| The process of grieving is a unique experience and has been conceptualized from the Western perspective, but this study investigated meaning making through bereavement in a cross cultural perspective by interviewing Chinese and United States participants who shared their experiences with bereavement and posttraumatic growth. Powerful insights emerged from working with the participants' subjective experiences of grief and growth, and through using thematic content analysis, a web of connectivity was separated into themes that illustrated similarities and differences in the grieving and growth processes. Meaning making came from the culmination of meanings in the smaller contexts to form a larger subjective meaning. Grief literature has previously been inundated with Western bias, which is a very narrow view, in both the need to have answers and the need to look beyond one's culture when searching for answers. The clinical implications of the findings of this study are recognizing the importance of depth work in grief therapy and broadening the perspective of the grieving process to involve culture beyond the concepts of culture. Culture is not simply a concept; it is a living and breathing entity that permeates all segments of the experience. Observing the various components of grieving and growth, in the context of cultural variances, demonstrates the need to go beyond concepts and models. |
