A Metamodern Autoethnographic Journey of Healing from Childhood Cancer and Adverse Childhood Experiences through Reinhabiting Self and Ecological Consciousness

This autoethnography delineates a transdisciplinary journey of reinhabiting ecological consciousness and a rejection of dominant, late-modern, mechanistic, and dualistic Western views of self. Each stage of the journey incorporates and celebrates the transformative trajectory from separation to participation on multiple complex levels of reality. The dissertation reconsiders the nature of the American self by means of three theoretical pillars: ecopsychology, psychosynthesis, and metamoderism. The study articulates the primary research method, autoethnography, and its constituent parts: research strategy, data, procedures, analysis, ethics, interpretations, limitations, and findings. The literature review, personal narratives, and findings are presented and integrated thematically in a layered account to demonstrate transformations of self on a variety of levels. Chapters explore six themes: adversity, illusion, breakdown, healing, reinhabiting, and co-creating viewed through intrapsychic, sociocultural, and ecological lenses. This recursive approach provides multiple cycles of scholarly review and personal discovery that flow from personal to collective in an ongoing reciprocal loop of robust examination. A model that uses the methods developed in this inquiry, the Peer Rich framework for autoethnography (PRF), is explained as a methodological outcome of this project. The research will be of interest and use to scholars and non-scholars alike who seek to widen understanding of transformative studies, transdisciplinarity, autoethnography, ecopsychology, psychosynthesis, metamodernism, survivorship, and the journey of reinhabiting ecological consciousness