| This dissertation investigates how mothers experience grief and loss when faced with the death of a child. A qualitative research methodology integrating Moustakas's heuristic approach with nondual feminist methods was utilized. As a recruiting method, I placed an advertisement in a monthly newsletter of The Compassionate Friends (TCF) chapter in Marin County, California. TCF is an international nonprofit support organization for parents whose children have died. Depictions of the respondents were drawn verbatim from personal two-to-three- hour personal audio-recorded interviews.;Seven bereaved mothers whose children have died were provided a platform for the telling of their stories through two-three-hour recorded interviews. The intention was to contribute to developing psychotherapeutic models grounded in women's subjective experiences relative to maternal bereavement. As researcher, I refrained from asking the women any direct questions. Rather, I invited the women to tell their stories and to speak about what was intuitively arising throughout the interview process.;The outcomes of the interviews were organized around a three-part analysis: four interwoven dimensions of the women's ways of knowing---spiritual, psychological, emotional, and psychosocial; core themes; and individual themes. The findings highlighted that the women's experience with the death of their children is a lifelong and timeless process of grieving from and living with this devastating loss. Though the coresearchers' narratives had commonalities, each woman experienced and expressed her bereavement uniquely.;Mothers' bereavement has been explored from other perspectives, but psychological research has yet to fully develop women-centered frameworks that consider intersections of spiritual, psychological, emotional, and psychosocial experiences of maternal bereavement. I argue that nondual perspectives of feminist theory and feminist psychology rooted in spirituality ground the development of theoretical frameworks more aligned with women's experiences of maternal bereavement. I uncover ways in which bereaved mothers' personal accounts may inform psychological science and guide psychotherapeutic clinicians in the healing arts, thus remedy defective theoretical frameworks. I believe that nondual perspectives in spiritual counseling focused on bereavement may usher in a shift towards developing clinical models designed to better support this otherwise erased population---bereaved mothers. |
