How Do You Find Peace in Unresolved Grief?
Have you ever missed someone who’s still alive?
Maybe a friend who slowly faded out of your life.
A family member who hasn’t reached out.
A parent whose parenting journey has been disrupted by illness or disability.
A loved one whose illness is gradually changing who they are.
Or even the version of yourself that existed before everything changed.
An ache that doesn’t fit neatly into the word grief but feels like grief. That ache has a name. It’s called ambiguous loss and it describes the kind of heartbreak that lingers when there’s no clear ending, no closure and no ritual for moving on.
What Is Ambiguous Loss?
Psychologist Dr. Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss in the late 1970s to describe a unique kind of grief — one that’s open-ended and hard to resolve.
Unlike the loss that comes with death, ambiguous loss has no certainty. It keeps you suspended between hope and mourning.
Boss described two main forms:
Physical absence, psychological presence: Someone is gone (missing, estranged or distant) but emotionally still there.
Ex: A parent who disappeared, a long-distance partner or a loved one who cut off contact.
Physical presence, psychological absence: Someone is here but not really present.
Ex: A loved one with dementia, addiction, depression or emotional withdrawal.
Both forms leave us grasping for clarity that doesn’t come. You can’t “move on,” because you’re still waiting. Waiting for answers, for change, for the person you remember to return.
How Attachment Shapes Our Experience
This kind of loss stings so much because it strikes at our attachment system, the innate drive for connection and security.
Our early attachment patterns influence how we cope when someone feels both close and gone.
Anxiously attached individuals often feel desperate for reassurance. They replay memories, overanalyze messages and struggle to let go.
Avoidantly attached individuals may shut down emotionally or detach completely, not because they don’t care, but because the uncertainty feels unbearable.
Securely attached individuals can better tolerate ambiguity, yet even they experience the disorienting pull of missing what’s not fully lost.
We’ll touch on these responses in a future post. But for today’s purposes, it’s important to know when we can’t get clear cues of connection or disconnection, our nervous system stays stuck in fight, flight, freeze or fawn. This is the brain’s way of saying, “Something’s wrong, but I don’t know how to fix it.”
Why Doesn’t It Fit the Stages of Grief?
Maybe you’ve heard of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance? They’re useful for understanding universal experiences of death and bereavement by helping us make sense of our emotions when someone dies.
But ambiguous loss doesn’t follow these stages. Death hasn’t occurred. Maybe it’s distant or anticipated, but your loved one is still here. There’s no clear ending.
It’s not about finding closure but about accepting both truths simultaneously.
They’re gone, and yet still here.
I love them, and I’m angry at them.
I’m grieving, but also living.
Dr. Boss calls this “both/and” thinking. It’s the key to surviving ambiguous loss. It frees us from the pressure to “get over it” and teaches us how to live with uncertainty, questions and contradictions.
There’s no neat ending. Just moments of calm we learn to hold onto.
Coping and Healing
Healing means learning to live with uncertainty while still caring for yourself and your people. Here are a few evidence-based approaches that can help:
1. Name the Loss
Validation is powerful. Naming your experience can lessen the confusion and shame. It turns the invisible visible.
2. Find Symbolic Closure
Rituals help the brain process emotion. Write a letter you’ll never send. Light a candle. Create a playlist for what you’re grieving. These symbolic acts give shape to something shapeless.
3. Lean Into “Both/And” Thinking
Practice acknowledging opposing truths without forcing a resolution.
“I can care about them and still need distance.”
“I can miss what was and still build what’s next.”
4. Strengthen Secure Connections
Find people who can hold space for your uncertainty. Safe, consistent relationships help your nervous system calm and rewire toward security.
5. Seek Support
Attachment-based or grief-informed therapy (like Narrative Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, or CBT ) can help you process what’s unfinished without demanding closure.
Living with the Unanswered
Some stories don’t resolve, they evolve.
We learn to live in the “in-between.” To love people who are no longer who they were, to grieve possibilities that never became reality and to build peace from uncertainty.
As Dr. Pauline Boss writes,
“Resilience is not about closing chapters. It’s about learning to live with the unanswered.”
If you’re somewhere in that gray space.
Missing.
Waiting.
Wondering.
You’re not broken. You’re human, navigating one of the most complex forms of love and loss there is.
Keep holding on! Peace will come.
Ronelle
This section is for the academically-curious:
Chronic ambiguity can put your body on constant alert. Research shows it keeps cortisol levels high and makes emotional regulation harder, which over time can lead to anxiety, depression, and burnout (Boss, 2006; Harris, 2021).
Health organizations highlight the physiological consequences.
The American Heart Association notes that loss can lock your brain into a persistent stress response, showing up as heightened anxiety, poor sleep and immune disruptions.
The American Psychological Association adds that prolonged stress increases the risk of hypertension, heart attack and other health issues, since cortisol affects nearly every system in your body.
The Mayo Clinic highlights the sleep and immunity problems.
Harvard Health points to links with high blood pressure, depression and even addictive behaviors.
Chronic stress is hard on both your mind and body.
Neuroscience gives us another piece of the puzzle. When stress or loss isn’t resolved, the brain’s reward system (the circuits that make us feel pleasure and satisfaction) can get stuck in what researchers call an “unfinished loop.” This is why we can’t stop replaying memories or ruminating over what happened.
A 2024 review found that trauma can reduce dopamine activity by up to 45% in some people, showing just how much our brains get thrown off when closure isn’t possible.
It can also quietly chip away at relationships and self-esteem. You might catch yourself asking, “Why wasn’t I enough?” or running through “what-ifs,” even when logic tells you to stop.
Citations:
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.
Boss, P. (2006). Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. W.W. Norton.
Harris, D. L. (2021). “Grieving an Unclear Loss: The Psychological Impact of Ambiguity.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
