Navigating Life Transitions for Meaning

Elizabeth M. Altmaier

• Verlag: Academic Press
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780128188507
• Thema: Psychologie
• Thema: Conseil en psychothérapie

Navigating Life Transitions for Meaning explores the central human motivation of meaning making, and its counterpart, meaning disruption. The book describes different types of specific transitions, details how specific transitions affect an individual differently, and provides appropriate clinical approaches. The book examines the effects of life transitions on the component parts of meaning in life, including making sense (coherence), driving life goals (purpose), significance (mattering), and continuity. The book covers a range of transitions, including developmental (e.g., adolescence to adulthood), personal (e.g., illness onset, becoming a parent, and bereavement), and career (e.g., military deployment, downshifting, and retiring).

Life transitions are experienced by all persons, and the influence of those transitions are tremendous. It is essential for clinicians to understand how transitions can disrupt life and how to help clients successfully navigate these changes.

• Covers cultural transitions, such as immigration and religious conversion
• Examines health transitions, such as cancer survivorship and acquired disability
• Uses a positive psychology framework to understand transitions
• Includes bulleted 'take-away' summaries of key points in each chapter
• Provides clinical applications of theory to practice

Part 1

Introduction

Outline

• Chapter 1 Meaning in life amidst life transitions

Chapter 1

Meaning in life amidst life transitions

Elizabeth M. Altmaier, ¹Department of Psychological and Quantitative Foundations, College of Education, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States

Abstract

Meaning in life is a concept that has been shown to influence well-being in both psychological and physical domains. However, meaning can be affected by a variety of events. Trauma of many types causes a necessary reevaluation of meaning, and perhaps a reconstruction. Similarly, life transitions may have a deleterious influence on meaning. This chapter considers contemporary models of meaning in life and examines the effect of trauma on meaning and the potential effect of life transitions.

Keywords

Meaning in life; transitions; well-being

How do we discover, or create, meaning in life? When psychology and philosophy were closely related in the early 20th century, meaning was a concept considered to undergird thought itself. For example, Welby (1896) defined meaning as the combined influences of sense and significance [italics mine], thus locating meaning within the “great provinces of thought we call philosophy, poetry and religion” (p. 27). Meaning was a literal signal of the existence of perception and organization: “That a thing means something to us is equivalent to saying that it symbolizes something for us, that we are aware of some of the relations which it sustains to other things” (Angell, 1906, p. 204).

Some decades later during early years of experimental psychology, the study of meaning was virtually rejected, since meaning did not concord with “wholly observable phenomena and their causes” (Higginson, 1937, p. 503). For example, Tolman (1926) defined consciousness as “some moment or aspect in overt behavior” (p. 353), a distinction that would disallow the study of meaning without an overt expression. Further, meaning was thought to derive from the past experiences of the individual, and thus meaning as a product of life history was wholly subjective and its report, scientifically suspect.

Scholarly interest in meaning resumed during the middle 20th century, stimulated in large part by the writings of Viktor Frankl who reflected on his time imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II, where brutality and starvation eliminated mental and physical necessities. What remained was the choice of attitude in the face of those horrific circumstances, that choice of attitude being what he considered the only human freedom that cannot be taken away. His book (Frankl, 1963) was entitled Man’s Search for Meaning, denoting an inner motivation to search for and create personal meaning. More recently, positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), with its focus on strengths and virtues, generated further impetus to study meaning, particularly as it is present in human experiences of happiness and flourishing. For example, Seligman’s model of PERMA (Seligman, 2017) defined happiness with meaning as an integral component—positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

This chapter considers contemporary models of meaning, including their empirical support. Two challenges to meaning are then considered. First, the effect of trauma on meaning and the recreating of meaning after trauma are examined. Second, the potential of life transitions to affect meaning is discussed, including identification of potential mechanisms by which transitions might influence meaning. The chapter concludes with an overview of the remaining chapters.

Contemporary models of meaning

Contemporary scholars have attempted to define meaning, to understand its predictors, and to outline consequences of its presence or loss. One of the first psychologists to study meaning was Baumeister (1991) who approached the concept from the perspective of social psychology in understanding how people think and act. He defined meaning as “an imposition of a stable concept onto a changing biological process” (Baumeister & Vohs, 2002, p. 609). This stable concept is connection, the link between two entities. One entity is change, and the other entity is stability; meaning connects those processes for the individual.

According to Baumeister and Landau (2018), meaning, this stable link, incorporates four characteristics. The first is purpose, the orientation or motivation for actions, experiences, or activities. Meaning is present when events and circumstances connect to future goals or hoped for consequences. The second characteristic is mattering. Meaning denotes subjective value; meaning occurs when I matter, when my life brings value of some type, or when my decisions or actions have importance. The third is continuity; meaning is connection across time whereby disparate events become joined through shared meaning. The fourth characteristic is coherence. Meaning not only exists across time, but also across types of human experiences—events, thoughts and beliefs, history, activity.

Two of those characteristics, coherence and mattering, were considered further by Martela and Steger (2016). Their discussion presented coherence as comprehensibility, “making sense.” In contrast, mattering signifies worth, positive or negative. Coherence is descriptive, mattering is evaluative. This distinction returns to Welby’s (1896) view that meaning encompasses sense and significance. In support of this distinction are data from Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, and Larson (1998) who interviewed 200 adults before and 6 and 12 months after a family member’s death. Coders successfully categorized these adults’ narratives regarding meaning into two types: making sense of the loss and finding something positive in the experience. Examples of responses in the type of making sense (coherence) were beliefs in God/fate, the death as predictable, and loss as part of a life cycle; examples of responses within the type of finding benefit (mattering) were growth in interpersonal bonds, gaining perspective, and giving to others in similar circumstances.

Are these two components of meaning the result of two different psychological processes? Davis and Novoa (2013) argued that making sense is part of our search for the confirmation of our basic assumption that life is fair, that events occur for a reason. Finding benefit may be an expression of dispositional traits (such as optimism) or other personal characteristics. However, these two processes may not delimit meaning making. For example, Meert et al. (2015) studied the meaning-making process that occurred as parents talked with their child’s physician after the child’s death. Finding benefit and sense making were aspects of meaning making but two additional components of meaning making were establishing continuing bonds with the deceased child and completing identity reconstruction (changes in the parents’ sense of self).

An alternate way to define meaning making is through its operationalization in various measurement approaches. The most widely used measure of meaning is the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (Steger, Frazier, Oishi, & Kaler, 2006a, 2006b). This questionnaire assesses the degree to which an individual believes he or she has meaning in life, but items are not specific to any content in that meaning. For example, two items are “My life has a clear sense of purpose” and “I understand my life’s meaning.” Their validation research established two components of meaning—presence of meaning and search for meaning—represented by separate subscales.

A newer approach to measuring meaning in life was proposed by George and Park (2017) in their Multidimensional Existential Meaning Scale. Their operationalization of meaning in life encompasses three key dimensions—comprehension, purpose, mattering. Comprehension is the feeling that life “makes sense,” that experiences are cohesive and fit within a personal story. Purpose is the degree to which individuals believe they have a clear view of their goals and of pathways toward achieving them. Mattering is the personal belief that existence has significance, that the individuals have value in their worlds. The development and validation research for their scale revealed that meaning in life judgments can be empirically differentiated among these three content dimensions.

Recent analytic scholarship supports meaning in life as multidimensional. Martela and Steger (2016) argued from their review of theoretical literature that meaning contains three facets: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the presence of “making sense,” the comprehensibility of life within discernable patterns. The domain in which coherence operates is understanding. Purpose is derived from goals, aims, and directions; its domain is motivation. Significance is present when life is “worth living,” and valued. Its domain is evaluation.

Meaning can be present or searched for, and therefore it can be prioritized as a value in itself. Russo-Netzer (2019) conducted two studies with 300 community-living adults to understand how prioritizing meaning in life is related to well-being. The assumption behind this research was that individuals vary in their approach to prioritizing meaning, from a general orientation to a specific intentionality, and in the degree to which meaning emphasis influences well-being. The findings documented individual differences in the degree of meaning prioritization, with the concurrent finding that prioritizing meaning leads to increased experience of meaning which in turn links to well-being including positive affect and life satisfaction.

In summary, meaning in life is connection among memory, events, and conceptions of the self. Meaning has a descriptive function, sense making, and an evaluative function, conferring gain or benefit. Models of well-being in life point to meaning as central to happiness. Meaning in life has also been empirically documented (see Hooker, Masters, & Park, 2018; Roepke, Jayawickreme, & Riffle, 2014) to be associated with physical and psychological benefits and its absence to be associated with physical and psychosocial problems.

Challenges to meaning

Traumatic events

One set of challenges to meaning is posed by individuals’ experience of adverse and traumatic events. The term “trauma” was originally a medical term denoting physical injuries in and on the body, produced by suddenly occurring outside forces such as a motor vehicle accident or combat. Later use of the term expanded during World War I to cover psychological injuries, such as mutism and memory loss, presumed to be caused by those same external forces. In the case of combat, those forces were thought to be the soldiers’ proximity to exploding shells. Most recently the term is used for psychological damage from external events. Trauma symptoms that cause significant life interference, including frequent and unwanted reliving of the experience, strong negative emotions such as anxiety and depression, and hyper vigilance, form the foundation for the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

In modern society, a wide range of frequently experienced events can be disabling for individuals. Among those are mass shootings, sexual assault, bullying, mobbing (workplace bullying), natural disasters such as tornados and hurricanes, environmental disasters, accidents involving motor vehicles or trains or airplanes, and interpersonal violence. It is concerning that these events are occurring more frequently in people’s lives...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Identity Transitions
• Part 3: Role Transitions
• Part 4: Health Transitions
• Part 5: Conclusions
• Index