The Paper I Never Announced: My Synchronicity-and-Grief Research Is Out in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology
Here's a confession from the patience-of-publishing files: almost a year ago, one of my proudest professional milestones happened — and I told almost no one. In September 2025, my article, “The Role of Synchronicity in Meaning Reconstruction,” was published online in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. And then I closed my laptop and went back to work.
I was mid-manuscript on my Routledge book and juggling client dissertations, and the way these things go, the email landed, I felt a quiet flush of pride, and I kept going. The print version still hasn't been assigned to an issue, so somewhere in my head it stayed “not quite done.” But online-first is published. I just never stopped to mark it.
So what is the paper, in plain language?
It asks a deceptively simple question: can a meaningful coincidence help someone rebuild a sense of meaning after a death? Using a phenomenological method, I worked closely with the written accounts and interviews of seven bereaved women and identified five essential components of the experience that help people reconstruct meaning while they are actively grieving.
Underneath it, the paper braids together four bodies of thought that don't usually sit at the same table: Jung's idea of synchronicity, Neimeyer's meaning-reconstruction model of grief, terror management theory, and Janoff-Bulman's shattered-assumptions theory. The question I kept asking was what those big ideas actually look like in the lived experience of a real griever — and what that means for the people who sit with them.
Why I'm sharing it now
If you've followed my Routledge book journey, this will sound familiar — because this article is the scholarly backbone of the book. The book grew directly out of this line of research; the paper is the peer-reviewed foundation beneath it. Posting about the book while never once mentioning the study it rests on finally stopped making sense to me. So: here it is.
A note to other academics
Here's the part I actually want to say out loud: we are remarkably bad at celebrating our own milestones. We submit, we get the acceptance, we feel it for an afternoon, and we move straight to the next deadline. If you published something this year and quietly let it pass — consider this your permission to go back and mark it. It counted then, and it counts now.
Reading it
The article is behind SAGE's paywall, though the abstract is free to read, and the print version is still pending an issue (I'll share when it is released). If you'd like to talk about the findings, or you're a clinician curious how this shows up in grief counseling, reach out — I'm always glad to discuss the work.
→ Read the abstract in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology
Hill, J. (2025). The role of synchronicity in meaning reconstruction: Integrating synchronicity, meaning reconstruction, terror management, and shattered assumptions theory in bereavement. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678251367795
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