Religious belief and patience in suffering of life from psychological perspective: A qualitative study

In all of religious belief systems and teachings, believers are asked to tolerate suffering of life. Believers in this process have developed strategies to cope in various ways. In Islamic culture, believers are expected to accept God's discretion, to be patient with the perpetrators, to abandon the illicit and forbidden, and to show perseverance and seriousness about the continuity of worship. This study has emerged with the curiosity of the psychological situation of the Muslim individual against the difficulties of life. Therefore, in Muslim culture, how people have achieved the difficulties of life, how these people passed through a period of mourning, these difficulties and the functions of social support systems in the process of mourning have been sought. First of all, the difficulties of life, mourning process, coping strategies and theoretical background of patience in Islamic culture are examined in detail from psychological perspective. Then field research was conducted. The study is based on the grounded theory approach of qualitative research methods. The data were obtained by recording the traumatic events experienced by people determined by the purposive sampling method and by the researcher himself, and by recording the experiences following the incidents. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with people and their relatives who had experienced or were affected the traumatic events. All collected data were subjected to phenomenological analysis and interpreted. At the end of the study, we have encountered some challenging human types (Confusion, Anxiety, Anger, Silent, Submissive) in the context of coping and patience, and as a model proposition, a conceptual framework that we call the five states of the journey to patience (Shock-Complaint-Suspect-Gratitude-Acquiescence). As a result, it is claimed that the people who believe will surely pass through these states in the face of the suffering of life and that they will surely appear in one of these typologies. Keywords: Sorrow, mourning, social support, coping, belief, faith, patience.