中華心理衛生協會

The calamitous '921' earthquake entailed long-term systematic research on the process of posttraumatic psychological changes. This study aimed to explore the peri-disaster and post-trauma life impacts and the psychosocial experiences of the bereaved victims who faced both losing a loved one and house collapse.The method used was based upon multiple research paradigms, including participation observation, depth interview, and interpretive interactionism. Ten cases at a disastrous site of central Taiwan were interviewed at least once from August 2001 to December 2002. As the discursive data showed, it was found what the bereaved family coped against the double loss and established a form of continuing relationship that satisfied the emotional need of maintaining their ties with the deceased, including ”rumination”, ”refusal of plain explanation”, ”attachment”, and ”sublimation”. It was also found that the social processes of the traumatic experiences included ”the formation of weak tie”, ”the flexibility of family reconstruction”, and ”the displacement of the discrepancy between 'thinking' and 'telling' about the double loss encounters”. The role-taking strategy adopted to cope with the life disruption included ”the new life signpost”, ”becoming the wounded healer”, and ”the change of life beliefs”. In further analysis, we found the critical turning point from the victimization to survivorhood was the supportive social bond and the house reconstructed at the original place. Those who build their houses at non-original places were the less adaptive ones. How the victims perceived and interpreted the symbolic meaning of the renovated house was a critical life task during the posttraumatic periods. Inferred from the research, it was found that trauma is a repetitious suffering from the particular event, but it is also a continual ”leaving of its site”. It is a challenge to our understanding of the relation between trauma and pathology. Finally, a conceptual model was proposed, and the implications from the study were discussed further.