Rehabilitation should put greater effort into supporting stroke survivors and their families in home-making and community reintegration processes, and help them to re-own and renegotiate their disabled bodies and changed identities in real life. Implications for Rehabilitation The experienced self-body split, identity confusion and related mourning process should be foregrounded in the post-discharge phase rather than functional recovery, in order to help stroke survivors understand and come to terms with their changed bodies and selves. In the post-discharge and reintegration phases stroke survivors should be coached in rebuilding meaningful relations to their bodies, home and communities again. This home-making process should start at real-life sites where stroke survivors wish to (inter)act.

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Stroke survivors may suffer from physical limitations as well as cognitive and behavioural difficulties. Many survivors work on their recovery in a rehabilitation clinic with the aim to return to their own home again. Since full recovery is often not feasible, they face the challenge of coming to terms with lasting effects of the stroke and of giving meaning to their home place again. Based on in-depth interviews with stroke survivors, we discuss the meaning of the home with respect to changed post-stroke identities. Our findings show how, for many participants, a formerly comfortable home becomes a space of struggle. Formerly stable bodily routines become time-consuming and demanding, reciprocal relationships with significant others change, often becoming unbalanced dependence. In conclusion, each stroke survivor faces a different struggle to accommodate a changed self in a house that does not feel like home anymore. These findings imply that stroke rehabilitation services need to address the individual and everyday challenges that stroke survivors and their families face at home, to improve their sense of home and well-being.