Reclaiming Complexity
How Autoethnography Helped Me Reframe My Life
I don’t usually share my conference talks here, but this one felt worth making public. It’s a snapshot of how autoethnography, and especially the method I now call Relational–Developmental Autoethnography, became a lifeline and a lens. This is the story behind the method.
On July 19, 2025, I gave this talk at the annual meeting for the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP). What follows is the text of my presentation, along with a PDF of my slides. This talk traces how autoethnography became a path to reclaiming my identity and reinterpreting my past through a developmental lens.
Hello. I’m Chris Wells, and I’m so grateful to be here today. My presentation is called From Reflection to Integration: How Qualitative Inquiry Fosters Personal Growth.
I’ll be sharing how, over the past decade, autoethnography became more than a research method for me. It became a way to reclaim my identity, revise the stories I had been given about myself, and live with greater clarity and coherence.
For me, autoethnography began with personal writing, but it became something much deeper. I found myself returning to the same questions again and again—What happened? What did it mean?
Over time, writing became a mirror. Then it became a method. And eventually, it became a path.
I’m a nonbinary, neurodivergent writer and researcher based in Madison, Wisconsin. I co-host the Positive Disintegration Podcast and lead a small nonprofit called the Dąbrowski Center.
I first came to qualitative research as a student—but I was living this way long before I had the language for it. I was already observing, recording, questioning, and making meaning from the inside out.
My method began in the margins of my journals and in the tension of being misunderstood and mislabeled for much of my life. And it wasn’t until I became the parent of a neurodivergent child that I began to ask: What if the stories I’d been given about myself weren’t the whole truth?
A Life Misunderstood
“As long as I believed that I was mentally ill, I was.” (Journal entry, April 2022)
The quotes I’ll share throughout this talk come directly from my journals. I started journaling at 16, thanks to a book called When Anger Hurts. What began as a way to document outbursts of anger became a daily reflective practice.
I internalized the label "mentally ill" early in life. It shaped how I understood my thoughts, my emotions, and even my capacity.
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 19, but that wasn’t the only label I carried. Over the years, I received multiple psychiatric diagnoses. For more than two decades, those labels shaped how others saw me, and how I saw myself. That belief—that I was fundamentally broken—was the foundation I started from.
“I have a problem and I am not afraid to admit to having a mental illness. It is something I believe I will always have to deal with. I may not like it, but I have no choice, do I.” (Journal entry, August 26, 1990)
I wrote that in my journal at 17. I had already accepted that I would live my entire life as a mentally ill person. But what I didn’t realize then was that I had already begun writing my way out of that identity. My journal became the first place I started to witness myself.
Searching for Pathology
“People are surprised to hear that I was once a mental patient because it doesn't fit with my status of having my MSW and getting a PhD. Mentally ill people are informally expected to not be capable of such academic achievement.” (Journal entry, April 12, 2014)
By the time I began my doctoral work, I was still carrying the story that I was fundamentally disordered, but high-functioning. I went into social work, and I was raising a child with multiple exceptionalities. Advocating for him brought me back into the diagnostic system—this time as a parent.
I saw him struggling in ways that felt familiar. I recognized myself in him. But I also began to notice something I hadn’t allowed myself to see before: that he was disabled and gifted.
For the first time, I began to wonder: what if those things weren’t mutually exclusive in me, either?
“By deeply pathologizing two of my strengths, I was left feeling more damaged than I already had because of my internal conflict—the 2e paradox of feeling like a fraud. A classic issue for anyone who’s gifted and disabled.” (Journal entry, September 16, 2014)
When I discovered the concept of twice-exceptionality, everything began to shift. The term means gifted and disabled. I realized that my giftedness and my struggles weren’t canceling each other out—they were coexisting.
In the middle of my dissertation, I threw on the brakes and launched a personal research project using grounded theory and autoethnography. As I read the literature, I realized I had pathologized my emotional intensity and imaginal process—the very qualities that were actually signs of developmental potential.
This was the first time I began to see that what I had called illness might have been a different kind of process.
Positive Disintegration
This is when I found Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. There’s not enough time to explain it fully here, but it’s the focus of my work and podcast. Dąbrowski offered a psychological framework that didn’t see inner conflict as pathology—but as potential. He described disintegration as a developmental necessity.
His work gave me a language for what I had lived through. I also drew from relational-cultural theory, especially its emphasis on connection, mutual empathy, and relational resilience. These frameworks shaped how I approached writing as a relational act.
“I need to write about the changes I’ve gone through since doing the autoethnography. The way that I no longer think that I was mentally ill. It was a difficult thing to figure out. I was certainly struggling during those years in my 20s, but it wasn’t a sickness.” (Journal entry, December 26, 2021)
That realization was hard-won. It took years of recursive reflection to reframe my past and begin integrating my life.
Relational-Developmental Autoethnography
I came to name the method I was building Relational–Developmental Autoethnography, or RDA.1
“RDA is a qualitative method grounded in recursive reflection, relational engagement, and developmental theory, used to make meaning of lived experience over time.”
Central practices of RDA include:
Dialogic writing: letters to real or imagined others
Recursive retrieval: returning to past journals and documents to reinterpret them
Developmental coding: engaging personal data through cycles of meaning-making
Holding multiplicity: allowing for inner conflict and ambiguity
Ethical reflexivity: writing about others with care and relational responsibility
RDA allowed me to integrate lived experience. Not by forcing coherence, but by tracing how insight emerges in layers.
It’s a developmental practice grounded in:
Temporal recursion: revisiting material across years, and even decades
Emotional recursion: feeling what was once defended
Relational recursion: returning to key relationships with new understanding
Theoretical recursion: deepening insight with each pass through the same ideas
For those who’ve been pathologized or misunderstood, RDA offers something powerful: a way to reclaim complexity.
“I used to see myself as so broken.”
That was from a June 2024 journal entry.
While my story centers on reframing a bipolar diagnosis, RDA has broader applications. It can serve anyone who has been told their intensity, sensitivity, or depth is too much.
It offers a way to recover meaning in places others may have seen only disorder.
If you’d like to explore Dąbrowski’s theory or listen to our podcast, you can find more at dabrowskicenter.org and positivedisintegration.org.
The RDA paper has been submitted for publication, and I’ll share a manuscript as soon as possible.
I love the way you present yourself in the picture. Fully self-acceptive!
I try not to waste time on regret, but if I could go back in time, I wish had pursued a career in academics so that I could make a living spending my time studying and teaching things like this.
Instead, I pursued creativity. I thought I hated school and wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible—but what I actually hated was being evaluated on work that was assigned to me. Unfortunately, the creative path ended up exploiting me, chewing me up, and spitting me out. I didn’t want to charm, network, or manipulate. I wanted to learn, grow, understand, and express myself.
Most notably to your piece, it reinforced horrific beliefs about myself. That I wasn’t good enough, that I asked for too much, and that my constant yearning for more was the result of mental illness—an irrational, voracious hunger for treatment that was unreasonable to expect. This resulted in a psychological collapse that I called my “brain crash” for years, but now thanks to you, I know what I’ve been experiencing is positive disintegration.
Whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing, I think your work is lighting the way. Thank you.