The Meaning-Making Model: Helping Others Find Their Way Through Suffering

By M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall

[M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall is Professor of Psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, La Mirada, California.]

[This is the second article in the four-part series “Suffering and the Christian Life: The Hard Road to Glory,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 2–5, 2021.]

On a lovely fall afternoon seven years ago, I received an email inviting me to be a plenary speaker at a conference, with a specific request to speak on the topic of suffering and growth. I had written an article on that topic several years before but had since then been concentrating on other topics, so I quickly sent back my regrets. A couple of hours later I received a call from the conference organizer, encouraging me to reconsider and providing some reasons that proved to be compelling. I agreed to speak at the conference, which was about a year and a half in the future, and also write a book chapter. Less than a month later, out of the blue, I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer. Although in my head I knew, based on the statistics, that I had a decent chance of surviving my cancer, my gut wasn’t as convinced. I was terrified that I was going to leave my teenage boys motherless and my husband wifeless. For the first time in my life, I had symptoms of both depression and anxiety. I spent the following year in treatment for cancer, wrestling with God and thinking about the topic of suffering and growth “from the inside,” and that chapter and conference presentation have led me into my current involvement in research on this week’s topic of finding meaning in suffering. God in his mercy did allow me to survive my cancer, and seven years later, I’m cancer-free, and the chances of a recurrence are fairly low. But in many ways my life has changed, for the better in some ways, and for the worse in others.

I share my story not because there is anything remarkable in it; my suffering is fairly minor when it comes to the scope of potential suffering. I share my story precisely because it is fairly typical. I’ll be using it to help explain the centrality of meaning to coping with suffering, drawing on psychologist Crystal Park’s meaning-making model as a framework.[1] My hope in today’s lecture is to provide a framework to help you think about the task of helping others find meaning in their suffering.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of meaning for wellbeing; the universal human need for meaning is a widely accepted notion. Some even see the need for meaning as one of the primary characteristics of what it means to be human. Psychologist Roy Baumeister, for example, offers the view that humans are essentially cultural animals, with meaning comprising an essential part of culture.[2] The need for meaning is certainly clear in the context of suffering. Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist who spent time in a concentration camp under Hitler’s regime, articulated this perspective in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. In that book, he wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”[3]

Park’s meaning-making model begins by distinguishing two important aspects of meaning: global and situational meaning.[4] Global meaning has to do with our overarching framework of beliefs, goals, and sense of purpose. Global meaning is composed of three parts: beliefs, goals, and feelings. Global beliefs are the broad assumptions that we have about ourselves, others, and the world, such as our belief that a loving, omnipotent and omniscient God exists, and that we are created in God’s image, but also finite and fallen. In our circles, we might more commonly refer to this as our worldview. Global goals are the high-level purposes that guide our behavior and that we pursue in our everyday lives; they include broad goals that are informed by our values, such as the kind of person we want to be, the kinds of relationships we want to have, what we will invest our time in, etc., and are closely tied to our values. These are what philosopher Eleanore Stump more poignantly calls “the desires of the heart” that, when blocked, cause suffering.[5] Global emotions come into play in our subjective sense that life has meaning, that our lives have purpose, that we matter. Global meaning is important because it is the framework through which we evaluate all the events in our lives, which then influences how we respond to those events. Every decision we make at every moment of our lives is influenced by our meaning structures.

Our global beliefs are one of the most important ways in which our faith informs our meaning-making. What are some of the most important beliefs with respect to suffering that form part of our global belief system? Researchers in this area have suggested that some of the most important assumptions are about whether the world and other people are good and just, how much control we have over our environment, beliefs about luck and randomness, as well as beliefs about how and why events occur.[6] All of these are influenced by faith. I would add to that list beliefs about God’s character and beliefs about suffering itself.

In addition to global meaning, we have situational meanings in our life. These are the specific meanings that we attribute to potentially stressful or traumatic events. They are our interpretation of the events. The interpretation of the events in our lives includes a variety of appraisals, including the “extent to which the event is threatening and controllable, initial attributions about why the event occurred, and implications for one’s future.”[7] Is the loss of a job an opportunity to move into a different life calling or a threat to our very identity? Is a diagnosis of cancer compatible with our life goals, or does it disrupt those goals? Is Covid-related sheltering in place a chance to spend more time with God or a devastating loss?

When our situational meaning is in tension with our global meaning, this results in distress. The larger the gap, the more the distress. This is because the tension between our appraisal of our situation and our global meaning challenges that global meaning. It threatens to make cracks in it or even to completely disrupt or overturn it. Beliefs are shaken, purposes are blocked, and life is experienced as lacking in meaning. Traumatic life events are disorienting; they wreak havoc with our meaning systems and threaten meaninglessness.

This is where meaning-making coping comes in. In attempting to recapture our sense of meaning and decrease our distress, we need to somehow reconcile our global meaning and our situational meaning, to regain a sense that the world is meaningful and that our lives have purpose. Sometimes we are able to retain our global meaning system by reevaluating our situational meaning and understanding it differently, in a way that is compatible with our global meaning. This is called assimilation. Sometimes our global meaning system needs to change, either slightly or perhaps more radically. This is called accommodation. Sometimes there is a combination of these things. If the meaning-making coping is successful, it can result in growth and change in ways that are consistent with the long Christian tradition that sees suffering as a pathway to growth.

Let me walk you through an example drawing on my own cancer experience. When I was diagnosed, I experienced the diagnosis as a threat. The first night after my diagnosis, I lay awake all night with my heart thumping in my chest. It was my first and only experience with severe anxiety. I thought I was probably going to die, and this was going to leave my children orphans and my husband a widower. I also found myself surprised by my diagnosis. I kept trying to figure out how I could have ended up with cancer. I had no family history of cancer, I was healthy, and I was relatively young. All of this had to do with my situational meaning, my appraisal of the diagnosis, which is part of the situational meaning. This was in tension with my global meaning. With respect to global beliefs, I believed in a loving God who was in control of the events in my world. I wrestled with God, trying to understand how it could be loving to my teenage sons or my husband to have me die when they still needed me. I mentioned that I was surprised by my diagnosis. After some reflection on this, I realized that my surprise had to do with some other global beliefs, ones that I was less aware of. In spite of a theology that sees the world as broken and myself as a sinner, I had bought subconsciously into the idea that the world is fair, that I was a good person, and that consequently I deserved to have only good things happen to me—the philosophy of Job’s counselors.

With respect to global goals, one was clearly to live a long and productive life and to be a mother and a wife, all of which were threatened. With respect to global emotions, I struggled with a sense of apathy and meaninglessness. I had meaningful work to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What was the point, in the face of my potential death?

So I engaged in a process of meaning-making. Much of the process took place during my quiet time every morning, where I would spend about an hour reading both secular and Christian books about cancer, memorizing Scripture—especially Psalms—writing in my journal, and, above all, crying out my distress before God. How did I reconcile my global meaning and my situational meaning? In my case, it proved to be a combination of assimilation and accommodation. With respect to accommodation, changes to my global meaning happened in (at least) a couple of ways. My suffering had revealed to me that my heart theology was not consistent with my head theology, and so I was able to internalize a bit more that the world is broken and consequently not just and that I don’t deserve for only good things to happen to me, but that instead anything good I receive is God’s gracious, unmerited gift to me. Further accommodation occurred in my theology of suffering, which was woefully inadequate even though I am a clinical psychologist and had even published on the topic of suffering. Essentially, I realized that my theology of suffering was too thin, that I needed more robust ways of understanding God’s loving purposes for my life and for the lives of my loved ones. As I developed that theology, my global beliefs changed to become more robust. Assimilation also happened. I initially perceived the cancer as primarily a threat. Over time, I perceived it as something a loving God had allowed into my life to bring me into a new place in relationship to him and to shift my area of calling.

The meanings that I made through the processes of assimilation and accommodation are part of the beneficial outcomes of the meaning-making process. Sometimes the meaning-making process results in changes in goals. My scholarship, for instance, which till my cancer had focused primarily on gender issues, is now almost entirely in the area of meaning-making in suffering. Sometimes it results in character growth. For example, I think that I’m more even-keeled since the cancer, that I’ve gained some equanimity. I think facing my death has made it easier to not be overwhelmed when other struggles come my way. Nor am I as shaken by the suffering of others, which means that I don’t feel the need to defensively move away from their suffering in order to protect myself, as I might have in the past.

Now that we’ve briefly overviewed Park’s meaning-making model, let’s turn to some of the research on religion and the meaning-making process.

Religion And Meaning

What does the psychological research tell us about religion and meaning-making? First, it tells us that religion is often brought into the meaning-making process,[8] and, in fact, the more stressful the event, the more people tend to rely on their religions.[9] This is particularly true when the events are perceived as more aversive, harmful, ambiguous, or threatening.[10] Religions are, of course, the most comprehensive meaning-making systems available to us as humans. They are overarching, encompassing all aspects of life from conception to death and beyond. Meaning tends to be more complex and coherent when derived from a religious versus a nonreligious source.[11] Religions provide us with community, a sense of identity, values, and purpose. And, most importantly for our purposes and unlike secular worldviews, they provide meaning even when facing suffering and death. It is no wonder, then, that psychological literature has documented ways that people turn to their religions when dealing with the challenges of life.

Second, this research tells us that people who are more religious or spiritual on average have better psychological outcomes in the face of suffering than those who are less religious or spiritual.[12]

This effect is even stronger when stress levels are higher.[13]

Third, religiousness, including such dimensions as intrinsic religiosity and positive religious coping, strongly predicts reports of growth as an outcome of suffering.[14] This connection between religiosity and growth has been found in groups of people dealing with a variety of circumstances, including bereavement, sexual assault, interpersonal transgressions, exposure to terrorism, and cancer.[15]

Fourth, this research tells us that sometimes more religious people initially experience a greater discrepancy between global and situational appraisal, and consequently struggle more. For example, in a study of parents whose infants had died of SIDS, parents’ rating of the importance of religion was positively related to their reports of engaging in searching for meaning shortly after the death.[16] Similarly, among students who were strongly, adversely affected by the 2005 hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, higher religiousness was related to greater appraisals of the hurricanes as threatening and as a loss.[17] While there might be several ways of understanding these findings, one way is to consider that religion in general is correlated with a higher sense of meaning in life; in a sense, there is greater room for struggle than when life is already experienced as lacking in meaning.[18] Pre-suffering, there may also be a kind of unconscious naïve global meaning in which believing in a loving, all-powerful God translates in people’s minds into the belief that nothing really bad will ever happen to them. Suffering then becomes an important mechanism for revealing to us the kind of faith that Satan accused Job of having, in which we love God only for what God gives us.

The bottom line is that this substantial body of research shows that religion is helpful when dealing with suffering. This is a useful basis for advocating for religiously-based interventions for suffering populations but does not go far enough. It is too generic. It is generic because religions are not all the same. They conceptualize suffering differently, they propose different pathways for getting through suffering, and they value different outcomes of the suffering. For example, Buddhism sees suffering as an illusion that results from an unhealthy attachment to the objects of our desire, including false belief systems, material objects, and even our sense of ourselves as a bounded self.[19] The Buddhist religious practices that are recommended to overcome suffering include awareness of our attachments and the cultivation of detachment in order to overcome suffering.[20] In contrast, from a Christian perspective, suffering is not an illusion. It is a very real consequence of the fall and sin’s entrance in the world. The solution to suffering cannot be found inside of ourselves but is found in God’s loving provision of redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is the Savior who can sympathize with suffering because of his own suffering; he is the model for how to suffer. Through following Jesus’s example, suffering itself can be transformed as God uses it to accomplish God’s purposes in our lives. This is a distinctive of Christianity. Suffering is not merely something to be avoided or eliminated as in our secular culture. It is not merely something to be overcome as in Buddhism. Instead, it has the potential to be transformed through the loving intervention of God into something that can benefit us.

This is where my research interests lie—in studying the particulars of Christian approaches to meaning-making. Along with my research team, we have been developing approaches to studying Christian-specific beliefs, practices, and outcomes that characterize the meaning-making process. In the next few days, I will be sharing with you some of my thoughts on this process along with any existing psychological findings.

But today my intent is to offer some suggestions for those of you who vocationally come alongside those who suffer. So in the remainder of our time, I’ll be drawing on my research to discuss the kinds of religious discrepancies between global and situational meaning that people tend to have and offer some suggestions for helping people to resolve those discrepancies.

What Kinds Of Discrepancies Do People Have?

The primary point I want to make here is that it is important to assess what discrepancies are actually present. The tendency is to assume that when people encounter significant suffering, the primary problem will be doubt, and the resolution will require some kind of defense of God’s character—some kind of justification for the suffering. This is not the case. Not all discrepancies are spiritual in nature, and when spiritual discrepancies are there, theodicies don’t seem to be the solution to them. While no quantitative studies have yet been done to document the frequencies and types of discrepancies, a handful of qualitative studies, including our own, suggest that spiritual concerns occur in less than half of their participants.[21] In our interviews with thirty evangelical cancer patients, two thirds of our sample did not experience any spiritual tensions.[22] When they did experience discrepancies, what form did these take?

Six questioned God’s justice—the most common kind of spiritual struggle in this sample. For example, a woman in a conflictual marriage questioned why she should get cancer rather than her husband: “Why, God, does [my husband] choose wrong and he chooses the world, and I’m choosing you and I keep getting beat up? . . . It’s kind of that thing, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ ”[23] Another said, “When I got cancer I’m like, what did I do that was so bad? I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t steal, I didn’t go rob houses or murder people, I’m not a bad guy. . . . And here all of a sudden I’ve got this death sentence.”[24]

Five questioned God’s love. One man stated, “I said, ‘Lord, you’re a good loving father and that’s what we’re told but a loving father doesn’t write you out a list of instructions and then leave for 2000 years. Show me that you’re still here.’ ”[25] A woman also referenced God’s love using parental imagery. Referring to a passage in the Bible that speaks of God’s care, she stated, “Maybe God doesn’t love me. . . . The Bible says if your child wants some bread a father will not give you a stone. I felt like, ‘God, you gave me a stone, not the bread. This is not bread.’ ”[26] Another participant distinguished between God’s goodness and God’s personal care: “It’s not necessarily that I think that He’s not good, I sometimes just wonder if He really cares . . . I wonder and question if God is really this close or if He’s really more distant.”[27]

Only one participant indicated doubting God’s existence: “Does God exist? Does he hear my prayers or is it . . . just wishful thinking?”[28] Doubt or confusion was more commonly directed at God’s plan or reasoning for the cancer. This sentiment was not usually expressed as anger or disbelief so much as a longing for understanding of and connection with God.

Additionally, three individuals reported struggling to reconcile biblical teachings about healing with the fact that many people are not healed of their cancer. For example, one participant said, “In the Bible . . . Jesus healed all the people who came to him . . . [currently] I know some people got healed but some people do not . . . . Maybe God can heal because He’s almighty God, but I don’t know whether God wants to do that. . . . Sometimes it doesn’t happen. . . . So, my head is still struggling, honestly.”[29] Another similarly stated, “It talks about that in the Bible, whatever you ask in my son’s name, these things will be given to you and so I think I wrestled with that for sure.”[30]

What Helps Facilitate Meaning-Making?

One of the advantages of a model such as Park’s meaning-making model is that it suggests many avenues for therapeutic intervention. Meaning-making can be relatively brief with resolutions of discrepancies easily reached. Or the process can be long and difficult and can even be accompanied by increased anxiety, depression, and anger, as well as decreases in functioning.[31] Sometimes meaning-making gets derailed and is unsuccessful, leading to unsatisfactory meanings or transitioning into rumination, intrusive thoughts, and long-term distress.[32] What are some concrete recommendations for helping people reach successful resolution?

Be Willing To Provide A Supportive Interpersonal Presence

It might seem as if this could be taken for granted, but often interpersonal support is not offered in a way that will actually be helpful to the meaning-making process. Sometimes the help that is offered takes the form of distraction from the meaning-making. Sometimes the help gets lost in problem-solving, which has its place but is not meaning-making. Sometimes the support that is offered is too impatient of the often-repetitive processing that needs to happen and wants to jump ahead to the resolution. Sometimes the help is too cognitive, assuming that just knowing “the right answer” will solve the problem. Supporting the process of meaning-making takes patience and time.

Assess Global Meaning

Does the sufferer have adequate resources at his or her disposal to craft adequate meaning out of the suffering? What are his or her beliefs and experiences of God? Is God a safe attachment object, or is God perceived as unreliable or distant? What is the sufferer’s theology of suffering? Can suffering have meaning, or is it always intrinsically meaningless or a sign of God’s anger? If the sufferer does not seem to have adequate resources, gently offer some. Early in my career as a therapist, I encountered a deeply depressed woman who had lost her faith many years earlier. Her beloved sister had died in an accident, and my client, who thought that God promised protection to his children (her global meaning), was so disappointed by God’s failure to live up to his promise (her situational appraisal) that she rejected him as thoroughly as possible by deciding she did not believe in him. What she needed was someone to go back with her to the loss of her sister and reprocess her loss, perhaps gently suggesting alternative ways of thinking about what God promises. As a therapist, you might provide hope by offering the possibility that there are alternative ways of thinking about suffering. If the timing is right, you may even suggest new global meanings or ways in which existing global meanings need to be nuanced or made more complex. Tomorrow I will be talking specifically about a theology of suffering that is relevant both to global meaning and to specific appraisals of the suffering.

Assess Situational Meaning And Identify The Discrepancy With Global Meaning

How is the sufferer understanding his or her current suffering? What questions is he or she asking God, and what do those questions mean? “Why?,” for example, can mean a variety of things. Sometimes it is simply a search for antecedent events that precipitated the suffering. Did I get cancer because of chemicals in my food or where I lived while I was growing up? Did genetics play a role? Was there anything I could have done differently? Sometimes “Why?” is a question about God’s purposes for allowing the suffering. Is it punishment, justice, or the desire to produce growth?

Understanding how sufferers are appraising their suffering can guide you in identifying what the discrepancies with global meaning actually are, which can then become the target of your interventions. How can you prompt them to consider what God is doing in their lives through their suffering in order to arrive at more positive reappraisals of their suffering? Since we tend to rely on global meanings in our situational appraisals, do some of the situational appraisals suggest weak spots in people’s global meaning? For example, a common (and often implicit) global meaning seems to be the belief that the world is just and fair, and that we get what we deserve. In a fallen world, this is clearly not the case, as the story of Job so powerfully illustrates for us.

There is some evidence that one of the most difficult aspects of the discrepancy between global and situational meaning has to do with disruptions to purpose. Have specific life goals been disrupted by the suffering? Has the suffering revealed goals that are anchored in values such as achievement and wealth, which are shifting sand when suffering hits? Help sufferers identify the global values that are tied up in the more specific goals. This may help them to realize that there are alternative ways of achieving those global goals. Help them relinquish and grieve lost goals and reinvest in new goals that are congruent with their deeply held values. It may even be possible to encourage pursuit of the highest-level goals, such as giving glory to God. In Philippians 1:20–21, Paul notes that the value of exalting Christ with our life is a firm foundation, impervious to even death, since “to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

Facilitate The Process Of Resolution

In our research, we asked participants what helped them resolve their spiritual struggles. The primary theme had to do with a process of spiritual surrender, which involved developing a kind of intellectual humility regarding their suffering and a giving up of the global belief (usually implicit) that this earthly existence is just. Our Christian heritage includes a powerful process for leading people in developing this resolution in the form of lament. I’ll be speaking more about lament on Friday. The resolution of the struggle, involving surrender, can clearly be seen in the following quote from a man who initially struggled with God’s goodness. When asked how this was resolved, he said,

He can do anything that He wants at His time in His way and it’s not at my direction, at my bargaining, at my pain, at my whining, at my anything. It’s up to God and He’ll take me when He wants to take me and He’ll cure me when He wants to cure me and He won’t cure me when He doesn’t want to cure me and that’s okay. So, I go back to the first commandment that if I can really follow the first commandment and make God my only God. Not my intelligence, not my ability to read a cure on the internet, not my ability to find someone else who got cured and if I do what he does then I’ll get cured. If I can let all of that go and just make God God, then everything else kinda goes away. And I can lead the rest of my life breathing, walking, in communion with [God], it’s very nice.[33]

As evident in the above quote, spiritual surrender was dependent on the development of a certain kind of intellectual humility, which my colleague Kent Dunnington defines as “glad intellectual dependence on God.”[34] This perspective recognizes one’s own finitude, especially in regard to the outcomes and purposes of the suffering, while also acknowledging the other side of the coin, that God does know and is in control of the outcomes and has loving purposes for our suffering. This is illustrated by one of our participants. Rather than demanding to know answers, she said, “I can just give it to God: ‘I don’t understand this. Is there something you want me to know and if there is could you tell me?’ Maybe He doesn’t want me to know. . . . I guess when I get to heaven He’ll tell me why.”[35] Rather than doubting God’s purpose, this participant accepted the presence of an unknown plan while simultaneously expressing the desire for its eventual manifestation, patiently questing for purpose.

For some participants, spiritual surrender was also connected to giving up the belief that the current world is just. One woman, connecting humility to the absence of a just world, said, “You know, I think the ‘Why me?’ to me is very selfish because it should be ‘Why not me?’ I’m not any better than anybody else in this earth. . . . Who are we to think that?”[36] She went on to tie this to her original spiritual struggle with God’s justice: “I was raised that if you make good choices you have fewer consequences, and I was mad because that’s not true. I think that was the hardest one to take this time.”[37] Another woman described her resolution as follows, “I think I just came to a place where we’re in a world where it’s not perfect. We’re not in heaven and things happen.”[38] The next world may be just, but the current one is not.

Surrender may also include forgiveness, as it essentially involves giving up our desire for vengeance and leaving justice in God’s hands. Forgiveness did not come up much in our interviews, because cancer typically does not have its origins in evils done to us. However, many traumas include human agency and might require the need for forgiveness of others or oneself in order to arrive at satisfactory meaning. There is a vast psychological literature on forgiveness, as well as a well-established biblical basis for it. I recommend Ev Worthington’s work, which integrates both.[39]

Assist In Articulating The Outcomes Of The Meaning-Making Process

As my friend Rick Langer says, “We are ultimately the curators of our narratives,” choosing what threads of our life to emphasize or  deemphasize through various circumstances and how to weave them together in the process of meaning-making. Can the client see his or her suffering as a catalyst for positive changes? What meanings have been made? What changes have happened in faith and in the relationship with God? What changes do they see in themselves, and how can God use those in the future? This should be done without attempting to diminish the weight of their suffering. Sometimes trying to find silver linings is experienced as a disregard for or a trivializing of suffering. But this is not an either-or situation. The depth of suffering can be acknowledged while also recognizing benefits from it.

Let me end today by encouraging you to consider that struggling is not the problem, nor is resolution of the struggle the goal. In the context of Park’s meaning-making model, distress is conceptualized as originating in discrepancies between global meaning and situational meaning.[40] In line with this, we tend to think of the resolution of the discrepancy and diminishment of distress as a positive outcome. However, the presence of struggle and the accompanying distress does not, in and of itself, constitute a negative outcome. From a psychological perspective, distress is often associated with perceived growth.[41] From a theological perspective, wrestling with God is modelled throughout Scripture and lament is provided as a powerful spiritual resource for shaping suffering in God’s presence.[42] Distress, while painful, may be an important part of the developmental process of coping from a psychological perspective and of sanctification and achieving intimacy with God from a theological perspective. Keeping this in mind will enable you to provide hope when hope is not present, to model faith when faith is challenging, and to communicate God’s loving presence when God seems distant.

Notes

1. Crystal L. Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature: An Integrative Review of Meaning Making and Its Effects on Adjustment to Stressful Life Events,” Psychological Bulletin 136.2 (2010): 257–301.
2. Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 3rd ed. (Touchstone, 1984), 84.
4. Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature,” 258.
5. Eleonore Stump, Atonement, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 82.
6. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992); Mark E. Koltko-Rivera, “The Psychology of Worldviews,” Review of General Psychology 8.1 (2004): 3–58.
7. Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature,” 259.
8. Crystal L. Park, “Religion as a Meaning-Making Framework in Coping with Life Stress,” Journal of Social Issues 61.4 (2005): 7–29; Crystal L. Park, “Religion and Meaning,” in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2nd ed., ed. Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park (New York: Guilford Press, 2013), 357–79; Annick Shaw, Stephen Joseph, and P. Alex Linley, “Religion, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth: A Systematic Review,” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 8.1 (2005): 1–11.
9. Daniel N. McIntosh, Roxane Cohen Silver, and Camille B. Wortman, “Religion's Role in Adjustment to a Negative Life Event: Coping with the Loss of a Child,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65.4 (1993): 812–21. Kenneth I. Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice (New York: Guilford, 1997), 310.
10. Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, “Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14.1 (2009): 7–16.
11. A. Taylor Newton and Daniel N. McIntosh, “Associations of General Religiousness and Specific Religious Beliefs with Coping Appraisals in Response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita,” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 12.2 (2009): 129–46.
12. For reviews, see Park, “Religion as a Meaning-Making Framework”; “Religion and Meaning”; Shaw, Joseph, and Linley, “Religion, Spirituality, and Post-Traumatic Growth.”
13. Kenneth I. Pargament, Kavita M. Desai, and Kelly M. McConnell, “Spirituality: A Pathway to Posttraumatic Growth or Decline?,” in Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice, ed. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), 121–37.
14. Shaw, Joseph, and Linley, “Religion, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth,” 1–11.
15. Crystal L. Park, “Religiousness and Religious Coping as Determinants of Stress-Related Growth,” Archive for the Psychology of Religion 28.1 (2006): 287–302; Patricia Frazier et al., “Correlates of Levels and Patterns of Positive Life Changes Following Sexual Assault,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 72.1 (2004): 19–30; Jessica M. Schultz, Benjamin A. Tallman, and Elizabeth M. Altmaier, “Pathways to Posttraumatic Growth: The Contributions of Forgiveness and Importance of Religion and Spirituality,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 2.2 (2010): 104–14; Avital Laufer, Zahava Solomon, and Stephen Z. Levine, “Elaboration on Posttraumatic Growth in Youth Exposed to Terror: The Role of Religiosity and Political Ideology,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 45.6 (2009): 647–53; Crystal L. Park, Donald Edmondson, and Thomas O. Blank, “Religious and Non-Religious Pathways to Stress-Related Growth in Cancer Survivors,” Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being 1.3 (2009): 321–35.
16. Daniel N. McIntosh, Roxane Cohen Silver, and Camille B. Wortman, “Religion's Role in Adjustment to a Negative Life Event: Coping with the Loss of a Child,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65.4 (1993): 812–21.
17. Newton and McIntosh, “Associations of General Religiousness,” 129–46.
18. Tatjana Schnell and William J. F. Keenan, “Meaning-Making in an Atheist World,” Archive for the Psychology of Religion 33.1 (2011): 55–78.
19. Bruce A. Wallace, “Buddhism and Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24–40.
20. Jens Schlieter, “Endure, Adapt, or Overcome? The Concept of Suffering in Buddhist Bioethics,” in Suffering and Bioethics, ed. Ronald M. Green and Nathan J. Palpant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 309–36.
21. Elizabeth Johnston Taylor et al., “Spiritual Conflicts Associated with Praying about Cancer,” Psycho-Oncology 8.5 (1999): 386–94; H. K. Black and R. L. Rubinstein, “Themes of Suffering in Later Life,” The Journal of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 59.1 (2004): S17–S24.
22. M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall et al., “Theodicy or Not? Spiritual Struggles of Evangelical Cancer Survivors,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 47.4 (2018): 259–77.
23. Hall et al., “Theodicy or Not?,” 270.
24. Hall et al., 270.
25. Hall et al., 270.
26. Hall et al., 270.
27. Hall et al., 270.
28. Hall et al., 270.
29. Hall et al., 270.
30. Hall et al., 270.
31. Crystal L. Park et al., Trauma, Meaning, and Spirituality: Translating Research into Clinical Practice (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2017), 34.
32. Suzanne C. Segerstrom et al., “A Multidimensional Structure for Repetitive Thought: What’s on Your Mind, and How, and How Much?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85.5 (2003): 909–21.
33. Hall et al., “Theodicy or Not?,” 271.
34. Peter C. Hill, Kent Dunnington, and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, “Glad Intellectual Dependence on God: A Theistic Account of Intellectual Humility,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 37.3 (2018): 198.
35. Hall et al., “Theodicy or Not?,” 271.
36. Hall et al., 271.
37. Hall et al., 271.
38. Hall et al., 271.
39. Everett L. Worthington, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application (New York: Routledge, 2014).
40. Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature.”
41. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 121–37.
42. M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, “Suffering as Formation: The Hard Road to Glory,” in The Holy Spirit and Christian Formation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Diane J. Chandler (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 69–88.