The Myth of Closure

Review

I read this book in graduate school in a course on Clinical Practice with Survivors of Political Trauma and Torture. It was probably the most interesting course I took, and if there were an alternate world where I practiced clinical social work, I’d love to work with this population.

A few months ago a friend and I were talking about loss and I recommended Boss’s research. I re-read several of Boss’s papers around that time and ordered a physical copy of the book on Thriftbooks. It’s been sitting on my living room table since then, and I picked it up this morning to skim through.

I remember thinking the first time I read it, probably around the time of its publication in 2022, that I felt it was too COVID-centric. The reality is this is closer to a self-help book (though, not one I would disparage) introducing the topic of ambiguous loss at a time when almost everyone on the planet was experiencing some form of it. So, you know, I can get over that.

It does mean that reading in 2025, large parts of the book are skimmable or skippable, at least for me on a re-read.

I continue to love Chapters 6 and 7, which are the actual tools and what I would describe as most similar to Boss’s published research. Chapter 6 covers “both/and” thinking, chapter 7 gives Boss’s guidelines for living with ambiguous loss. They are:

• Find Meaning
• Adjust Mastery
• Reconstruct Identity
• Discover New Hope
• Revise Attachment
• Normalize Ambivalence

I had a couple of thoughts reading through these sections that I didn’t years ago. First, my understanding of “meaning” here has grown a bit. I think the attempt to discover meaning in someone else’s behavior without directly engaging with them (and perhaps, even then) is usually folly. But as I read it this time, I kept inserting the word “purpose.” I’m not sure if Boss would support this or not, but it makes more sense to me.

Second, I realized reading “Notes on Suicide” that something happened over the last few years and I started confusing the word “ambivalence” for “apathy.” Ambivalence is “the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.” This is a good little subsection to read if you are someone that finds understanding important to moving past something. Page 80-81:

For example, if we have a high tolerance for ambiguity, we may not be immobilized by conflicting thoughts. But if we binary thinkers and like precise answers, we may exhibit so much distress from ambivalent feelings that we rush to absolute solutions, like denying that anything is wrong or needing closer on the matter.

I like this. Boss does not discuss it here (and maybe not in her papers, I don’t remember), but I believe quite firmly that our skills in this area are not necessarily the same setting-to-setting. What I mean is, a person may have high tolerance for ambiguity in the workplace, but less in personal relationships. I think we show up differently in different settings, and understanding that can be useful. I do not necessarily think that just because someone is able to do something in one setting means they can (at least, easily) d)o a roughly analogous thing in a different circumstance. Different things are different, even if the look similar.

Anyway, I was pleased that when I looked at some of my kindle highlights (which seem incomplete), I’ve tagged the same passages on this skim-through. I might see if I still have a kindle copy (I believe it was a rental) and put my physical highlights there.

That said, if you have any ability to read research papers, I would highly, highly recommend Boss’s published research. It is not dense and difficult, in fact it’s some of the best research writing I’ve read. These are where I would focus:

Boss, P. (2006). Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work With Ambiguous Loss (Vol. 58). http://psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ps.2007.58.3.419

Boss, P. (2016). The Context and Process of Theory Development: The Story of Ambiguous Loss: Theory Development: The Story of Ambiguous Loss. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 8(3), 269–286. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12152