An passionate election it’s over, but the emotions of the last few months are not. It is one of the emotions that many people experience griefoften associated with death rather than the voting process. American scientific He spoke with University of Minnesota professor emeritus Pauline Boss, who spent 45 years as a psychotherapist. In the 1970s he coined the term “ambiguous loss” in his work with the wives of soldiers missing in action; recently, he has applied the idea to people around the world They have lived through the COVID pandemic.
(Following is an edited transcript of the interview.)
What is grief?
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Grief is simply the result of loss, but there is a caveat: the criterion for what you have lost is your attachment to it.
You can grieve over things that are not clear and obvious. Most of our literature is based on a clear loss—death or monetary loss, things that can be quantified or proven. But there are many, many losses that remain ambiguous. It’s a term I coined in the late 1970s to apparently name a type of loss that was not recognized until now. People felt sad; they felt they wanted to grieve, but no one would come to their house to console them; there was no religious ritual for that kind of loss. There was no acknowledgment of that.
Now we know there is such a thing ambiguous lossand I think that’s what people can experience now.
During the COVID pandemic, for example, we lost confidence in the world as a safe place because of the virus. Many of us used to bake bread because it was a couple of hours to check again and have a good result. It was certainty, two hours of certainty, which by the way is a good way to deal with a situation you have no control over.
Now we have a kind of loss that is causing grief to people who wanted a different outcome of this election. It is really important to understand the feeling. It’s a normal response if you’re in the middle of something you didn’t expect and don’t like, and it comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It’s a big loss.
Do we need to change the way we think about emotions like sadness and anger?
We should normalize anger and sadness. I think we jump too quickly to pathologize scary emotions. I think you need to be patient with yourself if you’re feeling angry, sad, grieving right now. I think that’s a normal reaction to a surprising result and a result that, in our opinion, goes backwards and not forwards.
So accept your feelings. Know that there is no closure to grief. You know you’ve had a loss. List your losses: I would advise people to actually write them down.
What are some of the psychological losses that people may experience after the election?
The loss of hopes and dreams and plans that they thought came from the other candidate; This loss of certainty in the future was what they wanted; losing confidence in the world as a safe place; loss of feelings of freedom over your body; loss of support for people with less resources than the rest; to lose the support of your neighbor and of people who are different from you—is a grief that cannot be resolved.
It is not like the grief of a person who has a death certificate and a funeral and ritual support and comfort. We are stuck with this. I wrote like frozen grief.
What is it that freezes that grief?
Lack of evidence—lack of certainty that you’ve missed something, because you can’t see it. If someone dies, the body or ashes can be seen; you can see the death certificate. There is something official that says that person you loved and were attached to is gone, and while that is very sad, at least you have certainty.
With a more abstract type of loss, there is no evidence in the world that you have lost trust except your own perception. And if you perceive it to be true, it is true for you: that you feel helpless or powerless because things have not gone your way.
You can be frozen in grief, immobilized. That is the danger. Don’t immobilize yourself. You need to do something active to deal with a situation you cannot control. Be active in your neighborhoods at the village level. It will help to be active, not just sitting and grunting and not just flailing. It is action when you feel psychologically helpless.
This may sound like a long-term strategy. You talked about the example of baking bread; Would that be some kind of short-term strategy for dealing with that kind of grief?
Absolutely. In the short term, you need to do something you can control when you’re in a situation you can’t control. Do something you can control: in your home, in your home, with your family. Go for a run, listen to music, go to a movie, do something that requires action, that gets your body moving. You’ll feel better for it. Go see a neighbor.
long term, take part. Get involved in anything that works for change that will bring us closer to the future, not what will take us back.
Do you have any words of wisdom on how people can make room for grief over time?
It doesn’t disappear. Sadness becomes a kind of sadness, but don’t expect it to ever go away. You might shed a tear or even feel an emotion of sadness 20 years from now if you remember this time, and that’s normal. That’s normal grief. You don’t have to find closure. If you were attached to something, a person, an idea and you lost it, you will carry a sadness forever. You will remember. You won’t forget it, nor do you need to.
When people say, “Aren’t you done yet?” please answer them and tell them that today’s knowledge does not need to overcome loss and grief. You learn to live with it, and you learn to live with the loss by finding a new purpose in it, by finding something you can do to change things. You must find a purpose in your loss, and that purpose must be something active.
I could see someone feeling really cynical and sad saying something like, “If losing things you’re attached to makes you sad, then I’m not going to hold on to things.” Is this really a healthy response?
no I’m using the attachment pretty low. In psychology it has a narrower definition, but it is the motivation of our actions and our beliefs and values.
So are attachments really important, even if they sometimes cause you pain?
That’s right. It is a good time to sit down and reflect on your life and your attachments. What do you care? What do you care about your body? What do you care about in your family, your neighborhood, your nation and the world? I care about climate change, not because it will become more important in my lifetime, given my age, but because I care about my grandchildren and their children.
Is it possible to cultivate more resilience in the face of this kind of grief in the future?
yes Increase your tolerance for ambiguity and continue to increase your tolerance for uncertainty. We hate uncertainty in this culture.
There is, in fact, one tolerance for scale ambiguity. It was created from a scale called Today authoritarian personality scale. (Editor’s note: This scale was developed after World War II by the philosopher Theodor Adorno as a response to Nazism. Greater tolerance for ambiguity is associated with less sensitivity to fascist ideologies.)
Change is needed. If a human system doesn’t change, they die. And right now I think we’re on the precipice of not wanting to change, and that’s not good. That goes backwards. I think we should be working to bring about change at the community level now, wherever you have power and agency, at whatever level you are. Maybe it’s in your family, maybe it’s in you, or maybe it’s in your community or state or nation or the whole world. But work for change, because change is the only thing that will keep us going.
Are there strategies people can use to cultivate this tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty within themselves?
yes Go to the theater to see some improv. Go listen to jazz music, which is completely improvisational. Do something different that you’ve never done before. Learn a new language; go travel alone to a foreign country. Meet some people you have never met before, who are not like you. Stretch yourself out; reach do something different Take a walk along a new path.
I’m not against certainty. I want my accountants to think in binary. And in our sports world, you win or you lose. That’s a binary. But in human relationships and our human condition, binary doesn’t work so well. We are often in that shadowy land of ambiguity and uncertainty.
Is there anything else you want to say about the upset?
Don’t be afraid of that. Know that this is a normal reaction to an outcome that you did not want or expect. And it doesn’t have to go away, but hopefully it doesn’t immobilize you. Grief is frozen; you shouldn’t be yourself.
