Mortal Losses, Vital Gains: The Role of Spirituality

Abstract

Grief and its management constitute the general topic of this paper. A personal dynamic of reframing is articulated and defined as a major experiential source of human spirituality. The argument is that exercises in the comparative free association of loss activate dynamic reframing amidst mourning and its associated work of depression. Counselling that involves imagining “worse case scenarios” may invoke conventional religious belief and practice as constructive “tactics of make-believe,” ones that actually enlarge perspective and cast past losses into widening horizons of future gains. In effect, human spirituality is an individual's achieved capacity to affirm time and again that his or her great personal losses could have been far worse, in spite of the emotional turmoil and woe surrounding such events.