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.

The integrative text of Meaning-Making: Counseling and Groupwork in Education brings 40 years of research and scholarship in counseling, psychology, and education together in a singular analysis of the significant role meaning-making plays in how we come to know ourselves and others. In rejecting the modern understanding of the world as something "out there," Richard L. Hayes offers that we live in a postmodern world of our own making informed by our unique experience with that world. People are presented as self-organizing systems who are set indivisibly within changing social contexts. Development is the natural outcome of their attempts to realize a more stable and reliable understanding of that world. This meaning-making activity is positioned as an ongoing, dialectical, and recursive process of change and re-invention. The author argues that the construction of meaning is at the heart of the change process in illuminating its central role in individual development, loss, empowerment, multiculturalism, group and team development, and fostering collaboration. How these processes can be used to promote the development of deliberate democratic communities of learners illustrates how mental health professionals and educators can apply these insights to their own preparation and practice.