From Reflection to Integration

SQIP 2025

Later this month, I’ll be presenting at the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP) conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The official title of my talk is “From Reflection to Integration: How Qualitative Inquiry Fosters Personal Growth.” It’s based on the paper I’ve written about relational–developmental autoethnography and how qualitative methods—especially autoethnography—have helped me reframe everything from mental health and identity to giftedness and neurodivergence.

SQIP is a section of Division 5 of the American Psychological Association, and I’m excited to introduce the theory of positive disintegration to that group. I’ve been dreaming of attending for the past several years, and when I learned the conference would be in Milwaukee this summer, I knew I had to submit a proposal. I’m glad I did because it prompted me to finally write the paper I’ve been hoping to produce for years.

Photo by Wei Zeng on Unsplash

I’ve been immersed in this work for over a decade now, but preparing for this presentation has pushed me to revisit some of the earliest materials I created when I was first studying Dąbrowski’s theory. That means going back into my journals, my correspondence, and old interview transcripts—including some with Michael M. Piechowski from 2017 that I hadn’t looked at in years.

Reading through those interviews has been an unexpectedly emotional experience. I can see so clearly now how much was already in motion: how much I was grappling with and trying to articulate, even before I had the words or confidence to name it as methodological inquiry. Those conversations weren’t just about theory, they were about becoming.

In the talk I’ll give at SQIP, I’ll be making the case that methods like autoethnography do more than generate knowledge—they develop the researcher. They are tools for integration. When used with intention, they can bridge the gap between lived experience and scholarly contribution in a way that feels transformative on both levels.

And that’s exactly what this process has been for me: transformative. The theory of positive disintegration provided me with a language for describing experiences that once felt baffling and overwhelming. Autoethnography gave me the structure to work through those experiences on the page. Together, they helped me reclaim my story from the pathologizing systems and language that had shaped it for too long.

There’s more I could say because so much of this journey has been layered, relational, and deeply personal. In the next post, I’ll share more about my early conversations with Michael—the friction, the breakthroughs, and what they taught me about development, voice, and finding a place within a scholarly tradition.

But for now, I just wanted to mark this moment and say: I’m excited. I’m proud of this work, and I’m grateful to be taking it out into the world.