MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Katherine Jeanne Hayes Candidate for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ______________________________________ Larry M. Leitner, Director ______________________________________ Vaishali Raval, Reader ______________________________________ Deborah Wiese, Reader ______________________________________ Elise Clerkin, Reader ______________________________________ Ann Fuehrer, Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT EXPLORING PERSONAL MEANING MAKING RELATED TO SPIRITUAL CRISIS WITHIN EXPERIENTIAL PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY by Katherine J. Hayes This study explores spiritual crisis from the perspective of experiential personal construct psychology (EPCP). Spirituality and religion are understudied phenomena in clinical psychology, despite being relevant to many people’s understandings of themselves and their experiences of distress. Spiritual crisis, as a time of grief and loss related to one’s spiritual life that leads to a change in worldview, is an intersection of spiritual and psychological concerns given its focus on distress and grief (Agrimson & Taft, 2009). In this study, I interviewed four people who self-identified as having gone through periods of spiritual crisis. The purpose of this research was to deeply explore the lived experiences of these four persons and how they made sense of their experiences, in order to inform theoretical frameworks around spirituality (rather than to find generalizable themes of how all people respond to spiritual crisis). In the interviews, participants described personalized understandings of religion and spirituality, entwined with other aspects of cultural identity. Participants described times of spiritual crisis as marked by profound grief, distress, and confusion, and described the resulting changes in their lives as an ongoing, transformative process rather than temporary or resolved ruptures. Spiritual crisis often involved negotiating relationships with larger group or institutional structures such as churches or formal doctrines. I discuss these themes and how EPCP theory might develop an understanding of spiritual crisis related to group expectancies (Kelly, 1991). EXPLORING PERSONAL MEANING MAKING RELATED TO SPIRITUAL CRISIS WITHIN EXPERIENTIAL PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Psychology by Katherine J. Hayes The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2020 Dissertation Director: Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D. © Katherine Jeanne Hayes 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Psychological approaches to spirituality............................................................................ 2 Humanist psychology approaches to spirituality ................................................................ 5 Spiritual distress and spiritual crisis .................................................................................. 8 Defining spiritual crisis .................................................................................................... 9 Defining spirituality ....................................................................................................... 10 Experiential personal construct psychology (EPCP) ........................................................ 12 Method.............................................................................................................................. 14 Participants .................................................................................................................... 14 Conducting primary interviews ....................................................................................... 15 Interpretive summaries ................................................................................................... 16 Member-checking interviews.......................................................................................... 16 Reflexive writing ........................................................................................................... 17 Reflexive statement........................................................................................................ 18 Thematic analysis across participants.............................................................................. 20 Results .............................................................................................................................. 21 Interview 1: Anna .......................................................................................................... 21 Interview 2: Matthew ..................................................................................................... 27 iii Interview 3: Beatrice ...................................................................................................... 43 Interview 4: Miriam ....................................................................................................... 61 Reflexivity in practice .................................................................................................... 91 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 96 Brief summaries............................................................................................................. 96 Interview themes............................................................................................................ 98 Developing EPCP theory in response to these findings .................................................. 121 Limitations and Potential Directions ............................................................................. 131 References....................................................................................................................... 136 Appendix A ..................................................................................................................... 141 Appendix B ..................................................................................................................... 142 Appendix C ..................................................................................................................... 143 Appendix D ..................................................................................................................... 145 Anna............................................................................................................................ 145 Matthew ...................................................................................................................... 185 Beatrice ....................................................................................................................... 219 Miriam ........................................................................................................................ 256 iv DEDICATION To the many people who made my formal and informal learning possible, including my family, here and gone, who made every experience a learning experience; the communities that surrounded me in steadfast love; the teachers who encouraged my nonsense; the faculty, staff, and students of the Western College Program who challenged my assumptions and supported my growth; the extended academic family of the EPCP research group, who treated me as someone worth listening to and inviting to fancy dinner parties; my graduate cohort and student community, especially Aki Imai and Cat Munroe, who were my lifelines during change and grief; my internship cohort and friends who helped me find community far from home; and the web of friendships, connections, artists, and activists that helped sustain and educate me over the past several years. And especially to those who helped me stay relatively housed, hopeful, employed, and insured during the ABD phase, including Vaishali Raval, Chris Wolfe, Ginger Wickline; Deborah Wiese, Alexandria Schramm, and especially Alex Nyquist, who offered her spare room to a relative stranger and ended up pulled into many late-night talks about hymns. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible to complete without the assistance and support of many people. I am profoundly grateful to the people who shared their stories with me for this project. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members, Ann Fuerher, Elise Clerkin, Deborah Wiese, and Vaishali Raval, for their thoughtfulness, patience, and encouragement. In addition to the formal assistance with the dissertation process, I am grateful for the chance to work with and learn from a group of committed scholars over the years, including the members of the Qualitative Research Group. I would like to particularly thank Vaishali Raval for her gracious, practical, and generous support, especially during the latter period of this research. This project would not be the same, or done, without your insight, encouragement, and pragmatic support. Finally, I am very grateful to my advisor, Larry Leitner, for his compassionate and encouraging mentorship through difficult circumstances and past retirement. Your humanity, incisiveness, humility, and good humor have been and will continue to be deeply important to me. vi Exploring Personal Meaning Making Related to Spiritual Crisis