Meaning reconstruction after loss (Neimeyer)
The idea that grieving includes rebuilding the story of a life that the death broke: why it happened, who I am now, what still matters. Neimeyer and colleagues treat sense-making, finding some benefit, and changes in identity as the main routes, and see a failure to make sense of the loss as one path into complicated grief.
What drives it
A death can break the assumptions a life ran on: that the young outlive the old, that care keeps people safe, that faith protects. For identification it names a grief whose pain is the broken explanation as much as the missing person, and it shows in the questions a person keeps asking.
How it shows
Work
Doubting the point of targets and promotions after a death. Leaving a job to start something in the person’s name. Losing hours because the mind keeps returning to why.
Relationships
Telling the story of the death over and over, to anyone, looking for the version that makes sense. Falling out with a faith community whose explanation (‘God’s plan’) feels like an insult. New closeness with others who lost someone the same way.
Self
Notice which question keeps returning (why it happened, why them, who I am now) and whether any answer has started to hold.
What tells it apart
Post-traumatic growth: Post-traumatic growth is reported positive change after a crisis. Meaning reconstruction is the wider work of making sense of a loss, and a person may rebuild meaning without feeling they have grown at all.
Rumination and worry: Asking why can be part of rebuilding meaning when the answers shift and settle over time. Asking the same question in the same words for months, with rising distress, is more likely rumination.
Will to meaning (Frankl): Frankl’s will to meaning is a general human drive toward purpose. Meaning reconstruction may be what is happening when that drive is pointed at one death and the life story it broke.
A test
Ask the person whether they have been able to make any sense of the death. Someone with no answer who is also not searching may be doing fine, while someone searching hard with no answer in sight may be at higher risk of complicated grief.
Questions to carry
- When the question ‘why’ came back today, where was I and what had just happened?
- What did I believe about how life works before this, and which part no longer holds?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
moderate. In 1,056 recently bereaved college students (Currier, Holland and Neimeyer, Death Studies, 2006), being unable to make sense of the loss accounted for the link between a violent death and complicated grief symptoms, in a survey that cannot show cause. Davis, Wortman, Lehman and Silver (2000), studying 124 parents after an infant’s death and 93 adults who lost a spouse or child in a motor vehicle accident, found that fewer than half found any meaning more than a year on, a sizeable group never searched and still did fairly well, and those who found meaning fared better than those who searched and found none.
Where it comes from
Robert Neimeyer (editor), Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, American Psychological Association, 2001