Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping

Abstract

Loss As a Meaning-Making Journey Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping Robert A. Neimeyer. New York: McGraw-Hill (www. mcgraw-hill.com). 1998, 214 pp., $30.59 (softcover). Robert Neimeyer is not only known as one of the most prominent and prolific scholars in constructivist psychology and psychotherapy, but is also recognized as a leading thinker in the field of bereavement and loss. In addition to having published numerous book chapters and articles on death, loss, and suicide, he is the editor of the respected international journal, Death Studies, author of the Death Anxiety Handbook (Neimeyer, 1997) and coeditor (with Hannelore Wass) of Dying: Facing the Facts (Wass & Neimeyer, 1994). Aptly titled, Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping, provides readers with many of the significant "lessons" Neimeyer has garnered through his years of dedicated research, writing, and clinical work. The book also lays new conceptual ground as Neimeyer brings constructivist assumptions and principles to bear on the field of bereavement and loss. The book is organized into three broad sections. In Part I, "For Those Who Grieve," Neimeyer provides an overview of some of the general contours of bereavement with special attention given to the unique challenges associated with relationship loss (through either death or divorce), job loss, the tasks and challenges of mourning, and the social and cultural contexts of coping with loss. In each of these areas, he offers numerous practical guidelines (e.g., "When Should You Reach Out for Help?"; "Adapting to Loss: Ten Practical Steps"; and "Do's and Don'ts When Reaching Out to a Mourner") and uses brief vignettes to illustrate the significant issues and themes covered. While primarily designed for persons who may have experienced a recent loss, the material in Part I is also relevant to professionals who are looking for informative summaries of key issues and research or for supportive readings to give to bereaved clients. In Part II of the book, "For Those Who Help," Neimeyer more fully attends to theoretical issues by elaborating on a conceptual model of grieving as process of meaning reconstruction. Based on a constructivist epistemology of clinical practice, this model views meaning making as the core process of the grief experience and challenges traditional stage-based theories of grief that are based on the assumption bereaved persons privately and passively negotiate a universal sequence of stages, tasks, and symptoms in reaction to a loss. By way of contrast, Neimeyer suggests that people-rather than being passive reactors-be active in facing the challenges of loss. From this perspective, grieving is something people do, not something that is done to them. Furthermore, rather than viewing the grief process in normative, stage-based terms, a meaning-making model draws attention to the diverse and variegated ways in which humans both personally and socially construct viable ways to make sense of loss. This attention to both idiographic and cultural dimensions of meaning-making makes it less likely that a person who deviates from something called "normal" grieving will be pathologized. Neimeyer's meaningmaking model also takes a very different approach to understanding the role of grief-related emotions. That is, rather than viewing the constellations of emotions that may be associated with grief (depression, anxiety, guilt, hostility, etc.) as merely symptoms that need to be treated and overcome, a constructivist, meaning-making approach underscores the functional value of persons' feelings, suggesting that feelings "should be understood as signals of the state of our meaning making efforts in the wake of challenges to the adequacy of our constructions" (p. …