Transforming Trauma Through Reflection and Praxis

Abstract

What happens when the issues of the human condition one has been teaching and theorizing about become issues in one’s life-world, even become a totalizing force that seeps through the boundaries around and between the “personal” and the “professional?” What happens when one is not only teaching about the challenges of grown-up-hood, balancing adult relationships, family caregiving, work responsibilities, and personal development but is suddenly faced with an event which forces one to confront competing responsibilities and make meaning of an existential emergency? In this hybrid essay—a combination of mini-memoir, testimony, and scholarly discourse—my central preoccupation is an unexpected crisis and how I engaged the possibilities and limitations of my professional knowledge as an educational gerontologist with a commitment to Critical Theory and came to more fully embrace the principles of Critical Gerontology, intentionally dissolving the boundaries between “work” and “life.