Chaos to coherence: Psychotherapeutic integration of traumatic loss

Robert A. Neimeyer*, Olga Herrero, Luis Botella

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Indexed journal article Articlepeer-review

    85 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    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.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)127-145
    Number of pages19
    JournalJournal of Constructivist Psychology
    Volume19
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2006

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