Identity Reconstruction in Grief: An Integrative Embodied-Narrative Model

Despite broad recognition that identity reconstruction is central to profound loss, grief scholarship lacks a unified definition of identity. Grief scholarship has also focused primarily on narrative processes, leaving embodied and prereflective dimensions undertheorized. To theorize embodied identity reconstruction, we draw on Køster's phenomenological work on existential identity and scalar narrativity to extend Neimeyer's Meaning Reconstruction framework and propose the Integrative Embodied-Narrative Model of Identity Reconstruction (IENM). IENM provides criteria for recognizing identity change beyond narrative coherence. It conceptualizes identity change as a lived process unfolding across three overlapping modes: embodied (prereflective orientation), hybrid (embodied-symbolic enactment), and narrative (reflective integration). The model clarifies and unifies previously disparate assumptions about identity reconstruction across grief theories and offers a framework for recognizing identity change in both death and non-death losses.