, that made sense of so much for me when I had thought I was broken.

Just discovering that there was this whole literature in gifted education that talked about this phenomenon that I saw myself in, well, that just opened me up to finding the theory of positive disintegration, to finding more about the inner experience of giftedness, the overexcitabilities in Michael's work, all of these things that I was figuring out at the time when I was trying to review my own personal data.

I was reading my journal entries, coding my journal entries, sending away for more medical records, coding my medical records, doing a ton of work on my own personal data itself was interesting because I had only ever read my journals and then written stories. I had never placed my journal entries into qualitative data analysis software and started coding it, trying to identify the patterns. What were the turning points? What things happened? What medications was I on? What times was I hospitalized? There was so much to try and figure out. It was a huge amount of work.

Emma: That sounds like a ton of work, and I have no doubt that you got a heap of insights from it as well. As you said, it sort of led you to various things like the theory, but even if it hadn't led you there, it still would have been a highly fruitful exercise. And I know that people are probably out there thinking, oh my God, that seems like such a lot of work, you know, when you're talking about like coding stuff and referencing things. honestly, that can get translated into a much more layperson's thing. Because when I wrote about periods of my life, I didn't write reams and reams of paper, I wrote a few pages on it.

But I, too, went through almost a coding exercise because I was looking for dynamisms and overexcitabilities. And where did I see periods of disintegration? So it's really just like looking for patterns in your own way. So don't be like scared by the level of dissertation detail that Chris has got. You can do this in much smaller ways. So yeah. Look at your life, look at what's happened. As Chris said, the people who are important, the turning points, those big events. Think about some of the cultural and social things that are sitting around you at the time. And then once you've written about your stuff, go back with whatever lens that you need to. and start looking for patterns. That's really what it's all about.

And to something you said before, Chris, it's like the healing doesn't start immediately, but it gives you a starting point to figure out what are the things that you need to work on. So this can be a good way to lay it all out before you and then go, okay, I can see some things in my history now that have hurt me or that I'm still carrying bad behaviors from, and you use that as a launching point to start doing some of the work on yourself.

Chris: Yeah, don't be frightened hearing what I did. Nobody should necessarily look at me as a model of how to do this because it's true that I really go into the weeds and not everybody's going to have the kind of personal data that I had working with years and years of journal entries and It's kind of fun sometimes, like when I do write my posts about this stuff, I want to capture what it was like to have to even figure out the process of getting my journals onto the computer in a way that was useful for doing things like coding.

It was quite the learning curve as a researcher to do this. It's been such an overwhelming project, kind of in the background of everything else that I do, that I haven't had a chance to really write papers about it yet and get myself out there in the way that I should, but I hope to. Substack has really helped me get into a groove of writing and sharing, and so I think that more will come from that.

If it's okay, I want to read another quote. This one, it's actually from the Interesting Quotes post that I mentioned, but I just want to give an idea of how powerful this particular method of inquiry can be. This is from Chris Poulos, from his Essentials of Autoethnography:

“The deep emotional introspection associated with this form of academic writing comes with inherent vulnerability and exposure to the judgment of others, along with the possibility of opening up old trauma, stirring up painful memories, digging into taboo subjects, or sparking grief or other deep emotions.”

And so, for sure, that was all part of my process. Talk about opening up old trauma. Oh my gosh, reading my journal entries from the times when I was going through these periods that I had seen as mental illness. Reading my medical records, seeing what people wrote about me while I was hospitalized. Very difficult. Stirring up the painful memories, thinking about my father's death, the trauma with my parents—so much there. Taboo subjects, plenty of that too.

Even giftedness felt like a taboo subject at times. I interviewed like 10 people from the past who knew me when I was young, and every time I had to introduce my study and what I was working on, I would have to talk about giftedness, twice-exceptionality. I'd have to introduce terms to people, explain them. And at first, I had this awful feeling using the word gifted, having these conversations. I was afraid that people were going to throw it in my face or be like, what are you, a narcissist or delusional? I had this terrible history of mental illness, and I was going to go back and tell people that I was gifted?

But that's not how it went at all. I went back and told people, and they were like, hell yeah, you're gifted. It was the most validating, incredible experience to go to these people who I'd been close with when I was young from this perspective in middle age of thinking that I was so fucked up, and had this terrible history of mental illness. So many of them were like, I never believed you were mentally ill.

That was a big part of what created this period of disintegration after that first period of autoethnography, getting to know Michael and Frank and studying the theory in depth. All of these conversations with people during 2014 just completely blew my mind.

Emma: Yeah, it's interesting you brought up talking to other people because I know you say, look, you had a wealth of knowledge that other people don't have. You know, you had medical records, you had this stuff. But like when I think about some of the stuff that I did, like trying to figure myself out, there's correlations there because I too went and called my dad and asked him a few questions about what I was like as a kid.

I found going through some of my things from school, I've still got like a couple of little things from childhood. I found a couple of letters from people that they'd written to me about their stuff and, you know, the advice that they'd given me about whatever point in my life I was at. I go back and look at photos and then it triggers memories of stuff that happened in those times and places.

There are things that we can do even if we don't have a whole history of journals to go back to. We can write from our memory. We can talk to people close to us about shared experiences. How do you remember me from that period of my life? And, you know, you could probably go through even, I'm just thinking, your social media posts or a whole history of things that you've been thinking and feeling over the past few years. I know I have learnt some things by seeing shit pop up on Facebook. Ten years ago, you said this. And sometimes I look at that stuff and go, oh, wow, I was really in a different place ten years ago.

Whether or not we think about it, we all have some sort of record or at least memory, and we have shared memories with other people of who we are. If you're out there thinking about, you know, oh, how am I going to do this? I'm not going to go and interview people from my childhood. There's maybe one or two people around you can talk to. You can go fishing through your social posts. You can go fishing through those memories and stuff that you have put away and see what it sparks.

Chris: Interestingly, the first thing I started with was not my journal entries, but my Facebook Messenger history with one of my closest friends. There was so much to examine in our conversations. We had this rich Facebook Messenger history of catching up and talking through things in the past and stuff. So, that's actually what I practiced on when I was first learning coding. I called it the best friend project—the BFP. I still have that in my documents.

Emma: I think it's good to also reach out to others because they might have different memories or thoughts about the way you were back then. So sometimes it's good to actually get an outside perspective. And I remember one day I was in the car on a road trip and I'm like, I've got to ask my dad this, like I had this burning question about this one memory I had from childhood.

I'd been held back in kindergarten, after class, after hours because I'd been disrupting the class. I was too carried away with my imagination. I was chatting to the older kids because I was in a composite class. I was in kindergarten at the time, and I was always over at the year two kids table trying to see what they were doing. And I was creating havoc. And I was thinking about this in the context of, you know, giftedness and being overexcitable. I really remember getting in trouble for being a poorly behaved school kid because I couldn't sit still.

But when I asked my dad about that, he's like, yeah, I remember that. He said, I remember when you were little before we even put you in school, I was worried school wouldn't keep up with you. And he also said, we'd moved you from where you started kindergarten to another school because we moved house and location. And he said the stuff that your teacher was giving you, he said, I don't know if you remember this, but the stuff she gave you was just way below your level. You were already reading at a really good level, and she was giving you like coloring in exercises and it was no fucking wonder you were bored off your head because the work that she gave you was just not at the level.

Apparently, dad said, well, what are you giving her to do? The teacher explained it and he said, she is fucking bored. You need to give her hard work. You should consider skipping her up a few years now, I don't remember any of that conversation because I wasn't privy to it right but with dad's input into it, I got all these new insights that I had never had into a moment and I found that all really rewarding. So like when you're saying conversations between people on chat messenger, other people's opinions are all really, really helpful for this sort of thing.

Chris: Yeah, I think it's really essential, honestly. It was so important for me to talk to other people and get their perspectives. And sometimes it was really tough. I would be interviewing people, and they were being honest with me. Sometimes I think, for the first time.

I realized at some point during the autoethnography in 2014 that people had been afraid to tell me the truth, that they didn't think I could handle it. I had a history of not being able to cope well with hard conversations, with hearing the truth about myself. So, it was really interesting to finally realize that people did trust that I could hear things about myself.

But whoa, after hearing them… I was on a trip, right? I have all these memories of hotel rooms. I'd have to go back to my hotel room and cry, journal about it, and just process the reality of how selfish I had been for so many years of my life. That is the thing that I really came face-to-face with [during] that first year of autoethnography, the realization of how it had always been about me.

So many people that I talked with, at first, I could tell they were like, this is just another project all about you. But then they realized that this really was so different than the times when I just wrote autobiography or talked about my story from a narrower perspective. This was the first time when they felt heard by me, they saw that I was genuinely trying to integrate my experiences and to use them to help other people. I mean, that was clearly a part of what I was trying to do too. I really had faith that I could help other people who were like me realize that they weren't broken, and that is exactly what's happened. So, that's nice.

Emma: Now that is one of the pitfalls of doing some of this stuff because it will highlight to you, particularly if you're looking at it through a new lens, what an absolute douchebag you've been at certain points in your life. And I admit, when I was in a bad relationship, I was so focused on my own pain that I didn't realize how shit I was to everyone around me because I was just trying to protect myself and not trigger my ex into another rage fit. I realized what a shitty daughter I'd been and what a shitty friend I'd been to some people. I was lying to people, I was borrowing money off people and not paying it back, all sorts of crap things that I'd never do now. And I looked at some of the people that aren't in my life anymore, and I'm like, yeah, I can understand why these people aren't friends with me anymore, because I was a real fucking dick.

Chris: Yeah, with some friends like that from the past, I tried to reconnect and people were just straight up like, no thanks. I was trying to make amends with some people, and it was a tough pill to swallow that they didn't want to. I struggled with that.

Emma: Which is their choice, and I actually got some advice from someone. We were talking about people who don't want to bar review anymore. She was like, well, you can always pay it forward. If you can't make amends, you can always pay it forward. There's that.

Chris: Exactly. I had to come to terms with the fact that it was okay. It was their choice and it was okay, but it was tough because I'm the kind of person that just really wanted to talk about things, wanted to have my questions answered, and to also potentially answer questions. It's hard to realize that connection isn't there and it's not going to be there and to move on. And I think that I learned a lot of lessons about moving on, not ruminating, not getting caught up in thinking about it and just accepting and making peace with the past. And in some ways, those difficult relationships were the ones that really brought out the dynamism severely for me in a helpful way that helped me learn how to be a better person, I think, and a better friend.

Emma: Yeah, nothing like a huge helping of guilt and shame to kick you in the ass in the right direction.

Chris: Oh my gosh, so much dissatisfaction with myself in so many ways. It was interesting to see my mistakes in my thinking around the people from the past and things that I had assumed about them and hearing the truth. It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life for sure and really laid a foundation for everything I've done since. And there's just so much to say about it.

I think that I would like to do more of these episodes about it if we can. Now that we've done this, I'll have a better sense of what to write about on Substack to accompany it. I just have a feeling that it's going to be a rich place to draw from when it comes to ideas for talking about the theory and its application.

Emma: I can't stress, whatever level of detail you go to, how fruitful this activity is for two reasons. First of all, because it helps you understand that positive disintegration isn't just a theory. This is an experience and you're living it. But it also goes back to, I was kind of reluctant to do it until we did that episode with Kate Arms on autopsychotherapy and talking about doing an autobiography, do autoethnography. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.

But as you can tell from this conversation, the amount of shit that it unearths and the amount of understanding that it gives you Even if you don't take Creswell's method of, take a year to do this and throw huge amounts of coding and data and research at this. And even if you take my shitty approach of, I'm just going to write about my stuff and talk to a few people and see what comes out of it. No matter what extent you do this to, you are going to get some really valuable insights on yourself out of this. Like, totally 100% worth the exercise if you do nothing else for your auto psychotherapy, do this.

Chris: Definitely. And we can talk more about this in the future and give people ideas about how to do it without going overboard like me. But be prepared when your traumas are unearthed. It's going to take time and space to process them, to work through it, to get through the tears. I mean, I cried so many tears, and it was really so healing though.

What was cool about the autoethnography compared to other attempts to understand my life in the past is that I finally had enough space using these research methods. Studying my journals in this qualitative data analysis software really allowed me to get just enough distance from it that it didn't feel like I was torturing myself. And it was just kind of a different healing process that felt more trauma-informed for me. I had never had the understanding of trauma and its impact. I was able to have so much more self-compassion about my younger self. I was able to have more compassion about my parents and especially my father.

It's important to know that you are going to be re-traumatizing yourself a bit if you have a history like mine. And to be prepared for it, make sure you have people that you can talk with about it and self-care. Yeah, absolutely.

Emma: You're going to get your hands dirty, but it's well worth the effort. And I think the last thing I'll add in on this is if writing isn't your thing for whatever reason, don’t be shy of using technology to help you talk about it on audio or even video yourself.

The one thing that happened for me when I did that Triangle of Loneliness video was I was watching myself when I was editing it talk about this shit and how I felt about loneliness and alienation and being in dark places and being able to see my own facial expressions. and my body language was really helpful in understanding how I actually felt about some of this stuff. So if you can't write, if writing isn't your thing, like me and Chris both love to write, but if it's not your bag, use technology to capture it in some other way. I don't care if it's art or video or voice or some other thing. Interpretive dance. Whatever's your bag, use that.

Chris: Yes, absolutely. I have a folder of one hundred MP3s because during the autoethnography, I was breaking out my phone, opening voice notes and recording things. And often, I was also recording voice notes to people like my former psychiatrist or another therapist I had, I would record them voice notes to process what I was reading and dealing with about them in the past. I did share some of the voice notes with people, but a lot of the times I was just recording it to get it out, but I didn't feel like writing. Sometimes this would happen when I was traveling. I would shoot off a voice note instead of trying to write it down, and now I have all of these recordings. Like you said, this was supposed to be a quick bite and it ain't quick.

Emma: No, it ain't fucking quick, but it's a hell of a bite, right? It's been great to talk to you about this and I really thank you for sharing of both yourself and your insights into the process. So, always a pleasure.

Chris: It is always a pleasure. Thank you so much for giving me this space and opportunity to do this.

Emma: You're most certainly welcome. And thank you, listeners. It's always a pleasure to have you with us. And we hope that you'll think about how you can apply this to your own development and continue the path to authenticity. Continue your path for authenticity through the links in the show notes. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter for stacks of cool things delivered straight to your inbox. Explore the Dabrowski Center, email us, or join us on social media. And don't forget to show your love by liking, subscribing, grabbing some positive disintegration merch, or leaving us a rating or review on your podcast platform.