Psychosocial reactive experiences and coping strategies of survivors of the 9-21 earthquake, the largest in Taiwan's recent history, were explored through participant observation, depth interviews, interpretive interaction, and social construction grounded methodology. Twenty people were interviewed at least once at a disaster site in central Taiwan over a one year period that began one year after the disaster. Reactions included multiple realities, namely, collapsed spatiality, disruptive self, absent body, reorganized temporality, and reconstructed world. These dynamic structures were the manifestations of the interactive, ambivalent, and transformational relationships between the sufferers and their life-world in the post-disaster period. Individual differences in coping strategy approach behind the general structures were also found. These included reason vs. innocence, daily life vs. extreme situation, normality vs. episode, reality vs. illusion, and reconstruction vs. disruption. To recontextualize the traumatic experiences in thick descriptìon, a phenomenological view of the intentional arc, which projects a person's past, future, human environment, and physical, ideological and moral situation, was proposed. The intentional arc usually allows for unity of sensibility and motility, but it went limp when the victims suffered from the disaster. Survivors then strove to achieve new life balance between posttraumatic growth and ontological suffering. The psychosocial healing process entailed dwelling in the lived space and reconstructing the post-traumatic subjectivity through the aftermath of suffering.