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.
Notes
1“Sandra” is the pseudonym of a client who received services as part of a research protocol at York University, Toronto, Canada, who consented to her therapy's being recorded and analyzed as part of a broader process-outcome study. We appreciate her willingness to contribute her data to this project, and thank Dr. Lynne Angus for helping us gain access to these transcripts.