Without Anaesthesia: Transformative Learning of Therapy Ward Seniors

Abstract

In this article, I attempt to portray the symptoms of an elderly person being in crisis circumstances that encourage change through taking individual risks to increase control over one’s own life. The goal of my research was to (re)construct the process of transformative learning trajectory of a senior patient in a therapeutic ward, which constitutes the stages of healing. This study was an attempt to understand the subject’s inclusive effort on the road to recovery from the perspective of a therapist working in the Alcohol Addiction Treatment Unit (AATU). My focus on the principles of the interpretative paradigm led me to choose the concept of the kinesthetic subject and attempt to reformulate it on the basis of Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. The empirical part sought to find an answer to the question: how do interactions in AATU settings with a patient with alcohol use disorders enable transformative learning? The empirical material was derived from an in-depth interview with an addiction psychotherapy specialist, including the patient’s subjective testimonials on the effectiveness of intentional and unintentional therapeutic interactions which illustrate the patient’s learning experience during  behavioral changes. The findings indicate that a change in the patient’s frame of reference may result from an adaptive commitment to the rules of the therapy process, which force radical transformations of their previous behavioral patterns.