ABSTRACT
In the process of living our lives, we do encounter losses on a regular basis, but we often do not recognize their signicance because we tend to think of loss in
nite terms, mainly associated with death and dying, and not in terms of adaptation to life-altering change. In the exercise described in the previous paragraph, our students create a “loss line,” where they draw a line on a piece of paper, with their birth at the left side of the paper and the present time on the right side. All along this line on the paper, we suggest they place tick marks at specic ages to indicate when they experienced signicant loss events in their lives. Once students are able to grasp the broader sense of loss as something that caused their lives to change in a signicant way or that required them to make a signicant adaptation in some way, the line is lled quickly with tick marks. Frequent examples include those already given, and often there are losses involving hopes and dreams, such as when they had planned that their lives would go in one direction and they realized that what they had hoped for was not going to be as they had anticipated. Some students realize at this time that, while the losses they have experienced are very real, they may also be intangible and difcult to describe concretely. Further examples of these losses may be lost beliefs that they once held about how the world should work or their ability to trust others. Or they may have somehow lost themselves. In our clinical practice, we hear many stories of individuals who have either been diagnosed with or must take care of family members who have degenerative physical or mental conditions, of intimate relationships that end with an aftermath that continues long after the relationship does, and of individuals who are attempting to rebuild their lives after losing their employment. Many of these descriptions can be identied as nonfinite losses or ambiguous losses, which we will explore in greater detail in this chapter.
