The Lived Experience of Divorce: A Narrative Analysis of Personal Stories and Identity Reconstruction of Women

Ashalatha T LSaranya TS^*Sandeep Kumar Gupta

• CMR University, Bangalore, India

This research investigates the lived perceptions of South Asian women in coping with the consequences of divorce, a culturally tainted break-up commonly fraught with shame, disposability, and loss of identity. Using narrative approach, from interviews and handpicked personal stories, the research investigates how women interpret post-divorce life in patriarchal, collectivist societies that value marriage as a pillar of feminine moral character. Based on Arthur Frank's typology of illness stories, specifically the quest narrative, the results indicate that most women reinterpret their trauma as a transformative, resistant, and re-claimed journey. This research, however, explores an expansion of Frank's model by incorporating the idea of the "agency quest," where narrative coherence is supplemented by embodied and spiritual practices-journaling, yoga, chanting, and intuitive healing-as a part of identity reconstruction. Spirituality appeared not in the form of passive withdrawal but as an active ethical work by which women rethought the holy, recovered bodily sovereignty, and developed emotional toughness. The analysis locates these practices within paradigms of embodied cognition, feminist theology, and ethical self-cultivation, contending that healing is not just a cognitive or discursive endeavor but one profoundly embedded in sensory, affective, and ritual practice. Notably, the research considers the lack of chaos narratives and the structural limitations that dictate whose narratives get to be heard and told. It demands a feminist praxis affirming not just coherent narratives of development but the messiness, silence, and ambiguity that play a role in identity reconstruction following social disconnection.