Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work With Ambiguous Loss

Pauline Boss

Foreword by Carlos Sluzki

Praise for Loss, Trauma, and Resilience:

“Comprehensive, clear, well-referenced guide….[that] presents valuable insight into the common feature in the situations so many people find themselves in…”

 - Counseling Resource

“This is a book that is so needed in our field, that builds upon the years Boss has spent developing the important concept of ambiguous loss....a very important contribution. Complex concepts are clearly written, using examples that bring the concepts to life.”
—Constance Ahrons, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, University of Southern California, Director, Divorce and Remarriage Consulting Associates, Author of The Good Divorce and We're Still Family

“With her new book, Pauline Boss has made a significant contribution to the field of trauma studies by addressing the need to bridge individual models of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder with those based on relational and resilience approaches. At a time when the violence and losses of war, terrorism, and natural disasters increasingly threaten to unravel the social fabric of entire communities, clinicians and humanitarian workers alike will welcome Boss’s clear guidelines for strengthening connections in families in order to better cope with the stress of such ambiguous and difficult situations and find new sources of meaning and hope.”
—Jack Saul, Ph.D., Director of the International Trauma Studies Program, New York City

“We all confront loss in our lives, and with loss comes a rupture in meaning. In Loss, Trauma, and Resilience, Pauline Boss insightfully sees traumatic loss as ’a relational disorder and not individual pathology.’ Most importantly, she draws on her substantial therapeutic experience, along with sophisticated theoretical resources, to provide practicable routes to restoring relations, meaning, and hope. This work will be especially useful to therapists confronting cases of trauma, great and small, and to scholars concerned with therapy as the site for restoring meaning.”
—Kenneth Gergen is the Mustin Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of The Saturated Self and An Invitation to Social Construction

“[I]nsightful and a fresh approach to the field of loss and trauma studies. . . . [A] recommendable resource.”
—Journal of Systemic Therapies

“My brother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had surgery to remove over half of it. Our whole family is reeling from this and trying to make sense of it all. I am telling you this because I want you to know your book on trauma, resilience and ambiguous loss has been most helpful to me. It helps me understand, in the most personal way, how traumatic this loss has been because it is ongoing and ambiguous. It has truly helped me by increasing my understanding, and by helping me name my loss. The book has been something for me to hold on to. Thank you for writing it.”
—Rosie O'Brien MA, Licensed Psychologist

“[T]he reader is certainly left with a sense of Boss's rich clinical experience and deep compassion for the families she has worked with.”
—PsycCRITIQUES

“In a dominant culture that denies death and marginalizes those most closely affected by it, the work of Pauline Boss is indeed welcome. . . . [D]efies many traditional Western ways of thinking about and responding to loss by examining it head on and giving voice to the experiences of those whom even mental health professionals may be least prepared to assist. . . . [A] worthy contribution.”
—Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life & Palliative Care

“This decidedly is a book worth reading, especially for new therapists in the field, because it reminds us all that both psychodynamic and family systems principles are as relavant today as they were in previous decades.”
—Psychiatric Services

For more information on ambiguous loss, visit the author's website at www.ambiguousloss.com

Overview - Contents and Excerpt

All losses are touched with ambiguity. Yet those who suffer losses without finality bear a particular burden. Whether it is the experience of caring for a parent in the grip of Alzheimer’s or waiting to learn the fate of a spouse gone missing in a disastrous event, the loss is disastrously coupled with a lack of closure. Bereft of rituals and social support, persons who experience such ambiguous losses find it hard to understand their situation, difficult to cope, and almost impossible to move ahead with their lives.

In Loss, Trauma, and Resilience, Boss, the principal theorist of the concept of ambiguous loss, offers new concepts and clinical practices for addressing this critical psychological experience that, in one form or another, touches all of our experiences of loss.

Boss draws on research and extensive clinical experience working with families in order to frame a powerful but flexible therapeutic approach. The fundamental goal is to guide readers in the task of building resilience in clients who face of the trauma of loss without resolution.

In Part I readers are introduced to the concept of ambiguous loss and shown how such losses relate to concepts of the family, definitions of trauma, and capacities for resilience. Over the course of these first three chapters Boss updates and expands her earlier understanding of ambiguous loss in a way that not only refines the character of the phenomenon but relates the phenomenon to other critical psychological and therapeutic categories.

In Part II Boss leads readers through the various aspects of and target points for working with those suffering ambiguous loss. From meaning to mastery, identity to ambivalence, attachment to hope–these chapters cover key states of mind for those undergoing ambiguous loss. Boss then offers techniques for fostering in clients a healthy and sustainable posture toward loss. Readers are encouraged to lead clients toward modifications of their more typical inclinations to control their situation and resolve all uncertainty. The therapeutic lesson is to learn to live with ambiguity and thereby nurture resilience in clients and their families.

The Epilogue addresses the therapist directly and his or her own ambiguous losses. Closing the circle of the therapeutic process, Boss shows therapists how fundamental their own experiences of loss are to their own clinical work.

In Loss, Trauma, and Resilience, Boss provides the therapeutic insight and wisdom that aids mental health professionals in not "going for closure," but rather building strength and acceptance of ambiguity. What readers will find is a concrete therapeutic approach that is at once directive and open to the complex contexts in which people find meaning and discover hope in the face of ambiguous losses.

About the Author

Pauline Boss, PH.D., is Emeritus Professor and Clinical Supervisor of Marriage and Family Therapy, University of Minnesota. She is also the author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, Coordinator of the post-9/11 Minnesota-New York Project, and a former trainer for the International Committee of the Red Cross mission in Bosnia-Herzogovina.

ISBN: 0-393-70449-1
December 2005

240 pages / cloth