Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Speech Pathology and Audiology, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).

D.Phil. / The world we live in is characterised by daily trauma, crisis and tragedy. The media, which are everywhere nowadays, expose us to the hurt and suffering of thousands of people, as well as to our own, and too often this creates the impression that only negative events are taking place. One cannot help but wonder whether the human race has not lost control over itself and the environment it has created. Are we victims of external events, or can we still make a difference or a positive contribution to our lives and those of others? This kind of question makes us curious about the human condition, and at the same time makes us aware of the different ways in which people deal with similar situations. Some people cannot function under difficult circumstances, while others cope quite well, and some even flourish! This gives rise to questions such as: What causes people to react so differently under equal circumstances? Why do some people become conquerors and others go to pieces? What can we learn from victors or survivors? Is it possible to teach people to become victors, instead of victims, in testing times? The researcher’s search for answers to these and other questions gave rise to this study. The focus of this study was to determine the possible key factors which led to the researcher’s friend becoming a survivor in the face of a life-threatening disease, breast cancer, and how the researcher herself managed to cope with the trauma of the disintegration of her marriage. More particularly the researcher wanted to explore how the ordeals they had gone through influenced their lives. How did their experience of trauma influence them, and what have they learned from these experiences? Questions which came to the fore at the outset of the study were the following: • How did the two women deal with loss? • Did the trauma influence their sense of purpose and meaning? • What role did their relationships with friends and family play in dealing with the traumatic events? • How did their ordeals affect their careers, and what was their employers’ reaction towards them? • How did trauma affect the various dimensions of their lives? • What advice could they as survivors offer to other people who are going through such traumatic experiences?

This study asserts that loss has been primarily focused on in terms of a set of reactions whose goals and content tend to be externally orientated. The thesis presented here states that the consideration of reaction to loss is incomplete without a detailed understanding of how the phenomenological self, on the intrapsychic level, is effected by loss. Consequently, this study takes a comprehensive look at how loss can effect this level of the phenomenological self, as well as the types of losses it can experience. An attempt is made to demonstrate that these losses to the phenomenological self can be identified and defined as a generic set of experiences, or, class of psychological events, which when taken together, this study considers as the loss of self. Given this class of psychological events, it is further claimed that mourning the loss of self, in different forms, is a universal change process. When dealt with in therapy this change process of mourning the loss of self is considered as a class of therapeutic event. An extensive literature review examines the basis for these claims, and provides the foundations for the presentation of a clinical model for mourning the loss of self. In this model, self, types of loss of self, and the process of mourning the loss of self, as relevant to this study, are defined. Utilization of this model for therapeutic purposes is demonstrated in case studies, and implications for research, as well as areas of application, are suggested. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2005. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Nov. 7, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-170).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 195 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 83 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2006. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Sept. 11, 2006). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

This study constitutes an exploration of the role of the experience of loss in the social processes of meaningmaking - regarding self, other and the world - especially as it applies to therapists. Traditionally a focus on loss has entailed a description of the mourning processes brought about by this inevitable but dreadful event. Here the lens is widened to evolve a description of how the loss experience can contribute to a transformation of a person's sense of her self and of her patterns of relating. This description. rests on a social constructionist understanding of the experience of self. A person's sense(s) of self is seen to evolve within the usual and seemingly predictable patterns of connecting and disconnecting that constitutes the social webs of the discursive communities that people move in. Thus her sense of I is indelibly linked to 'Nho and 'Nhere her Yous are. Indeed, all meaning is proposed to evolve from a template of connection-disconnection patterns. The experience of loss is seen to be able to disrupt these seemingly stable patterns within such a community sufficiently, as to be able to bring about in depth transformation of the meanings evolving from these habits of relating. One nuance of these meanings in transformation, entails a person's sense of her self. Experiences of, and struggles around connection and disconnection are centrally important in the world of therapists. It does not only constitute a basic focus of their 'M)rk, but is also the template in their personal lives that contributes to their O\Ml evolution as therapists. Thus the experience of loss is specifically explored as potentially transformational - on a personal and professional level - in the lives of therapists. / Psychology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

This collection represents work produced between September 2015 and April 2017. A phantom limb is characterized not by what is absent but by the wound that created its loss--the haunting of a pain, and the confusion caused by its non-presence. These poems shift and shutter around their phantom limbs, tracking the wounds split open by grief, the physicality of time’s passing, and the mind’s inability to reconcile its own impermanence. The poems hope to resist the lyric while simultaneously imploding form, confronting the mind’s relationship with the natural and digital worlds it inhabits and is informed by. Celestial bodies and human bodies share a panic of impermanence here––time is as unknowable but also as physical as star stuff. In their disfluencies and insistences grappling toward some kind of "feeling," these poems investigate what it means to live and survive a life characterized by loss in its various shapes and forms.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.