Reconstructing the Self Through Solo Travel: A Narrative Study of Divorced Women Using the NRMM Method

Divorce constitutes a profound disruption of identity, particularly in socio-cultural contexts where women’s self-concepts are relationally anchored. While existing research has examined post-divorce distress and adjustment, limited attention has been given to experiential pathways of identity reconstruction. The present qualitative study explores how solo travel functions as a reconstructive psychosocial space through which divorced women process trauma, re-author identity, and cultivate resilience. Ten divorced women who undertook solo travel within three years of marital dissolution participated in in-depth narrative interviews. Data were analyzed using the Narrative Reconstruction Meaning-Making (NRMM) framework, which examines rupture, emotional processing, meaning-making, identity reconfiguration, and emergent resilience. Findings reveal a coherent transformation trajectory across cases. Divorce was initially narrated as identity disintegration marked by shame, diminished agency, and temporal disorientation. The decision to travel alone represented activation of autonomy, while embodied mastery experiences during travel facilitated restoration of competence and self-efficacy. Subsequent meaning-making processes reframed divorce from failure to survival, enabling transition from contamination narratives to redemptive self-authorship. Resilience emerged not as absence of distress but as narrative coherence, future orientation, and restored self-trust. The study extends narrative identity and post-traumatic growth scholarship by demonstrating how embodied and spatial experiences scaffold cognitive reconstruction. Solo travel functioned as a liminal bridge between rupture and renewal, highlighting the role of experiential autonomy in fostering resilient identity transformation following marital dissolution.