Toward Eco-Ethical Consciousness

Abstract

Adventure therapy has predominantly emphasized behavioral change, functional recovery, and the development of adaptive capacities, while its longstanding use of therapeutic metaphor has received less attention at the level of consciousness through which metaphoric experience becomes transformative. This theoretical–conceptual paper brings existential hypnotherapy, a phenomenologically grounded approach developed in Taiwan, into dialogue with adventure therapy to reconsider both the process and aim of therapeutic change. Drawing on the framework of threefold conscious acts—sensorial, imagery, and significative consciousness—the paper proposes that therapeutic metaphors operate through the permeability of embodied sensation, imagery, and linguistic meaning rather than through cognitive analogy alone. This framework is illustrated through the experience of one adolescent in a three-day mountain wilderness program situated within the ecological and cultural landscape of a Bunun community in Taiwan. The case illustrates how adventure experience, cultural narratives, and the therapist’s ethical care may become interwoven within a relational field in which previously rigid meanings become open to reconfiguration. The paper further distinguishes the self-for-being-ethical from adventure therapy’s predominant concern with the self-for-functioning and proposes eco-ethical consciousness as a relational mode of being in which a person becomes ethically re-situated in relation to body, others, land, and world. Rather than presenting eco-ethical consciousness as an empirically established therapeutic construct, the paper offers it as a phenomenologically informed conceptual proposal that invites further examination across diverse adventure, cultural, and ecological contexts.