Much of what follows is taken from Mike’s latest book, Grace in the Ashes: The Soul’s Journey Through Grief, written to bring clarity, hope, and a way forward for anyone experiencing meaningful loss of any kind.
If you find this post helpful, I am certain the comforting insights and wise guidance Mike shares in Grace in the Ashes would benefit you tremendously.
We tend to reserve the word grief for funerals, for death is indeed a profound loss.
But grief is not the emotion of death.
Grief is the emotion of loss.
And in addition to death, loss can take on many forms:
- an estranged child
- a hoped-for future that never arrived
- a marriage that quietly unraveled
- a parent’s love that was never felt
- years of infertility
- a diagnosis that drains both body and soul
- the end of a lifelong career
- childhood innocence lost to abuse
- an aging parent lost to dementia
The list goes on and on.
Psychology refers to the grief resulting from these and similar losses as disenfranchised grief, a term first used by grief expert Kenneth Doka (1989) to describe the pain people feel when their loss is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly supported.[i]
What can make these losses particularly hard is that there is no memorial service for the life you dreamed about but never realized. Nobody sends a sympathy card when you lose your sense of self or when aging robs you of your strength and vitality.
Dr. Pauline Boss is credited for a similar term, ambiguous loss,[ii] for those losses that lack definition, remain unresolved, and often pass unrecognized. Losses for which there is no ceremony or ritual or communal support to help identify and process through what has changed.
Yet the grief we experience after such losses as these is very real. And unresolved grief does not just disappear or fade over time. Instead, it settles into the psyche where it often later manifests as chronic stress, fatigue, irritability, numbness, sadness, or depression.
My Story
I (Susan) know this to be so from my own experience.
My only sibling is a brother three years younger who was not only premature but who almost died at birth from a nuchal cord that pulled tighter around his neck during the birthing process. He weighed less than five pounds when my parents brought him home. And then when he was just six months old he had to undergo surgery for an umbilical hernia.
For these reasons, as well as residual effects from the nuchal cord issue that became apparent later in life, Mom was always partial to him (something I could understand). What I could not understand was the degree to which she acted as though she had love for only one child, my brother.
Mom took care of my physical needs. But I have no memories of her ever hugging or cuddling me, telling me she loved me, kissing me goodnight. Maybe she did and I was just too young to remember. But after my brother came along, whatever she had to give was reserved for him, a fact she reinforced often. Even up until the day she died.
As a result, when Mom passed (seven years ago this month) I felt very little grief over her death. Rather, the loss I associate with my mom was the absence of a mother’s love and the lack of any close relationship later in life, losses that were more painful for me while she was alive.
After she passed, I honored the grief of that loss whenever it surfaced using simple intentional activities that allowed me to forgive her and let it go.
But then about a year ago I began experiencing an intense sadness that I could not shake. In fact, I described it to Mike as a “profound sadness,” totally uncharacteristic for my personality. So, of course, the moment I shared it with him, he stopped what he was doing to help me work through it (an invaluable benefit to being married to a fellow counselor!).
What he helped me discover rather quickly was the fact that residual, unresolved grief… what we refer to as “trapped grief”… was manifesting as a profound sense of sadness for never knowing what it felt like as a child to be loved by my mother, and for her many behaviors both early and later in life that made that clear.
Trapped grief is detrimental to both body and soul because it keeps us in “loss mode,” forcing our body to carry what we have not allowed our heart to feel.
Thankfully, with Mike’s guidance I was able to release that grief, naming the loss and allowing space for it without judgment.
What I realized in the process was that I still harbored a lot of raw hurt, anger, and a deep resentment for the unfair and inequitable way she parented me. Once I opened that door, it all came out with a vengeance.
And as a result the sadness left and my joy and peace returned.
Permission to Grieve
We unintentionally trap our grief by telling ourselves, “it could be worse.” Or “other people have suffered a lot more than I have.” Or “at least no one died.”
And at any given point, all these statements are true. But that doesn’t mean your “lesser pain” does not qualify as real. If your loss is significant enough for you to hurt, it is significant enough to be heard.
And you do not need anyone else’s permission to grieve. You can give that permission to yourself. In fact, you must.
Because to deny yourself the right to grieve is to deny yourself the right to heal.
If you sense an inner sadness, anger, hurt, resentment, etc., that could be related to an ambiguous, “invisible” loss, it may help to know that Mike offers a simple framework for how to process through these losses in the book.
What if it Still Hurts
Every real loss, no matter how “invisible,” leaves a real wound. And wherever your heart has been broken, the God who sees (Genesis 16) is waiting for you to bring that hurt to Him.
But maybe you’ve done that, even multiple times. And it still hurts.
Sometimes the way He chooses to move us along is with the help and through the guidance of another.
Mike wrote Grace in the Ashes: The Soul’s Journey Through Grief to provide a fuller, very user-friendly paradigm for walking through losses that have altered your life… both those losses others are aware of and those they are not.
This 110-page book was written specifically to bring clarity, comfort, guidance, and hope to those struggling with the burden of grief.
And since the upcoming holidays are some of the hardest seasons to navigate around a significant loss, our companion Grace in the Ashes Group Coaching Experience will be open to a limited number of participants starting next week.
Grace in the Ashes is a six-week grief-support study led personally by Susan. Each hour-long session will include thoughtful teaching, guided reflection, and an opportunity to process the book’s themes in a respectful, confidential small-group virtual setting. This is a faith-informed educational and peer-support experience… not therapy, counseling, or crisis care.
If you would like more information, send me a DM and I’ll get you a link with the details. And feel free to let me know if you have any specific questions.
[i] https://thelossfoundation.org/stages-of-grief/disenfranchised-grief-kenneth-doka-overview/.
[ii] Pauline Boss, PhD, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief.
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