When Grief is Unclear
As part of my divorce, I lost my marriage, my partner, the house we owned, most of my kitchenware, and a beloved pair of vintage cowboy boots. I still mourn the box that made its way to Goodwill instead of my new apartment. These losses weren't exactly surprising—these are expected following a divorce. The less obvious losses were the following:
A sense of what my family might look like.
Parts of my identity (like being the proud dog mom of two daschies).
My difficulty in trusting future partners.
The experience of navigating life in tandem with my best friends.
These losses weren’t clear or ritualized, but I was grieving them, and my friends and family were grieving their versions too. They were real losses, even if I believed my marriage ending would be the right thing for me.
In the 1970’s Dr. Pauline Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” and characterized it as unclear, traumatic, relational, externally caused, and confusing. We experience this type of loss in relationships to others and in our environments with things like infertility, immigration, natural disasters, estranged relationships, Alzheimer’s, or addiction. When we talk about grief, we primarily think of death and terminal illness, but these are also losses–just less apparent and acknowledged, and ones where we tend to react with “I should be okay.” This isn’t even close to an exhaustive list, yet it encompasses many reasons people seek therapy!
I love to share the concept of ambiguous loss with people, and when I do, there’s a sense of relief and acknowledgment. But what do we do when we find ourselves here – (and we will!) –amid ambiguous loss? Here are a few ways I like to get started:
Name the loss. Acknowledge it to be real and begin to grieve it.
Explore your shifting identity. Who are you now in light of this loss or experience? How has it changed you, your roles, or your rituals?
Normalize ambivalence. You might have mixed emotions throughout this–we can feel multiple and seemingly conflicting emotions! So I like to normalize that experience. Ambivalence can be uncomfortable, and we can learn to tolerate or even embrace it.
It’s certainly not a linear journey, but our goal is to increase our ability to live with this ambiguity, to understand it, and to make meaning of it. These are just a few ways to begin that process because I find that a lot of my work as a therapist is grief work. Maybe a lot of our work as humans is grief work.