Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, proposed in Man's Search for Meaning that the primary human drive is not toward pleasure or power but toward meaning. His clinical observations from Auschwitz and other camps were that those who maintained a sense of purpose, however small, showed greater psychological resilience than those who lost all sense of meaning. The grief research that followed Frankl's work has provided empirical support for the role of meaning in bereavement outcomes, while adding considerable nuance to how meaning works.
Two Types of Meaning Making
Crystal Park at the University of Connecticut distinguishes between sense making, understanding why the loss happened and how it fits into one's worldview, and benefit finding, identifying positive consequences or changes that followed the loss. Both are forms of meaning making, but they are associated with different outcomes at different time points. Sense making tends to be more important in the early phases of bereavement, when the incomprehensibility of the loss is most acute. Benefit finding becomes more accessible later and is associated with post-traumatic growth. Pressuring people toward benefit finding before they have achieved adequate sense making is counterproductive.
When Meaning Making Fails
Not all losses can be made sense of in ways that provide comfort. Research by Niemeyer and colleagues found that the inability to find meaning in a loss, particularly in bereaved parents, was one of the strongest predictors of complicated grief disorder. When a loss violates deeply held assumptions about how the world works, such as the assumption that children should not die before parents, and no narrative can accommodate that violation, grief can remain in a state of acute incomprehensibility that resists integration. Therapeutic approaches to complicated grief often focus specifically on addressing these assumption violations.
Meaning Versus Forced Positivity
An important distinction exists between genuine meaning making and the performance of recovery that bereaved people are often implicitly pressured into. Meaning is not the same as finding the silver lining. It is not the belief that the loss was good or necessary. Genuine meaning can be quite dark: the meaning that you will never take time for granted again, or that you must restructure your priorities, does not require the loss to have been worth it. Meaning emerges from honest engagement with the reality of what was lost and what remains, not from the imposition of positive reframing.
Practices That Facilitate Meaning
The practices most consistently associated with meaning making following loss include: narrative reconstruction, writing or telling the story of the loss and the relationship in ways that can hold both the love and the pain; ritual, whether traditional or invented, that marks the loss as significant; legacy activities that continue something the deceased valued or that honour the relationship; community engagement with others who share the loss; and allowing sufficient time for the meaning to emerge rather than forcing premature resolution. Meaning is rarely imposed; it tends to emerge from sustained engagement with the loss rather than active pursuit.