Experiencing a Disorienting Dilemma

On the 30th October 2008, I experienced what I felt was a disorienting dilemma, where a disorienting dilemma is defined to be triggered by a life crisis or major life transition, although it may also result from an accumulation of transformations in meaning schemes over a period of time (Mezirow, 1995, p. 50). I received a phone call from Irvin and he wanted to break up with me over that phone call. That was one month after we collected the appointment letter for our apartment. He said he was tired and did not want to carry on the relationship. In fact, he claimed to have stopped loving me three months before. He refused to meet me or answer my calls and from that day on, I never heard from him. I was lost and my world seemed to have collapsed.

For a period of time, I went through a period of self-examination. I felt that I was not good enough for him and hence, he made that decision. Soon after, I realised those were purely based on my own assumptions because I found out from his friends that he was seeing someone else. I was filled with emotions such as anger and disappointment. I went through a critical assessment of internalised assumptions and suddenly felt very lost. My life was supposed to be like any other and I was supposed to live happily ever after but at that point in time, I felt alienated from all these social norms.

My Story

I have never been very confident about relationships and the few relationships I have ever had never lasted for more than half a year until I met him.

I met Irvin four years ago. I started a relationship that I thought would not last for a month. He had a lower qualification than I did and I thought we would not be able to communicate. However, before I knew it, we were three years into the relationship and he was the one who made me feel that relationships do last. He changed my perspective about love and I begin a relationship that evolves only between the two of us. We met each other on every weekday after our work and spent all our weekends together. To me, that was absolutely necessary to building a strong relationship, even at the expense of my family and friends.

The time came for us to begin considering moving on to the next phase of our lives and hence, we decided to apply for an apartment. I spent minimal time considering what this implied and as if it is a habit of mind, we are expected to settle down after a few years of courtship. Little did I know that, this is merely a set of broad, generalized and orienting dispositions that act as a filter for interpreting the meaning of my experience of thinking of settling down as the rightful course of action after a few years of courtship. 

According to Mezirow, 2000, habit of mind is constantly expressed and operated outside of awareness ... arbitrarily determine what we see and how we see it - cause-effect relationships, scenarios of sequences of events, what others will be like, and our idealised self-image. Hence, this exemplifies a line of action that tend to follow automatically unless brought into critical reflection (Mezirow, 2000).

Definition of Transformation Learning

A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience. For some, any uncritically assimilated explanation by an authority figure will suffice. But in contemporary societies we must learn to make our own interpretations rather than act on the purposes, beliefs, judgments, and feelings of others. Facilitating such understandings is the cardinal goal of adult education. Transformative learning develops autonomous thinking (Mezirow 1997, p. 5).

As found, "Transformative Learning" is a term that stems from Transformative Learning Theory (Mezirow, 1990, 1991, 2000), which describes a learning process of "becoming critically aware of one's own tacit assumptions and expectations and those of others and assessing their relevance for making an interpretation" (Mezirow, 2000, p. 4).

Since first introduced by Jack Mezirow in 1978, the concept of transformative learning has been a topic of research and theory building in the field of adult education (Taylor 1998). Although Mezirow is considered to be the major developer of transformative learning theory, other perspectives about transformative learning--influenced by the work of Robert Boyd--are emerging. Following a discussion of transformative learning as conceptualized by Mezirow, this is a blog about MY Transformative Learning and its current influence on my continuous learning. 

In this blog, I will attempt to give a personal example on how an incident that occured in my life has set me along on the road to transformative learning.