From Loss to Growth: A Positive Psychology Framework for Men's Divorce Recovery

Divorce is one of the most common and consequential life disruptions adults face, yet compared to the scale of need, existing recovery resources are inadequate. This capstone applies positive psychology to men's divorce recovery, proposing a peer-facilitated, men-only, closed-cohort support group as the intervention environment. Drawing on three bodies of knowledge: the empirical literature on men's divorce, the positive psychology literature on well-being and growth, and the applied literature on men's peer support groups, the capstone develops a disruption-to-flourishing model that maps the journey from acute loss to developmental growth across six recovery pathways. The proposed intervention fosters the growth described in the pathways by applying positive psychology mechanisms such as learned optimism, self-compassion, narrative reconstruction, meaning-making, character strengths, and agency in a group context. The support group environment overlays brotherhood as an overarching recovery mechanism that activates and amplifies the other mechanisms. This capstone serves as the cognitive and theoretical foundation for a men's divorce recovery group that the author intends to implement and offers a model for applying positive psychology to men's experience of divorce recovery more broadly.

Author dc:creator

• Scott Barentsen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tim Zeidner

• Psychology

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/63002

OAI record oai:identifier

https://repository.upenn.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Arepository.upenn.edu%3A20.500.14332%2F63002