Chaos to coherence: Psychotherapeutic integration of traumatic loss

Traumatic life events have the power to disrupt those self-narratives with which people order their life experience, by challenging their organization, promoting the development of problem-dominated identities, and fostering dissociation of aspects of the experience in a way that precludes its integration. We briefly consider these processes at levels ranging from the biogenetic, through the personal-agentic, to the dyadic-relational, and ultimately to cultural-linguistic levels of narrative structure, and then present the results of a grounded theory analysis of psychotherapy to reveal the pragmatic and rhetorical strategies by which it counters such disruption. Results suggest the means by which a client and therapist collaborate to help the former reconstruct the meaning of her mother's suicide, ultimately moving toward greater coherence and hopefulness in the narration of her life.