ABSTRACT
SUMMARY. Confronting one's mortality is at the heart of much human suffering. Building upon her previous development and testing of an exploratory model of psychospiritual distress, the author explores the confrontation of death in light of a transpersonal narrative with four new dimensions: (a) normalization of death, (b) divine intention, i.e., a belief in a supernatural force of higher power that provides a cosmic order, (c) surrender, i.e., the ability to let go of the outcome of events and to accept the unknown, and (d) trans personal existence, i.e., a belief in a continued existence beyond the known mortal self. Through a constructivist perspective on this transpersonal narrative, one can understand how personal reality is constructed and how affect flows from core beliefs that mediate events. This offers an explanatory model of how annihilation vulnerability of personhood can be mediated, resulting in diminished
KEYWORDS. Transpersonal, death, anxiety, spirituality, social work
Addressing psychospiritual distress associated with the threat of death is an important, and yet neglected, issue for social work practice. Confronting one's mortality is at the heart of much human suffering. In an effort to understand suffering among cancer patients, this author developed and tested an explanatory model of psychospiritual distress from a transpersonal perspective which revealed that those patients who had a higher level of transpersonal development, especially a normalized view of death, were less distressed (Smith, 1993; Smith, 1995). Factor analysis of new data helped to identify four dimensions of a distress-relieving transpersonal perspective as: (a) normalization of death, conceptually defined as the ability to tolerate the comprehension of personal mortality and to view death as part of the normal life cycle, (b) divine intention, conceptually defined as a belief in a supernatural force or higher power that provides a cosmic order, (c) surrender, or the ability to let go of the outcome of events and to accept the unknown, Cd) transpersonal existence, conceptualized as a belief in a continued existence beyond the known mortal self; for some this would be a belief in a spirit-self or soul.
