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The historical forces and events that shape us

“In the 21st century, we are facing an enormity of pressing challenges, many of which have at their source buried collective traumas, across cultures, throughout history, and spanning generations.” Thomas Hubl

“Trauma exists in the collective sphere, too, affecting entire nations and peoples at different moments in history.”  Gabor and Daniel Maté

“To take children from their families and their countries was an abuse; to strip them of their identity was an abuse; to forget them and deny them their loss was an abuse… Few tragedies can compare.” Margaret Humphreys

“Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious.” Rebecca Solnit

Today’s post is about collective and historical trauma.  I’m also including a new drawing and an extract from something I posted on April 19th, 2015 related to historical trauma, the silence around it and its impact on future generations. It’s like coming full circle back to these same topics.

Historical / collective trauma is the ocean we all swim in and the air we breathe whether we are aware of it or not. It’s the thread that ties us all together and gets knotted with our personal traumas. It impacts us and those around us, and it is interwoven with these other more personal wounds, which are always situated and influenced by the larger contexts we reside in and engage with. Gilan Hirschberger defines collective trauma as a cataclysmic event that shatters the basic fabric of society. Aside from the horrific loss of life, collective trauma is also a crisis of meaning. In the relevant literature around collective trauma it is supported that a collective trauma transforms into a collective memory and then becomes a system of meaning that has the potential to help groups to redefine who they are. For both victims and perpetrators, deriving meaning from trauma is an ongoing process that is continuously negotiated within groups and between groups.

For victims, the memory of trauma may be adaptive for group survival, but it can also be a reminder of existential threat. Unprocessed and unmetabolized this trauma is like secrets buried in the sand. It will manifest as disease, dysfunction, emotional pain, wasted opportunities, until reckoning and healing take place. It also requires the construction of a new collective self. For perpetrators, the memory of trauma poses a threat to their group / collective identity that may be dealt with either by accepting responsibility or by denying history, minimizing culpability for events, transforming the memory of the events. The dissonance between historical crimes and the need to uphold a positive image of the group may be resolved either by not identifying with one’s group anymore or by creating a new group narrative that acknowledges the crime committed, while working towards making amends.

Albert Bandura, who developed the concept of moral agency, which is manifested in both the power to refrain from behaving inhumanely and the proactive power to behave humanely, suggests that in order for those who have committed violations against a group or community to accept the responsibility it is necessary for the self-regulatory mechanisms governing moral conduct to be activated; however, there are many psychosocial maneuvers by which moral disengagement can occur.  Moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a worthy one by moral justification, disavowal of a sense of personal agency by displacement of responsibility; sanitizing language;, disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of one ‘s actions; dehumanization of those who are victimized, etc. He writes that “Many inhumanities operate through a supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people who contribute to destructive activities by disconnected subdivision of functions and diffusion of responsibility. Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to humane personal standards, safeguards built into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renounce cruelty” (Bandura A. (1999), Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. / SAGE).

Public acknowledgement and conversations around events that have traumatized communities and peoples allow people to process and make sense of what has happened and it opens up space for healing. It disrupts narratives and processes of moral disengagement. Hopefully, through this process and dialogue less dysfunction is projected on to others and fewer traumas are passed down to younger generations. In a talk show the Greek actor, Yiannis Bezos, recently noted that for instance, here in Greece there has been no public discussion or evaluation yet about the impact that the seven year dictatorship has had on the evolution of our society, our education system and culture, and how the legacy of those years has stifled growth and maturity in many areas.  Oppressive regimes create fear of expressing one’s views. People in Greece have during various historical eras been punished, exiled, imprisoned, tortured and killed for their beliefs and views. This fear, even unarticulated, is passed down from one generation to another creating a certain kind of fearful citizen, blocking expression and progress in general. We end up, as Bezos noted, with people being afraid of all sorts of things like microphones, being visible, public speaking, and so on.  Public discussions remove the veil of secrecy and free up energy for change and better ways of living and co-existing.

The need to write about these topics today partly arose as I was reading about the apology to the Indigenous peoples in Canada from Pope Francis. In relation to this historical trauma in his new book, The Myth of Normal, Gabor; Maté and son, write: “… trauma exists in the collective sphere, too, affecting entire nations and peoples at different moments in history. To this day it is visited upon some groups with disproportionate force, as on Canada’s Indigenous people. Their multigenerational deprivation and persecution at the hands of colonialism and especially the hundred-year agony of their children, abducted from their families and reared in church-run residential schools where physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were rampant, has left them with tragic legacies of addiction, mental and physical illness, suicide, and the ongoing transmission of trauma to new generations….. Nearly 30 percent of the jail population in this country is composed of Indigenous people, who make up no more than 5 percent of the general population. …., the inheritors and carriers of a toxic colonial legacy of extermination and expulsion….”

Maté writes this period is “known as “the Sixties Scoop,” when the Canadian child-welfare system abducted thousands of First Nations children from their homes and placed them with non-Indigenous families; atrocious living situations on reservations; ongoing multigenerational trauma; and the persisting encroachment on and pollution of Indigenous lands for economic projects that profit distant corporations. In 2021 the world was horrified at the discovery of thousands of small bodies at the former sites of residential schools across Canada. Many other thousands are known to have disappeared whose remains are yet to be found and whose deaths, deeply etched and grieved in the consciousness of their families and communities, have not until recently been formally acknowledged by the governmental and ecclesiastic institutions responsible. Nearly two thousand unmarked graves have been identified as of late 2021. Another five thousand to ten thousand such graves likely exist and await finding.”

Pope Frances delivered a historical apology, with differing responses. An apology is a first important step, but what happens after that, what steps are taken to help people who have been robbed of so much and who are marginalised, impoverished, dislocated, reduced in numbers. Apologies need to be accompanied by restoration and compensation. The Pope apologized for abuses and took responsibility for the church’s cooperation in generations of horrendous abuse and cultural suppression of indigenous children at Catholic residential schools across Canada. Pope Francis has said he is on a “penitential pilgrimage” to atone for the church’s role in the residential school system, in which generations of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and forced to attend church-run, government-funded boarding schools to assimilate them into Christian, Canadian society. More than 150,000 Native children were taken from their homes from the 19th century until the 1970s and placed in the schools in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their families and culture. The Canadian government has stated that physical and sexual abuse were rampant at the schools, with students being beaten for speaking their native languages. The Pope’s apology has come after the apologies delivered by the current and previous prime minister of Canada. Some people have welcomed the apology as useful to their healing and others believe it is the first step to a much needed longer process of reconciliation for institutional wrongs dating back centuries. The Pope acknowledged that the wounds and injustices will take time to heal.

Below is an extract from a longer post I wrote in 2015:

….. One topic I am interested in is that of child emigration policies and practices of breaking families and forced adoption that took place throughout the 20th century even up until the late sixties in many countries. I have referred to films and books in previous posts, but, I will briefly, make some reference here again. To begin with, like Margaret Humphreys I believe that few tragedies can compare with ‘taking children from their families and their countries and stripping them of their identity and then denying that their loss was an abuse’ because as she says ‘our sense of background or heritage is an important part of our identity’ (Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles, 1994). In her book, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare and the Decline of the British World, Ellen Boucher writes ‘in the 1980s the silence surrounding the subject of the lost families started to be broken. The decade witnessed a rapid growth of advocacy groups dedicated to raising awareness about the history of child emigration and to seeking redress for men and women who had been hurt by the policy. One of the first was the Child Migrant Friendship Society of Western Australia, founded in 1982 by a group of former migrants who aimed to relieve ‘the suffering, helplessness, distress, misfortune, poverty, destitution and emotional disturbance’ that they believed  the initiative had produced…,

Five years later Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham based social worker established the Child Migrants Trust, which campaigned to pressure the emigration charities, as well as the British and Australian governments, to acknowledge the trauma endured by former migrants. Humphreys documented her experience and work in her book Empty Cradles. The Trust was instrumental in the release of a 1989 award winning documentary, Lost Children of the Empire by Joanna Mack, which looks at the fate of some of the 150,000 British orphans, who – often without their parents’ knowledge and consent – were shipped abroad to be brought up in children’s homes and many were exploited and abused. Children are the most vulnerable members of society, and as such, have been victimized and exploited across time. Children have also, across time and especially during the 20th century, been institutionalized, taken away from their mothers and adopted illegally….

This practice began at the turn of the century, but children were still deported overseas up until 1967! Joanna Mack produced and directed a documentary, uncovering the story of child migration from the UK under which children as young a three were shipped to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the former Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The film’s broadcast in the UK and Australia, and the subsequent book of the same name written by Philip Bean and Joy Melville, helped secure the foundation of the Child Migrants Trust and their work supporting families separated by these practices. The Leaving of Liverpool (John Alsop, Sue Smith, Penny Chapman), an award-winning television mini-series produced by ABC/ BBC in 1992, is a dramatized account of unaccompanied child migration from Britain to Australia. It was screened in Britain and in Australia and was mentioned in parliamentary inquiries in both countries .It had a significant impact in putting child migration ‘on the map’ in terms of awareness among the general population and those people who had been sent to Western Australia as child migrants.

Gordon Brown apologized in 2010 to the children immigrants that were sent to Australia, a practice that lasted over 40 years right up until the late 1960s. The Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard delivered a national apology to victims of forced adoption in 2013. Kevin Rudd also apologized to the 500, 000 Forgotten Australians and their families.

The following small extracts are from his apology:

“Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost’…. ‘To those who were told they were orphans but were taken here without their parents consent, we acknowledge the lies you were told, the lies told to your mothers and fathers and the pain the lies caused for a life time’.

In previous posts I have also referred to films like Rabbit-Proof Fence by Christine Olsen, based on the book published by Doris Pilkington, the daughter of the real Molly Craig, and songs about The Stolen Generation in Australia…… In a nutshell, the film is about an Aborigine girl’s long walk home after she and her sister are taken forcefully from their mother and placed in a camp a thousand miles away, as part of the state policy of removing girls from aboriginal communities and educating them separately, in order to eradicate their aboriginal identity and raise them ‘white’. Thousands of children were forcefully removed from their families and placed in foster families, children’s homes or missions between 1890s and 1970s. In 2008 the Australian government apologised to The Stolen Generation. Of course, apologies alone may not be sufficient to erase or heal years of loss and pain, but at least it is one small step towards the recognition of wrong and unethical practices, and it also contributes to breaking social denial and secrecy surrounding practices like this around the world. At least some governments have been forced by survivors’ activism and society’s demand to take responsibility for dark chapters in history and work towards reconciliation and restoration.

They took the children away (Archie Roach) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL_DBNkkcSE

Unfortunately, such practices and policies did not take place only in Britain and Australia, but in many countries in the 20th century. For instance, in Greece thousands of children were removed from their families and placed in camps known as Queen Frederica’s ‘children’s towns’ after the civil war. Since 1950 there have been revelations about thousands of illegal adoptions of these children abroad, especially, in the USA. However, in Greece silence has not been broken officially and no government so far has made any attempt to investigate, discuss or apologize. These topics have remained taboo subjects because as in most cases they were the result of past government policies and initiatives and a lot of people were involved, including authorities, charities and the Church……..

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Edited / I will be posting a new drawing soon

Impermanence, life’s unpredictability and change and enjoying the good that  lasts……             

“Panta rei  / Everything flows” Heraclitus

“We should not complain about impermanence,
because without impermanence, nothing is possible.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later. One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be.” Stephen Batchelor

“If we can be open…we find that life’s unpredictability is full of interesting and invigorating challenges. These challenges engage us in unexpected and unanticipated ways and allow for the freedom of unscripted responsiveness….” Mark Epstein

The idea for today’s post came to me after a brief conversation in a shop I visit weekly. The person there greeted me as usual and asked “How are you?” to which I joyfully responded “Fine”. To my surprise they commented on how it would be more precise to say: “I’m fine, right now, but I don’t know what might happen to me tomorrow”. I was initially taken aback, and then I inserted some humor into our casual brief chat, but afterwards I gave it some more thought and pondered on impermanence and continuity, and whether it is helpful to go about one’s daily life in constant dread of all the bad things that might be awaiting us at every corner. In reality unless we’re living in a war zone the risk of being run over by a car or something of the sort happening to us would probably be relatively low. And this comes from someone who has been hit by a car and has come out of the experiences alive and relatively unscathed. This mental process eventually led to this post.

Of course, it is true that bad things happen to people all over the world every day and that impermanence and change are an inherent part of living on this planet. Nobody really knows whether they will actually wake up the next day. There is also a lot in life that we have no control over, from wars to the destruction of the natural environment to heart attacks and a myriad of other things that happen to us through the course of our life. Also, nothing really stays exactly the same even if on the surface people and things may seem the same over maybe short periods of time. But it’s good to remember that there is also the impermanence of pain, and that many changes are also positive and highly desired. Without change and impermanence there would be no possibility, no change, no growth, no learning, no recovery.

One of the basic teachings in Buddhist philosophy is impermanence and that by recognising this we can deal with change and human suffering with more ease and grace. Of course it is difficult for humans to accept both change and death, and it requires practice.  But by practising acceptance of this fact we can better appreciate each moment of life, and maybe make the most of it to the extent that we can. It shakes us out of our habit of taking life for granted, which is only available in the present moment, and it also increases our sense of gratitude. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, peace activist and poet write: “It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. We need to learn to appreciate the value of impermanence. If we are in good health and are aware of impermanence, we will take good care of ourselves. When we know that the person we love is impermanent, we will cherish our beloved all the more. Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us. When we practice mindfulness of impermanence, we become fresher and more loving.”

Science also demonstrates that change is inherent to life. Some time ago I read a blog by an undergraduate student doing research, whose name I can’t recall, in which she  said something along the lines of it being important to approach everything even research from a perspective of impermanence because as she explained the goal was not to maintain any status quo of rigid certainty, but to do work that would aid change and transformation. Through advancements in technology and medicine and scientific observations we now know that change takes place in our bodies every minute. Consider all the activity taking place in our bodies and organs as we obliviously go about each day. Something like 330 billion cells are replaced daily, and in about 90 days 30 trillion will have replenished, which is the equivalent of a new you. Consider the millions of synapses coming into being even as they disperse every moment. In describing the brain in his book, Neurodharma, Rick Hanson writes: “Like the mind, the brain is impermanent: Each day, hundreds of new baby neurons are born in a process called neurogenesis, while other brain cells die naturally. There is ongoing rebuilding of existing connections between cells and structures within cells. New synapses form, while less used ones wither away.  New capillary tendrils— the tiny tubes that supply blood to our tissues— grow and reach into particularly active regions to bring them more fuel. Individual neurons routinely fire many times a second. And molecular processes cascade like falling dominoes over the course of a single millisecond….”

On the other hand, we do experience a sense of stability and continuity within constant visible and invisible changes that take place in our bodies, our identities, our sense of self, our circumstances, our relationships, our natural environment.  My son and his girlfriend stayed with us for a while over the summer and we looked at old photo albums. Everyone had changed, parents had aged and kids had grown older and much bigger, and grandparents had died. And yet it was also true that most people were still alive, some aspects of their personalities had not changed, and there was continuity in their identity and life story.  In one photo I saw that our front patio was full of pots of plants.  Now it is empty and some of the many potted plants I had when I moved here have died, but most of them have taken roots in the garden. They have transformed into bushes and tall trees. Places visited in the past are still there. Cities have probably grown bigger and denser and the beaches in the photos have undergone subtle changes over the years, many due to more recent environmental changes, but they are all still in place, recognizable, familiar. Even our house, which has gone through change, some inevitable deterioration and restoration over the last twenty six years, is still here, providing us with shelter and accommodating our changing needs. It is in some sense both the same house and a very different one.

In an article with the title, Enjoy the Good that Lasts [https://www.rickhanson.net/enjoy-the-good-that-lasts/], Rick Hanson writes: “Look around and see things you like that were here yesterday – and maybe here many years ago as well. For me writing, this includes a desk, a collage on the wall that I made a long time ago that continues to guide me, and trees and hills seen through a window. As you look around, recognize the relative stability of so many things. Sure, most if not all will pass away eventually – the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, so “in the long run” ………. but for all practical purposes, there is so much lasting good literally within reach of your hands and feet right now. …… Allow a natural sense of reassurance, perhaps relief, to emerge. Perhaps a calming, a relaxing, a sense of the security of those things that are stable. Notice anxious doubts if they come up, and let them change and pass away, knowing that the future will be whatever it is but meanwhile whatever good that is true is really actually true right now. …..

Consider people in your life and the good that’s lasting there….  Consider the good in your past. It will always have been good, even if it is here no longer. Your own accomplishments, personal disasters avoided, crazy good fun times with friends, the ripples of your own sincere efforts large and small – nothing at all can ever erase what actually happened. How about the durable good inside you? Talents and skills, moral values, neat quirks, so much knowledge: it’s all real. Enjoy the felt recognition of it…”

And yes, we now know through science that life might eventually after billions of years become extinct on this planet. Then even the natural laws and the nature of things will not be true anymore. In relation to this, physicist Brian Greene says that we believed that if we uncovered more of how the universe works we would be touching something that was always true. … He explores the degree to which even this is true or ultimately has any purpose in the absence of human beings, or in the absence of a life form that can contemplate a deep equation or Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance.  He says that he eventually came to grips with this level of impermanence by realizing that instead of grasping for future certainty it was wiser to focus on the here and now “as that is the only place in which value and meaning can actually have an anchor.”

And meanwhile, we can still trust in the nature of things and the natural laws we are aware of currently, in the web of life, in the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, in nature, in the present moment and in all that makes us humans, and in our instinctual clinging on to survival in order to see the sun rise yet another day, I watched a film with many women behind the scenes recently: Where the Crawdads Sing. Amongst its many themes there was this central theme of survival running through the whole story, of our own and other species’ biological drive, inner mandate, in some sense, to live against all odds even in dangerous or hostile environments. And we can still trust in love and in our wishing wellbeing to those we love, and hopefully, to all humanity, in our putting in some effort every day despite and inspite of it all. We can remind ourselves to live more in the now, not necessarily in a timeless, mystical now, but to quote Stephen Batchelor, to view / experience the now as “an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment.”

I will end this post with another extract from Rick Hanson’s article mentioned above:

“See the durability of life itself. It’s been going on locally on our planet for at least 3.5 billion years. Things have changed and will change, and I am not trying to minimize bad changes, especially those involving human hands. Still, life will keep going in one form or another as long as the Earth keeps going (which should be at least a few more billion years, until our sun gradually expands and BECOMES a red giant, swallowing up Mercury, Venus, and us – but that’s a while from now)…….. Enjoy it all. The more we recognize impermanence, the more we can take refuge in the good that lasts.”

Also, I’d like to share a few things I’ve engaged with this last week.

Rick Hanson, PhD, talks about trust and its roots in our early years, mistrust and healing, the inevitability of change in people and circumstances, and finally, things we can deeply trust like love, life, the present moment, our own and other people’s natural goodness, the nature of things. So, the topics of the talk are to some extent related to some of the ideas in the piece I’ve written above [https://www.rickhanson.net/meditation-talk-trust-mistrust-and-deep-trust/].

Physician and auhtor Dr. Gabor Maté talks about the nature of addiction, trauma, and illness in a toxic culture, which is often at odds with true healing, the denial of children’s developmental needs in the culture, as well as the adult needs for connection, belonging, authenticity, autonomy, meaning, mastery, actualization, etc, and more, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEpD2o6MZOk

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Edited on September 9th, 2022

Ambiguous loss, non-violent communication, meditation and gratitude…..

“WHAT WE SAY matters. We’ve each felt the power that words have to heal, soothe, or uplift us. Even one caring remark can make the difference between giving up and finding the strength to face life’s challenges. We each also know something of the great harm that can be inflicted through speech. Sharp words laced with anger or cruelty can break a relationship and burn for years. Language can be used to manipulate and coerce on a mass scale, to fuel fear, war, and oppression, and to advance political agendas of genocide or terror. Few things so powerful are also so commonplace. Words are woven into the fabric of our lives. Your first love. Your first job. Your last goodbye to someone you love. Our beginnings and endings and the countless moments in between are punctuated by a play of words as we share our thoughts, feelings, and desires.”  Oren Jay Sofer

“Be aware that the grief we carry may be our own, or the pains of those close to us. It may also be tears for the world, the sufferings caused by climate change, human divisiveness, racism and war. These, too, are in our hearts. Yet human suffering is not the end of the story. When we touch our grief and tears honorably, they can empower us. They can lead us to care more deeply, to love more fully, to renew life through our actions.” Jack Kornfield

“It’s as if you were in a spaceship going to the moon, and you looked back at this tiny planet Earth and realized that things were vaster than any mind could conceive and you just couldn’t handle it, so you started worrying about what you were going to have for lunch. There you are in outer space with this sense of the world being so vast, and then you bring it all down into this very tiny world of worrying about what’s for lunch… We do this all the time.” Pema Chodron

“You’re just faithfully following your breath and— Wham!— you’re in Hawaii surfing. Where did it come from? And where does it go? Big drama, big drama’s happening, big, big,  drama. And it’s 9: 30 in the morning. “Oooh. Wow! This is extremely heavy.” A car horn honks, and suddenly you’re not in that drama anymore, you’re in another drama.” From Pema Chödrön’s book: Start Where You Are

Today’s post includes three more drawings and topics like ambiguous loss  and grief, and non-violent communication, as well as, a couple of quotes by Pema Chodron [Buddhist nun, teacher and writer]. In addition, I’d like to say that the underlying spirit of this post is gratitude. Even though I don’t write about it, feelings of gratitude have been salient while constructing this text.

I think Pema Chodron’s first “spaceship quote” is a metaphor of how we often lose sight of our true nature and of the vastness of the world of  which we are an intrinsic part of, of how we are oblivious to the bigger picture and how we so often reduce our experience to “the tiny world of worrying.” The second quote has to do with meditation and the nature of our thoughts. In the stillness of meditation, past and present experiences, thoughts, ideas, emotions, sensations, aches and longings, and future preoccupations arise and move through us.  I’ve intended to write a post on meditation for quite some time, but other ideas and topics become more salient and I keep putting it off.  I will say though that meditation has been a significant experience in my life, a tool and process that I am deeply grateful for. And even though meditating is not always an easy ride, it can become an empowering process. So, it needs to be trauma-informed, and at the beginning it may be wise and even necessary to have some guidance from good intentioned and informed practitioners. Anyway, I will write more when I do get round to writing about it in some future post.

In my recent posts on grief I didn’t discuss ambiguous loss and how this kind of loss complicates the grief process.  So, today I’ll very briefly refer to this aspect of loss and grief. I first became aware of this type of loss years ago while reading about the disappearance of people in Latin America under authoritarian regimes. While preparing for the posts on grief I came across material about this kind of loss as well. In one article, Ambiguous Loss in the Families of the Missing, Dr Pauline Boss [professor and clinical supervisor at the University of Minnesota, working to connect family science and family sociology with family therapy and family psychology] claims that one form of ambiguous loss is caused when loved ones suddenly vanish or when we are not certain whether they are alive or dead. She writes “For the families left behind—when soldiers are declared missing in action or relatives disappear during political unrest and civil conflict—not knowing whether a loved one is dead or alive defies emotional comprehension. Around the world, terrorists kidnap family members so often that the term “desaparecido” (disappeared) has entered the common vocabulary in Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Chile, Panama, Peru, Mexico, and other countries.….”

In this article Boss discerns two basic types of ambiguous loss. In the first type people are physically absent, but they are psychologically present, and even though they may be presumed dead their bodies have never been found. In the second type, people are physically present, but due to addiction, deep depression or dementia, etc, they are cognitively and emotionally absent. With ambiguous loss people cannot move on. Not knowing for sure if a loved one or family member is dead or alive can lead to feeling helplessness, anxiety, depression, anger, family conflict, and somatization. It sort of has some of the effects as gaslighting. The uncertainty keeps people stuck. One cannot break down denial or let go or move through the grieving process. This happens because as Pauline Boss writes: “people cannot make cognitive sense of the situation; and not knowing whether the family member will return prevents reconstruction of family and marital roles, rules, and rituals. Ambiguity destroys the customary markers of life or death, so a person’s distress is never validated. The community loses patience with the lack of closure, and families become isolated. Ambiguity causes even the strongest of people to question their view of the world as a fair, safe, and understandable place. Finally, ambiguous loss that persists for a long time is physically and emotionally exhausting.”

Boss adds that “Bowlby’s attachment theory suggests that it might be impossible to let go of a loved one unless one can actively participate in the rituals of honour and farewell that begin the process of detachment.” As a therapist working with families she suggests that family members or individuals need guidance in order to express their anger, fear, ambivalence, hope, and also, they need to learn to tolerate ambiguity, participate in family or communal celebrations / rituals and in storytelling and reminiscing of the missing person. People need to figure out how to reconstruct their identities and roles and how to live without the certainty or else their grief will remain frozen in place.

According to Boss, ambiguous loss can also arise from declining health, eco-anxiety, divorce, loss of homeland through immigration, incarceration of a parent, and many other experiences. She, like many others more recently, also challenges the idea that we reach closure. She believes that it’s a myth we need to let go of. Instead we can learn to live the best we can with the grief and loss and make some kind of meaning of it or accept the nonsensical nature or meaninglessness of certain losses while finding meaning in something else.

Dr Pauline Boss talks about ambiguous loss and other aspects of her work at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woFXkVKbeWA   – The Myth of Closure

And a meditation on grief by Jack Kornfield at: https://jackkornfield.com/meditation-grief/

I will also refer to a podcast with the title: Stretch Your Heart and Say What You Mean, where Oren Jay Sofer and Tami Simon talk about mindfulness based non-violent communication.

They discuss how Oren Jay Sofer integrates mindfulness, somatic interventions and Dr Marshall Rosenberg method of non-violent communication, the power of intention in communication, curiosity, humility and kindness, how the focus on what matters reduces reactivity and defensiveness, the link between compassion and non-violence, and the value of shifting from projecting blame to clearly expressing our needs. In relation to our needs Sofer says: “So we can just ask ourself that question throughout the day as a way of learning how to shift the focus of our attention, from what we call in Nonviolent Communication “our strategies,” which are the specific behaviors and actions we undertake as human beings, to the underlying need. “What’s driving this? What am I really reaching for in my heart here?”

He notes however,  that this is not that easy because our early experiences and enculturation have often blocked our capacity to even be aware of our deeper needs.

He says:

“…. by the time we’re probably eight or nine years old and then from there on, we’ve all internalized a whole bunch of messages about whether or not we’re even allowed to have needs and which needs are OK for us to have based on the gender we’ve been socialized into, our class, our education background, our culture or religious background. So for me, being identified as a man, it was OK for me to feel angry and to have certain needs, but it wasn’t OK for me to feel scared or vulnerable or to want reassurance or connection. Those were things that our culture and society shamed me for as a young boy. As we learn to identify our needs, we encounter barriers that are about how we’ve been socialized, which often come with very painful emotions and past experiences that take time and energy and effort to heal, to recognize the pain and the loss and the sadness of being told that you don’t matter. “You’re not entitled to this. You’re being selfish. What about other people?……

And to actually start to reexamine and reclaim what it means to be fully human and that to have needs doesn’t mean that other people’s needs don’t matter or become invisible. In fact, the more we are able to identify and acknowledge our own needs, the more aware and sensitive we become of others’ needs. It’s when we don’t allow ourselves to have our own needs that we tend to shame and blame and guilt others for asking for things.

Because if I don’t allow myself, say for example, to ask for support, to get help when I need it, and then you come to me and ask for help, there’s a part of my heart that’s going to be like, “Well, why do you get to have it? I don’t get to have that. Suck it up.” Or we start to believe the opposite, that my sense of self-worth is determined by how much I can help others. So we internalize all these messages, and all of this comes to the surface as we start to explore what our needs actually are and can be very challenging. So that’s also a very important part of the journey.”