The Inner Dialogue of My Personal Tranformation(s)
by Wendy Mason, Ph.D.
Sometimes I try to view my educational and professional vitae, through the eyes of others. I try to grasp what others may perceive looking at my life history as a brief synopsis detailed in thin lines on clean sheets of paper. I have opposing thoughts on what their perspectives might be. The first view I have envisions others concluding that there must be something very wrong. I wonder if my vitae reads the story that I could never decide what I wanted to be when I grew up; I couldn’t stick to a career; I never found my calling or I did not have a vision. The opposing vision is that others may look at my vitae and think, “Wow! This woman has covered a lot of territory!” And then I hope they wonder what drives me.
I’ve been a student in higher education since 1988. In this 22 year time span, I have been out of school a total of two years. My degrees consist of a bachelor’s degree in general social sciences with a major concentration in women’s studies and a minor concentration in culture, a bachelor’s degree of science in nursing and a master’s degree in advanced practice psychiatric and mental health nursing. I also completed the didactics for a postmaster’s child and adolescent psychiatric nursing certificate. I was unable to complete the certificate because the location in which I resided did not have a psychiatrist that specialized in children and adolescents to supervise my clinical hours.
I was a single mother of a small child at the time I was enrolled. Thus, I was unwilling to travel to distant facilities to complete the required clinical hours. I completed the first year of a doctoral program in nursing before withdrawing from the program. In addition, I have taken many courses in varying disciplines. I have discovered that there are phenomenal theories and brilliant theorists, exceptional practitioners in every imaginable discipline and philosophers that explore and expand our epistemological and ontological views of the world and our existence in it. Still, I was never able to grasp a tangible understanding of how to determine ‘truth’. I sought that knowledge base, that theory, that thread, something that would enable me to weave all these amazing pieces of contrasting and complementary knowledge, perspectives and experiences together. I just could not figure out how to synthesize a full picture.
I poked around in postmodern thinking, with all of the intrinsic risks of nihilism and relativism, as a possible solution to ambiguity. I liked the contrast it provided to a positivistic notion that an objective ‘truth’ exists. Still, I found myself confused with no further clarity than when I started. I tried to find a middle ground somewhere, anywhere, yet the middle seemed to move on me every time I thought I had it pinpointed.
The more my education progressed over the years the more aware I grew of how little we truly know about the world, ourselves and each other. I was determined to reach a point where I thought to myself, “Ah! Now I understand how it all connects!” Practicing as a psychiatric nurse for the last 12 years and as an educator for five of those years compounded my increasing confusion further. My head swirled with the awareness that there were no absolutes in psychiatry and there were no absolutes working with people, or anything else for that matter. There were certainly no absolutes in my own world. My transition out of practice as a nurse practitioner solely into the role of an educator further exposed my frustration with the tradition of teaching students the absolutes of disciplines where I could find no absolutes.
As I was nearing my ninth year in psychiatric nursing, my eighteenth year of higher education, and my second year as an educator, I found myself frequently sprawled on my friend and colleague’s couch contemplating the dilemma of my confusion in conjunction with my own despair and discontent with my professions. I knew I was unwilling to continue working and existing in life with this sense of purposelessness and discontent. Yet, I could not synthesize and comprehend the root of my frustrations nor could I surmise a solution to them.
Being that my predominant focus the last umpteen years had pivoted on psychology and psychiatry I explored the possibility that I was depressed. Maybe I had unresolved childhood issues I needed to explore? Maybe I was exhausted enacting my many roles as a single professional mother? Maybe I was lonely and wanted a relationship? Maybe I needed to find a hobby? I knew I did not want to do what I was doing anymore. To me, this meant I would no longer be sitting in an office trying to help people see how important a holistic approach to life was while they impatiently waited for me to scrawl a prescription for a “happy pill” on a pad so they could get on with their day. This also meant I would not stand in front of a classroom and drone on about content I did not feel passionate about while entrenched in a learning system riddled with problems for students, educators and knowledge creation and dissemination, alike. I decided to go back to school.
My explanation for my choice of school and the program to which I applied might cause concern for any career and professionally minded individual, particularly one who might look through the decision for cues and clues to my psychological functioning. I had explored a number of programs and I did not want a doctorate in nursing, in women’s studies, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, nor any other discipline for that matter. I did not want to wed myself to any of these disciplines although I don’t think I could clearly articulate this at the time of my decision to enter the program I did. I really did not want to do quantitative research either. I had become entirely disenchanted with many claims of scientific research findings when I felt that many research reports I read left out hugely important aspects in their studies to be considered, namely the subjects as living, feeling, and breathing people. In fact, at this point, I wanted nothing to do with science at all. I knew a bit about qualitative research because I used a phenomenological approach in my master’s thesis. I had also taken a course on qualitative methods in my first doctoral program and I knew qualitative approaches were far more appealing to me.
I found a program, Transformative Studies, that centered on a transdisciplinary approach employing qualitative methods. The program was online and intensive meetings that extended over a week were required at the school at the beginning of each semester. I thought this would be reasonable as a single mother considering grandma would delight in the time with my son while I had a little respite to rejuvenate and work toward a degree that I envisioned bringing a brighter future. I really had no idea what Transformative Studies was, nor did I understand what transdisciplinarity entailed. All I knew was that the program beckoned to me on an intuitive level and it was where I belonged. I threw caution to the wind and off went my application in the mail.
As I settled in at the dinner table when I arrived for the first intensive I began to wonder what on earth I had signed on for. I was surrounded by co-learners and faculty from a variety of traditional and non-traditional fields, mental health therapists and psychologists, astrologers, educators from elementary school through higher education, sociologists, spiritual leaders, nurses, artists, and administrators, to name a few. Many of these people were well travelled and highly accomplished professionals. There were authors of books, founders of programs, and amazing thinkers all around me. I had come to the intensive with an idea for research that bored me to tears but I knew I was deeply ‘stuck’ and I felt it was a starting place. As I listened to people and I watched events unfold around me, I realized I was the recipient of the most amazing gift. I was sitting in the midst of an opportunity to learn from, grow with and develop connections with these amazing people.
The more I watched and listened and participated with the faculty and my co-learners, the more I realized we were all there for a common purpose. Despite our variations in backgrounds, areas of expertise and experience, passions, focus and missions, we all held deep convictions about social change. We all adhered to a strong belief that social change was crucial for the future of our world, our children, each other and ourselves. We were all there in unity, seeking, co-creating and experiencing social transformation.
The transformations I experienced and participated in over the course of my doctoral program emanated out of my developing understanding of a transdisciplinary approach. I kneaded my own thoughts with extraordinary support and input from others, while participating in their processes, as well. I began to see the purpose of my wanderings throughout my educational and professional years. I had been seeking a way of understanding and connecting the multiplicity of knowledges, perspectives, theories, and philosophies while trying to meld these with my own experiences, particularly when none of them coalesced.
My introduction to transdisciplinarity was timely and I absorbed all that I could. I felt it enabled me, finally, to weave all of those amazing pieces of contrasting and complimentary knowledge, perspectives and experiences together that I had grappled with for so long. I began to synthesize a fuller picture. Although I now realize that the picture will never be completed, transdisciplinarity provided an understanding of how and why this can never be. For the first time, I feel at home with knowledge in all of its seeming disarray.
Thus, my experience of transformation occurred in my doctoral program. The effects of this transformation bled over into my practice as a nurse practitioner and nursing educator which subsequently, impacted my clients and my students. The improvement in the quality of my life and my skills in teaching and practice I have experienced as a result is incalculable and at times, beyond full comprehension.
Learning a Transdisciplinary Approach as a Doctoral Student
My introduction to transdisciplinarity occurred in my second doctoral program. I entered the program in desperate need of something different. I had so many questions, yet I could find no answers in the literature. The first year of the program, which was founded on a transdisciplinary approach, I struggled to make sense. I sought information in the literature, various bodies of literature, and I tried to sew the information together. The problem was, I could find no passion in the garment I was constructing. Finally, staring at the computer screen blankly one morning engrossed in despair, I had an epiphany. I had been approaching transdisciplinary inquiry as though it was multidisciplinarity, and at times interdisciplinarity. At times, I was trying to decide which discipline I wanted to locate myself in. At other times, I was trying to select a method that beckoned to me to design a research study. I realized I had not fully comprehended what transdisciplinarity entailed. It was a monumental moment for me as the haze began to clear and ideas and feelings began to organize within me.
The interesting part about this epiphany was that, at the time, I was deeply drawn into exploring spirituality in experience and education. Despite my long history of a lack of clarity and great confusion regarding my own spiritual beliefs and values, for many years I was resistant to any education, discussion, or exploration that involved the participation of others in my “spiritual space”.
At the time, I was deeply engaged in an exploration of the perennial philosophy because the overarching notion that all spiritual paths lead to one grand unifying Divine source and our goal is to achieve unity with this source holds great appeal for me. The more I turned this idea around and over in my head, the more I realized the value of a transdisciplinarity approach for studying spirituality. If all paths lead to knowledge, should we not honor all of these paths? Which led to the next bewildering question; if so, how? Transdisciplinarity focuses on what lies across, between and beyond disciplines (Nicolescu, 2002, 2007). Transdisciplinarity provided a lens that enabled me to conceptualize how to approach inquiry related to the spiritual dimension while honoring and embracing the various paths, paradigms, theories, testimonies, and philosophies of others. This became clearer for me in my practice as a nurse practitioner.
Applying Transdisciplinarity as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner
I practiced as a psychiatric nurse for two years and a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner for nine years before I heeded the call to move in a different direction. I felt terribly disillusioned by the field of psychiatry and psychiatric nursing for the last 3 or 4 years of practice. The enthusiasm for the science entailed in approaching psychiatric illness through a medical model waned greatly and I felt a void growing ominously within. I sat in front of my clients for several years and I tried to integrate a holistic approach into treatment. I engaged in a dialectic approach, teaching my clients the science I knew while a disharmony ached within in me. I began to explore my own spiritual process of growth and as I learned more about transdisciplinarity, I began to pay attention to the questions that went unasked and unanswered. I also began to question if we socio-culturally created the notion of psychopathology and reinforced it. I explored the way our Western world has become increasingly psychologized over the years, often at the expense of our spiritual growth. I reviewed my training and reflected on what I knew and how I had come to know what I knew. I began to understand the limitations of the approach I learned throughout my education, integrated and practiced with. Parker Palmer’s (1999) words reverberated inside of me
The mode of knowing itself breeds intellectual habits, indeed spiritual instincts, that destroy community. We make objects of each other and the world to be manipulated for our own private ends….I want to argue that it’s a trained schizophrenia: It is the way these students have been taught to look at reality through objectivist lenses. They have always been taught about a world out there somewhere apart from them, divorced from their personal lives; they never have been invited to intersect their autobiographies with the life story of the world. And so they can report on a world that is not the one in which they live, one they’ve been taught about from some objectivist’s fantasy. They have also been formed in the habit of experimental manipulation. These students believe they can take pieces of the world and carve out for themselves a niche of private sanity in the midst of public calamity. That is nothing more than the ethical outcome of the objectivism in which they have been formed or, deformed. It is a failure to recognize their own implication with society’s fate. I argue that the relation established between the knower and the known, between the student and the subject, tends to become the relation of the living person to world itself. (Palmer, 1998)
My practice began to change dramatically and my clients changed as I changed and I changed as my clients changed. A dynamic liberating shift began to occur that we were all co-creating, learning, growing, teaching each other without it explicitly being stated. At the same time, my confidence in “psychiatry” and “therapy” was failing. I began to recognize I was being called in a different direction despite the fact that there would be numerous barriers to face trying to implement change.
Applying Transdisciplinarity as a Nursing Educator
I taught an undergraduate senior psychiatric rotation at a state hospital while I was working on my master’s thesis. I had been working on an inpatient unit as a psychiatric nurse for about two years at that time. I had been a teaching assistance in the past in women’s studies but I had no more understanding of what was required to be a good teacher than fly to the moon. I vaguely recall sitting with students on an inpatient unit dialoguing with a person who had been committed to demonstrate the muddled thinking processes of this person and to teach them therapeutic communication skills.
I did not teach again in an academic setting until six years later. I signed on to teach at the local community college however, I found myself disappointed with the program. The program was designed to “meet the community’s needs”. As such, it was designed to focus predominantly on medical-surgical nursing from a highly medical model. I began to realize that the program was not “psych friendly” and that it was established on a medical model entailing objective data collection, care plans and treatments. I was surprised at my realization, how long it took for me to identify this, and highly disappointed when the awareness finally surfaced. Beyond this, however, there was also a void of some sort that I could not quite put my finger on. I realized that even this small, rural college in the middle of nowhere had not gone untouched by disciplinary boundaries, politics and power struggles and the subsequent confining influences.
I transitioned to teaching in the social science department at the college and I also began teaching at a major online university in nursing. I enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in curriculum development and pedagogy at the community college. However, teaching nursing at the online university is where I found a “home”. I was teaching students that valued “Care” like I did. Considering the profession of nursing is founded on the notion of caring this should not have come as a surprise. Yet internally, I had been questioning for a while whether I was a nurse any longer. I was so disappointed with the experience I had in the nursing department at the community college and my own educational foundations which had influenced my own practice as a nurse practitioner that not until I encountered a transdisciplinary approach did I find a restored passion for my chosen profession. I had felt as though nursing had lost it essence of “caring” in exchange for technological, pharmacology and surgical interventions driven by research that encouraged cost effectiveness.
I began to apply and teach the characteristics of transdisciplinarity, including reflexivity, integralism and the emergent character of knowledge creation in my classrooms with nursing students. The energy in my classrooms felt alive and students were engaged sharing personal life stories and epiphanies during application exercises while connecting them to theory and praxis. They co-created relationships with each other in which they questioned and challenge one another while exploring, expanding and constructing knowledge together. I felt alive and exuberant, connected to my students and their learning processes while also experiencing my own amazing process that catapulted me out of a static understanding and approach to pedagogy and praxis.
This approach to pedagogy, catalyzed a deeper connection to my students and the essence of caring. Further still, the mist cleared to reveal a deeper journey for my spiritual path. I found myself encountering the experiential dimension of spirituality, the mystical, frequently, and in contrast to confusion and anxiety, a peace and stillness grounded me.
At this point in my journey, I feel yet another transformation culminating. Something is brewing. I know not yet what, how, or when it will be… but I feel it coming…
Wendy Mason is a collector of stray animals who enjoys writing and adventures in esotericism. In her spare time, she's a psychiatric/MH nurse practitioner teaching full time in an online MSN program and a mother raising her six year old child while trying to keep a clean house (rather unsuccessfully). She can be reached via e-mail at WendyMasonARNP@msn.com.