Resilience as Narrative Reconstruction After Parental Divorce: Adolescents’ Experiences of Narrative Counseling

Parental divorce is widely associated with increased psychological risk among adolescents, yet adaptation varies considerably across individuals. Existing resilience research has largely emphasized traits and protective factors, offering limited insight into the subjective processes through which adolescents make sense of adversity. Addressing this gap, this study conceptualizes resilience as a dynamic process of narrative identity reconstruction within a counseling context. Using a qualitative narrative inquiry design, this study examines the lived experiences of three adolescents navigating parental divorce in an Indonesian collectivist context. Data were generated through in-depth counseling sessions and analyzed across three temporal phases: pre-counseling, during counseling, and post-counseling, with a focus on how personal narratives are constructed and transformed over time. Findings indicate that resilience unfolds as a meaning-driven and temporally dynamic process, evolving from survival-oriented coping and narrative fragmentation toward greater coherence, agency, and future orientation. Narrative counseling facilitated this transformation through mechanisms such as externalization, re-authoring, and value-based action, enabling participants to reinterpret adversity and reconstruct adaptive identities. Resilience emerged not as the resolution of distress, but as the integration of adverse experiences into coherent life narratives. The findings also highlight the role of sociocultural context, showing how values such as familial harmony and relational responsibility both constrain and enable narrative reconstruction. By reconceptualizing resilience as a narrative and evolving process, this study contributes a culturally grounded framework for understanding adolescent adaptation and informs narrative-based counseling practices.