Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro: a therapeutic team adventure

Abstract

This study presents a description of an adventure therapy experience undertaken by an individual who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro as part of a hiking team. Using phenomenological analysis and operating from a social constructionist stance, it describes how the narratives of the subject were altered through the interplay of individual, team and adventure. It shows how she reclaimed nurturing behaviour, regained emotional competence
and relinquished independence. Through the experience, she also escaped her situation of entrapment by redefining her competing relationships, allowing leadership and re-evaluating spirituality by means of an enhanced sense of connectedness. Thus, she used the adventure experience as an event or text through which she created meaning and reconstructed some of the operant narratives in her life. The study indicates that adventure provides an opportunity for participants to deconstruct and reconstruct the operative narratives of their lives.