Sometimes people call Dr. Pauline Boss a grief expert. She always corrects them.
“I’m not a grief expert,” she says. “I’m a loss expert.” Loss leads to grief, she explains, but in the case of a missing person, for example, the ability to grieve is frozen. You are immobilized waiting for clear information which may never come. “You don’t know if that person is alive or dead,” she says. “People can’t grieve; they are stuck. Thus the theory of ambiguous loss is about stress, a deep, deep stress that without certainty, may continue for a lifetime.”
Boss, a professor emeritus in the Department of Family Social Science, has spent nearly 50 years studying this phenomenon of ambiguous loss, a term she coined in the 1970s. Ambiguous loss describes a loss that remains unclear and thus has no resolution. It leads to feelings of confusion, anxiety, and chronic sorrow.
To help guide people living with ambiguous loss to a steadier ground, Boss has practiced family therapy, trained fellow therapists, written numerous books, and expanded on her theory, which has become recognized throughout the world.
David Olson is a fellow professor emeritus who has known Boss for nearly 40 years and has observed her work up close.
“One significant characteristic of her academic work is that it bridges theory, research, and practice—what I call the ‘triple threat,’” he says. “This means that her ideas are theoretically sound, empirically validated, and relevant to helping individuals, couples, and families. Her major contribution to the family profession and to individuals, couples, and families has been the development of the concept of ambiguous loss. May her ideas continue to enhance the lives of those under stress around the world.”
Identifying ambiguous loss
Boss’ professional work in ambiguous loss first took root in graduate school, but the antecedents can be traced back much further than that. She jokes that she listened to the popular radio detective drama Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons growing up in the 1930s and 40s. “But I think there’s a bigger reason I’ve stayed with this topic,” she says. “I’ve always had a love of family.”
Boss grew up on a farm in New Glarus, Wisconsin. She was one of four children in an immigrant Swiss family. She remembers her father receiving letters from relatives back in the homeland. Sometimes the letters had a black border—signifying a death in the family. Even though she didn’t know the Swiss relative personally, she could still feel a sense of loss through her parents. Immigrants by their very definition have ambiguous loss baked into their identities. As they move from one place to another, a part of their lives is missing.
“Even if it is a voluntary immigration, you have lost something,” she says. “You have left something or someone behind.” That is a common kind of ambiguous loss.
As Boss entered the 1950s, there weren’t a lot of choices for women in college, but a combination of a love of reading, a desire for scholarly pursuits, and a streak of curiosity motivated her to seek her own path. She enjoyed teaching so she earned a degree in education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She later became a family therapist and went back to graduate school to focus on marriage and the family. As she sat in on therapy sessions with families of troubled children, she noted the fathers were always angry about being there. “Fathers thought their role was to earn a living. They would say ‘Why am I here? I need to be at work.’” she says. “The families had a father, but they all said that the kids were mothers’ work.”
The fathers were psychologically absent but physically present in the family. Although this was the first kind of ambiguous loss Boss studied, it is now known as Type Two: psychological absence with physical presence. This can occur when the individual is emotionally missing, such as the 1950s fathers, or anyone who is cognitively gone, such as those afflicted with dementia, traumatic brain injury, mental illness, addiction, or any condition that takes away one’s mind and memory.
The other kind of ambiguous loss, Type One, is defined as physical absence with psychological presence. Examples include kidnappings and those missing due to wars, terrorism, and natural disasters.
Losses stemming from divorce and adoption are more common examples of Type One, as well as the loss of physical contact with families due to immigration—the feeling Boss’ parents had when they received those black-bordered letters.
Boss researched Type One in the early 70s when, for her doctoral dissertation, she studied the wives of men missing in action in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. It was then when she came up with the term ambiguous loss. “What I did was provide a name for a type of loss that’s been common but had not been acknowledged,” she says. “Giving this stressor a name helps people begin to cope with it.”
“It’s amazing she coined this phrase that we never knew how to approach before,” says journalist and author Krista Tippett, who hosts the popular On Being podcast. “Ambiguous loss has filled in such an important part of the puzzle for us.”
Tippett is an expert on moral wisdomand human understanding. She notes that Americans in particular focus so much on closure and moving forward, but that is actually not how people function. “Loss is a condition of being human,” she says.
“Pauline has been able to help us understand this particular source of pain. Its biggest strength is taking seriously the fact that uncertainty is the reality much of the time, but we have to go on living.”
Boss was a featured guest on Tippett’s podcast in 2020 during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The show can be listened to at z.umn.edu/OnBeing.
Six pillars of coping
As Boss expanded on her theory, she looked for ways to help people mitigate the distress caused by ambiguous loss. She borrowed ideas from Eastern cultures which have a higher tolerance for ambiguity. She worked with many people with missing loved ones who have gone on to have relatively stable lives with some joy in them. “I was curious as to how they do that,” she says. “It was difficult and surprising for me because I like certainty.”
Boss did find some answers by studying families, for example after 9/11, to devise six guidelines for coping with ambiguous loss. “They are not linear,” she stresses. “It’s messy.” Boss recalls the five stages of grief developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who wrote in her last book that she never meant for the stages to be thought of as a straight progression from denial to acceptance. Kübler-Ross came to regret that they were interpreted that way in the public’s mind.
Boss’s six guidelines to help people build resilience to cope with ambiguous loss are presented in a circle, and in no particular order. (See Figure 1) They are:
Finding Meaning is all about making sense of the loss and finding a new purpose. For example, a mother turns the tragic experience of her missing son into campaigning to change legislation and working globally to prevent kidnapping and sexual abuse in other families.
Adjusting Mastery is about recognizing your degree of control in the situation. “If we like control, we need to lower it,” Boss says. “We may have to live with not knowing for years, decades, or a lifetime. During the pandemic, people could not control the virus. It was no accident that so many people were baking bread. While they could not control the virus back then, they could control the baking of bread and the certainty of an outcome that was comforting.”
Reconstructing Identity is how a person comes to understand their new identity. “Who am I now that my husband has been physically missing for 20 years? Am I still married? Or with Type Two ambiguous loss, can I have a relationship with someone else if my mate no longer knows who I am? Yes, you can honor your marriage and also have some social relationships for the sake of your own health,” Boss says.
Normalizing Ambivalence refers to coming to terms with conflicting feelings. When a person doesn’t know if a missing loved one is alive or dead, they often wish for the ambiguity to be over, but then realize that means they are wishing the person were dead. This leads to ambivalence and guilt for having that thought in the first place.
Revising Attachment is recognizing that a loved one is both here and gone. “He may be dead and maybe not. She may come back to the way she used to be and maybe not,” Boss says. “You learn to carry two contradictory ideas in your head at one time.” Loved ones are missing, but you keep them in your heart and mind while you also reorganize your life without their physical presence.
The last guideline is Discovering New Hope. “You can’t just wait for the missing person to come back because that would mean putting your life on hold,” Boss says. “You have to discover something new to hope for. Frequently, the new hope is to help other people avoid suffering from ambiguous loss as you did.”
Worldwide impact
Since Boss developed her theory, it has been applied nationally and worldwide. Ambiguous loss theory helps shape interventions used by the International Red Cross and the Red Crescent (ICRC) with families and communities coping with massive losses after natural and human-made disasters. Boss and her graduate students traveled to New York City to work with families of the missing after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She also trained therapists to work with those suffering after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 as well as the earthquake in Turkey in early 2023. With ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, pandemics, and natural disasters, there is tragically no shortage of those dealing with ambiguous loss.
“The ambiguous loss framework is being tested around the world in various kinds of situations and contexts. Thus far, it is holding up in different cultures,” Boss says. “However, a theory always needs testing, and there are now two generations of scholars who are doing this testing. I am deeply grateful for that. I hope when I stop working, others will pick up the work on ambiguous loss and develop the theory further.”
Although Boss has had a long and influential career, she considers its highlight to have taken place just last spring. She was invited to Spain to give the keynote address at the World Family Therapy Congress hosted by the International Family Therapy Association. “I was honored deeply by that,” she says, reflecting on delivering it to an audience of international practitioners who have applied and tested her theory all over the world. “It was gratifying and humbling,” she says. “I saw that speech as my swan song. But as you know, I’m still working.”
For more information, including two videos of Pauline Boss’ life and University achievements,
visit z.umn.edu/pauline-boss.
-KEVIN MOE