Understanding ambiguous loss
As a leadership coach, grief and loss are everywhere I look. Sometimes, these losses are abundantly clear, like the death of a loved one. But other, silent losses can show up in how we relate to others and our work. Losses like:
Getting fired or laid off.
Caring for a spouse or parent with dementia.
Being forced into retirement.
Immigrating to another country.
Having to drop out of school.
Being denied entry to school because of your income, race, or gender.
Having a family member in prison.
Having a workaholic parent or spouse.
Being adopted.
And so on.
Family therapist Pauline Boss calls these events “ambiguous losses.” In each, faces disappear from our lives, sometimes forever. Our identity and role changes, often permanently. We’re forced to adapt to a new reality we may not have expected or wanted.
In other words, these are real losses, and we experience them just like any other loss. We may:
Feel confused and uncertain.
Struggle to figure out what’s next.
Have difficulties relating to others.
Lose touch with who we are.
Feel exhausted and drained.
Find it hard to trust ourselves, others, and life itself.
Yet, despite what we're feeling, we’re told these losses don’t “count.” After all, the people we lost may still be living in the next state or, in the case of a loved one with dementia, even the next room. There's no funeral, no official verification of our loss. So it goes unnoticed, even to us.
For Boss, the experience of losing something or someone without being given permission to say what we’ve lost is the essence of ambiguous loss.
Because we can’t name what we’ve lost, we can never reflect on it, process it, and heal. And because we can’t heal it, it lives on in how we respond to life. We experience what Boss calls “disenfranchised grief,” in which we suppress the pain and push on.
But no matter how hard we try, we can never quite shake the loss. We get stuck. We question over and over what we could have done differently. We blame ourselves, others, or God. We become consumed by anger, regret, or resentment. We lose our confidence. We pull back.
And that “stuckness” shows up in how we lead others and ourselves.
Getting unstuck means giving ourselves permission to do the grief work we needed to do but couldn’t. We need to make sense of what happened, build new habits of thinking, reframe our stories, and learn to tell new ones.
All of this happens in coaching. And it can lead to newer, richer ways of living and leading.
Interested in learning more? Book your free Discovery Session here.
