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GXC 2025 Online Virtual Conference - Mental Health Without Borders

Grief Without Borders: Ambiguous Loss & the Power of Collective Community Healing

Pauline Boss, Ph.D. 🇺🇸
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Description

In a world increasingly shaped by displacement, disaster, and deep uncertainty, few voices have offered more clarity and compassion than Dr. Pauline Boss. Dr. Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” — a groundbreaking concept that has reshaped how professionals and communities understand unresolved grief. Her work and this training provides a language for the kinds of losses that defy closure — from a loved one lost to addiction or mental illness to those physically present but psychologically gone.


This training will also offer concrete tools for providers navigating ambiguity with their clients, and it will center the role of community in healing. She challenges the dominant cultural narrative that grief must be resolved individually, arguing instead that it is in the collective acknowledgment of loss — through rituals, support groups, storytelling, and shared presence — that true resilience is built.


In today’s global context and as collective trauma crosses borders–from forced migration to climate-related disasters to the COVID-19 pandemic–the need for community-based mental health responses has never been more urgent. Dr. Boss teaches us that healing is not about closure or answers, but about bearing witness to ambiguity, together.

Educational Goal

Participants will deepen their clinical understanding of ambiguous loss and develop greater competence in applying relational, culturally responsive, and community-based therapeutic strategies. This session fosters professional growth by equipping clinicians and caregivers with tools to support individuals and groups experiencing unresolved grief across diverse contexts, including trauma, displacement, and chronic illness.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • Explain the concept of ambiguous loss.

  • Apply relational, culturally-responsive, and community-based therapeutic strategies to address ambiguous loss and unresolved grief.

  • Discuss why meaning-making and relational resilience are at the heart of both individual and community recovery.

  • Identify practices (e.g., meaning-making, relational resilience, and collective rituals) that foster individual and community healing in response to ambiguous loss.

Target Audience

  • Addiction Professional
  • Counselor
  • Marriage & Family Therapist
  • Nurse
  • Physician
  • Psychologist
  • Social Worker

Presenters

Pauline Boss, Ph.D. 🇺🇸
Since 1973, Dr. Boss has studied ambiguous loss, taught university students, practiced as a clinician, and trained family therapists, psychologists, counselors, and humanitarians around the world to help individuals and families suffering from the trauma of ambiguous loss and its grief that has no end. Drawing on research and clinical experience, Dr. Boss worked across cultures to develop six useful and inclusive guidelines for building the resilience needed to both bear the ambiguity and move forward to live productive lives. Over the course of her research, Dr. Boss has worked with families in New York who lost family members during 9/11 and families in Kosovo who have lost family members as the result of ethnic cleansing and terrorism. She also has worked with families who have psychologically lost a relative as the result of Alzheimer's disease and other chronic mental illnesses. Dr. Boss draws on her research (and that of others) and her forty years of clinical experience to develop a powerful but flexible therapeutic approach for this heretofore unrecognized but ubiquitous type of loss. The fundamental tools of the theory and practice, described by Dr. Boss in the Ambiguous Loss Online Training and in her writings, are the six guidelines for therapists and practitioners as well as for concerned family members and friends who, despite ambiguous loss, need to find new hope and meaning in life. At this time, the ambiguous loss model, as updated, is being used to ease the pain and trauma for various kinds of ambiguous losses and across different cultures. Education and Work history: Dr. Boss received her Ph.D. in Child Development and Family Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975. From 1975 to 1981, Dr. Boss was an assistant and then associate professor with tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1981, she joined the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and continued there as full professor until 2005 when she became Emeritus Professor. In 1995-96, Dr. Boss was appointed Visiting Professor at the Harvard Medical School, and in 2004-2005, she was awarded Moses Distinguished Professor at Hunter School of Social Work in New York City.

Financially Sponsored By

  • GXC Events - The Global Exchange Conference