Pauline Boss — Navigating Loss Without Closure
Podcast |
On Being with Krista Tippett
Publisher |
On Being Studios
Media Type |
audio
Podknife tags |
Interview, 
News & Politics, 
Religion & Spirituality, 
Society & Culture
Categories Via RSS |
Religion & Spirituality, 
Science, 
Social Sciences, 
Society & Culture
Publication Date |
Dec 13, 2018
Episode Duration |
00:51:01

Pauline Boss — The Myth of Closure

The family therapist who created the field of “ambiguous loss” — loss without closure. Complicated grief: parents, divorce, addiction, dementia, aging. “You love somebody. And when they’re lost, you still care about them. You can’t just turn it off.”

There is no such thing as closure. In fact, Pauline Boss says, the idea of closure leads us astray. It’s a myth we need to put aside, like the idea we’ve accepted that grief has five linear stages and we come out the other side done with it. She coined the term “ambiguous loss,” creating a new field in family therapy and psychology. She has wisdom for the complicated griefs and losses in all of our lives and for how we best approach the losses of others.

Pauline Boss is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of “Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss,” “Loving Someone Who Has Dementia,” and “Ambiguous Loss.” She has also pioneered a global online course with the University of Minnesota called “Ambiguous Loss: Its Meaning and Application.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

You could say of the present that we are suddenly in a world of “ambiguous loss.” Family therapist and clinical psychologist Pauline Boss coined this term, and invented a new field within psychology, to name the reality that every loss does not hold a promise of anything like resolution. There are “complicated griefs” that shift the world on its axis from one day to the next, with no going back to the world of before and no time to set things in order. This conversation is full of practical intelligence for shedding assumptions about how we should be feeling and acting that deepen stress precisely in a moment like this. It offers wisdom and concrete tools for becoming more meaningfully present to what is actually going on inside ourselves and for others.

Pauline Boss — The Myth of Closure

The family therapist who created the field of “ambiguous loss” — loss without closure. Complicated grief: parents, divorce, addiction, dementia, aging. “You love somebody. And when they’re lost, you still care about them. You can’t just turn it off.”

There is no such thing as closure. In fact, Pauline Boss says, the idea of closure leads us astray. It’s a myth we need to put aside, like the idea we’ve accepted that grief has five linear stages and we come out the other side done with it. She coined the term “ambiguous loss,” creating a new field in family therapy and psychology. She has wisdom for the complicated griefs and losses in all of our lives and for how we best approach the losses of others.

Pauline Boss is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of “Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss,” “Loving Someone Who Has Dementia,” and “Ambiguous Loss.” She has also pioneered a global online course with the University of Minnesota called “Ambiguous Loss: Its Meaning and Application.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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