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Abstract. New conceptualizations of bereavement have begun to highlight the process of meaning reconstruction in the aftermath of loss, and the important role this plays in adaptation. This article summarizes theoretical and empirical contributions to this emerging perspective, and discusses several specific implications these carry for the practice of grief therapy.
Bereavement theory has evolved considerably in recent years. Gone is its unquestioning reliance on presumably universal stage models of recovery, its preemptive focus on emotional responses to loss in isolation from both cognition and action, and its penchant for quantifying grief only in terms of psychopathological symptomatology (1). In their place is a newfound sensitivity to different patterns of adaptation as a function of age, gender and ethnicity (2), concern with the disruption of life assumptions (3), and the quantitative and qualitative study of the transformations of self and world occasioned by loss (4, 5). My goal in the present article is to extend this latter effort by exploring the concepts and methods of one recent contribution to grief theory -- namely, a constructivist and narrative approach - as they pertain to the practice of grief counseling and psychotherapy. I therefore will begin with a brief recapitulation of emerging paradigms in grief theory that are more extensively summarized elsewhere (1, 6), noting their compatibility with a constructivist approach to psychotherapy, which focuses on the personal and collective processes by which people construct and reconstruct the meaning of significant life experiences (7). Finally, I will conclude by detailing seven strategic implications of these perspectives for the practice of grief therapy.
Toward a New Theory of Grieving
The past decade has witnessed the development of several new trends in grief theory and research. In this section I will highlight a few of these trends that have special relevance for clinical practice, and that converge with a constructivist model of meaning making in the face of adverse life experiences (8). These include (a) the shift toward idiographic approaches and away from stage models of grieving, (b) the growth of qualitative research, (c) notions of sense-making, benefit-finding, and identity reconstruction, (d) the adoption of non-pathologizing models of transformation, and (e) explicitly narrative models of grieving. Idiographic approaches. Despite the near hegemony of stage models of grief...