Finding Meaning After Trauma and Loss: Meaning-Making as a Path to Healing

Life can confront us with events that dramatically disrupt our sense of knowing, safety and meaning. It is however within our capacity as conscious human beings to make new meaning from even the most devastating experiences.

Making new meaning does not mean telling ourselves a lie or augmenting narratives. Meaning-making is much more than a story we tell ourselves. Finding meaning in life is an embodied awareness of the impact something has had on us, in a way that allows us to hold conscious space for it with all its emotional content of grief, loss, anger or shame.

From this capacity something in us grows larger. With time our personal sense of who we are as individuals begins to be experienced as embedded within something greater than ourselves. In this way, meaning-making can become a deeply spiritual and reconnecting act of healing.

The psychospiritual context of transpersonal therapy offers a container for this kind of deep healing and transformation because it recognes the natural movement of the human soul towards wholeness. The separate sense of “I” slowly begins to ebb as the ground of meaning on which it once found purchase begins to give way and a new shore calls us towards it. We must make way for this and this takes time. It can also take a guide, someone willing to hold the torch for us as we cross the uncertain ground between what we have known and what we are becoming,

Through this period of deep growth and inner work we may come back into our lives carrying ineffable qualities that seem to arise from something beyond merely the relationship or content of therapy — a visitation of grace perhaps. Humility, empathy, a greater continuity of being, resilience, wisdom, and a larger heart to offer the world are all to be discovered within us when we engage with the living process of meaning making. To recognise, at a deep level, that our existence itself is the most profound experience we have as human beings is the ultimate recognisiton of meaning. To consciously engage with the curriculum of life, with all that it asks of us, even when the bleakness of a dead-end road is all we can see before us, is to honour this truth deeply and to allow it to become the lantern by which we find our way.