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GXC 2025 Online Virtual Conference - Mental Health Without Borders

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

Pauline Boss, Ph.D.
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Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • How Pauline Boss’s work has evolved to meet the complexities of our time;

  • What it means to support healing in contexts where answers may never come;

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

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.

Description

In a world increasingly shaped by displacement, disaster, and deep uncertainty, few voices have offered more clarity and compassion than Dr. Pauline Boss. A Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and internationally renowned family therapist, Dr. Boss is best known for coining the term “ambiguous loss” — a groundbreaking concept that has reshaped how professionals and communities understand unresolved grief. Across a distinguished career spanning over 40 years, she has worked with a wide range of populations: families of the missing, refugees, immigrant families navigating cultural separation, communities impacted by war and natural disaster, military families, and caregivers of loved ones with dementia or chronic illness. Her work is grounded not only in theory, but in real-world interventions with groups who live every day in the shadow of uncertainty. Her seminal book, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (2000), offered 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. It was followed by Loss, Trauma, and Resilience (2006), which expanded the model into clinical practice and offered therapists concrete tools for navigating ambiguity with their clients Yet it is in her most recent work, The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change (2021), that Dr. Boss fully centers 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. Her model is especially vital in today’s global context. 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.

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.