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The psychological and emotional stress from ambiguous loss is tremendous and difficult to move forward from.

There is typically no container for these kinds of losses.

Rituals can create such a container, mark the transition, and restore agency.

As I wrote in a prior post, some losses don’t have a neat, clean ending. Or any real ending at all. This kind of loss, called “ambiguous loss,” is deeply challenging for us psychologically because our ability to make meaning is blocked. Our attachment to that person remains activated, even as the relationship itself no longer exists in the way it was.

Part of why ambiguous losses are so challenging is because they have no ritual associated with them. Often there’s no real endpoint, and there’s little, if any, societal recognition. When you lose a loved one to addiction, ghosting, estrangement, dementia, divorce, or they go missing, the person is not dead (that we know of) but the relationship as it was is gone. Research is clear: the psychological and emotional stress from ambiguous loss can be tremendous and difficult to move forward from; and yet, it goes unacknowledged. There is tremendous loss and grief, but there’s no container for it. As a result, these losses can cause chronic stress, rumination, and identity disruption.

It can be tremendously helpful, then, for someone suffering from this kind of loss to create a ritual for themselves: a ritual can provide a way to process the complex, difficult........

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