What does ambiguous loss mean

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Two clicks install ». Quiz Are you a words master? Thanks for your vote! While studying families of pilots missing in action during Vietnam in the s, Dr.

Boss named ambiguous grief to describe a physical absence with a psychological presence, such as with missing persons like the military example above , divorce, miscarriage, and desertion. The term also describes psychological absence with physical presence, as with cases of dementia, traumatic brain injury, chronic mental illness, or addiction.

And when you're tasked with handling ambiguous loss, the feelings that arise are often complicated because there's no real recovery. There's no funeral and there's no script, so to speak, to follow. People can't get over it, they can't move forward, they're frozen in place. With death, eventually you reorganize family roles, and somebody takes over what the lost person used to do, says Dr.

For instance, someone suffering from ambiguous grief may just wish the whole ordeal were just over but then feel guilty for those very feelings.

In effect, those markers of frozen grief can sometimes cause symptoms that appear psychiatric, such as depression. But Dr. Boss advocates building resilience to live with the loss instead of seeking psychiatric intervention. What we learn from experience is that we can't recognize ambiguous loss in others until we first recognize our own. For Dr. Boss, her ambiguous losses centered on immigration, addiction, divorce, and aging parents. You will have a different history, some of which may include more catastrophic ambiguous losses, such as war, genocide, slavery, holocaust, natural disasters, or catastrophic illnesses or head injuries.

Rife with ambiguity, while such losses cannot be resolved, they can be acknowledged and supported by professionals or in community with others. As a therapist told Dr.