Surprisingly Powerful Ways to Process Ambiguous Grief

When most people think about grief, they think about loss after death. So when you first realize you are grieving someone that hasn’t actually died, the experience can be incredibly confusing. We can grieve a lot of different losses that aren’t due to death: * A parent who we may be estranged from or the parent you needed* The loss of relationship due to addiction, abuse, or disease like dementia* A marriage* Your faith* Your community* Fertility * Childhood trauma* An identity you once had: Christian good girl, the caretaker, the strong one, the people pleaser* The person you were before chronic illness or disease took over your lifeMaybe you’re wondering: * “Why can’t I just get over this?”* “Why am I still thinking about it?”* “Why does this hurt so much when nobody died?”The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with you. There is a term for this type of loss. It’s called Ambiguous grief. Here’s a definition from my essay, “Resilience in the City of Ghosts” that was recently featured in Memoir Monday’s best personal essays on the web: “Ambiguous grief is an open-ended grief without resolution. No funeral to mark the end, no body with your hopes for what the relationship could have been. There is nothing concrete—no tombstone or funeral—to cling to to validate the sense of loss. All that remains is the hope of what could have been.”The problem is there is no set roadmap to ambiguous grief like there is for death. Yet, processing that grief is still incredibly important. For those of us who grew up in faith communities, it is especially for us to pay attention to as we often learned to spiritually bypass negative feelings and focus on the positive.But that is not how we heal. In this week’s Live, Lauren (The Grief Circle) and I discuss the roadmap of ambiguous grief and grief’s radical transformation in our lives. Books mentioned in this episode:* Soulbroken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief by Stephanie Sarazin* I Belong to Me by Tia Levings * The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller* Reregulated by Anna RunkleOther books for Chronic Illness grief:* The Place Between Our Pains by K.J. Ramsey Check out Lauren’s work ( The Grief Circle)* Instagram* TikTok* WebsiteQuips and Confessionals is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Quips and Confessionals! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Quips and Confessionals at katejohnsonwrites.substack.com/subscribe