Becoming disabled in adulthood: a pedagogical reading of life stories

Abstract

The article analyses the results of a qualitative Italian piece of research that involved 20 disabled people who became disabled in their adulthood. These were perfectly sane people, successful professionals, mothers and fathers, women and men with lives full of interests, who overnight were subjected to trauma that irreversibly changed their lives. The stories were collected through semi-structured interviews, and explain emotions, states of mind, thoughts and worries that are experienced after the disability has occurred. The biographies collected together in the work make you think about disability in adulthood as a
tortuous, complex and hard walk of life that gradually led the disabled people to reach different goals, often unthinkable and unexpected.
For many interviewees, the first sensation after the trauma was that of being lost. In fact they felt inadequate, without a way out, useless and defeated, and after an introspective process they found themselves deeply different in both body and mind. The most frequent stages in this pathway are despair, acceptance and reorganization. In this piece of research we wanted to delve into the role of the professional educator in the path of recovery and in their accompaniment and support for the adult disabled.