Rethinking Disorienting Dilemmas Within Real-Life Crises

This study elaborates on how a disorienting dilemma, a life-event crisis, may trigger reflection. The study comprised an analysis of interviews with involuntarily childless women, who were in the process of negotiating emotionally chaotic experiences. The implications for Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning are explored. Compared with the more often discussed role of reflection in facilitated contexts, the analysis shows differences in the role of reflection in this nonfacilitated context, where it appears to enable meaning making in a chaotic situation that was not understandable from within existing meaning frameworks. Furthermore, disorienting dilemmas are manifested in various emotional experiences, indicating that one’s relation to these emotions—as opposed to the nature of the emotion—becomes essential with regard to triggering reflection. Last, the social dimension appears as a second-wave trigger of reflection, as one’s changed assumptions are found to collide with views of significant others.