Making Meaning of Loss: Change and Challenge Across the Lifespan is about how change brings loss to our lives, how we make meaning of loss, and how our experience with loss directs our encounters with loss in the future. Each loss challenges us in this way: to rethink our world view, to ask who we have become, and to reinvent ourselves anew. Taking a lifespan approach, Richard L. Hayes examines how we make sense of the losses that change brings in each period of our lives and how the way in which we meet the challenge that each loss brings directs our encounters with loss in the future. In addition, he provides suggestions for how earlier losses can become fruitful allies in encounters with change in the present and how caregivers can help others to make meaning of the loss in their lives.

This integrative book brings forty years of research and scholarship in counseling, psychology, and education together in a singular analysis. In Making Meaning, Hayes illustrates how the construction of meaning can have a profound effect on how we come to know ourselves and others. Hayes depicts meaning-making as an ongoing, dialectical, and recursive process of change and reinvention. This process plays a central role in individual development and loss and helps promote multiculturalism, collaboration, and group and team development. This book is recommended for mental health professionals and educators looking to promote democratic learning communities.