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This article synthesizes past studies of illness, stress, coping, and social support and offers a model of communicative support, based on problematic integration theory, that emphasizes two major dimensions of meaning in the breast cancer experience. The model suggests that supportive messages are designed to help the breast cancer patient manage both perceptions of the likelihood (e.g., uncertainty) of various illness experiences and evaluations of those experiences. Support messages are designed to facilitate coping by reducing, maintaining, or increasing the supportee's level of uncertainty; variations in message design are expected to be related to perceptions of the supportee's pre‐message uncertainty about and evaluation of the potential experience. These expectations were tested by asking breast cancer patients to formulate supportive messages in response to several hypothetical scenarios. The …