Search

This study investigated the meaning-making phenomena underlying the responses of 13 bereaved mothers to the death of a child from cancer. Using a mixed-methods research design incorporating constructivist data collection methods, we found specific characteristics, coping processes, and factors to distinguish adaptive as opposed to complicated grief responses to this type of loss. However, the findings did not distinguish the bereaved mothers themselves as “adaptive” or “complicated grievers,” as they all evidenced both types of responses to their loss within or across different datasets. Despite this finding, the mothers’ results varied in terms of the proportions of adaptive as compared to complicated grief responses to their loss, which in turn were related to features of their self-construing, change or reinforcement of their world assumptions, ongoing relationship to their child and others in their social world, and management of loss- and restoration-oriented coping. Results suggest the utility of constructivist and cognitive coping models and methods in illuminating the experience of parental bereavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewed from a constructivist perspective, grieving is a process of reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss. Although most people successfully navigate bereavement and retain or return to pre-loss levels of functioning, a significant proportion struggle with protracted grief, and are unable to find meaning in the wake of an unsought transition. For these individuals, constructivist therapists have a number of strategies at their disposal that foster meaning making and help clients reestablish a coherent self-narrative that integrates the loss, while also permitting their life story to move forward along new lines. After reviewing theory and evidence that scaffolds this constructivist conceptualization, this article draws on excerpts of therapy with two bereaved clients to illustrate how narrative retelling, therapeutic writing, a focus on metaphorical language, and the use of visualization can all be viable strategies in helping individuals reconstruct meaning in the wake of bereavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on grief therapy using a constructivist approach. It notes that a constructivist approach to bereavement assumes that grieving involves the reaffirmation or reconstruction a world of meaning that faced challenges due to a loss. Principles related to grief therapy are discussed, including the use of narrative methods and concepts in reconstructing life.

A cognitive-behavioral model of complicated grief (CG) that emphasizes the struggle to integrate the loss into autobiographical memory receives both conceptual and empirical support from recent constructivist work on the role of sense making as a crucial process in bereavement adaptation. However, globally negative appraisals and anxious and depressive avoidance strategies, factors also posited by the cognitive-behavioral formulation, may play a more circumscribed role, inhibiting adjustment to loss in some, but not all, cases of CG. Converging research programs lend credence to a cognitive-constructivist approach to grief and suggest the relevance of meaning-oriented and narrative strategies for assisting clients whose lives have been devastated by loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]