This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
Ambiguous loss is a concept I’ve found helpful in living with my father’s Alzheimer’s disease. The book “Ambiguous Loss” by Pauline Boss is a good discussion of it in various contexts, primarily with a focus on experience of an ambiguous loss of a loved one.
This post really made me want to revisit the book, in part because since I read it, my brother has become estranged from my family. Some of the estrangement is certainly rooted in his response to my father's disease. And now my family (and particularly my mom) is simultaneously dealing with two ambiguous losses. It is rough.
Related to your work, I'm a big fan of Reddit and I assumed that I would be able to find a community around loved ones of people with Alzheimer's but the subreddits related to these topics really haven't resonated with me in the same way, for example, pregnancy or pregnancy-loss related subreddits have. I've found that a little strange given that Alzheimer's is so common. I wonder if that could be related to the fact that there is no redemption narrative which can be related to Alzheimers. It is a disease without any hope of an alternative outcome, as opposed to say cancer, in which there are survivors, or miscarriage, in which you can have your rainbow baby. In fact the only thing left is for people (at least those genetically related to the person with Alzheimer's) to wonder if it will happen to them. I'd be curious as to the role in these online communities that those who have "made it through" play and if it's particular to the online communities. My mom has found a lot of solace in being in an in person support group where most of the other caregiver's partners/parents have passed (my dad hasn't, it's a very slow progression). Maybe that community format is more appropriate for this particular disease.
Anyways, lots of rambling thoughts here -- thank you for provoking them!!
This article struck home for me. As a soon to be psychologist who works with trauma—including with 9/11 first responders—the concepts of rupture and repair and of reframing the narrative from us in relation to our bodies to us AS our bodies are at the heart of my personal and professional work. It’s so hard, y’all.
There is so, so much to say, so I’ll leave it at this for now: We are all trying our best and that is enough.
I have a question from reading — do you believe anticipatory grief can exist? I don’t mean anxiety. But rather - knowing that a change or loss will be coming. And feeling that sense, well before it arrives?
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of decarbonisation and the radical changes coming. Knowing we must change. Losing « the before times » - but in this case the before is before we tackled climate change fulsomely.
It seems like the answer should be yes? A sadness over What Cannot Be, in a sense. If anticipatory grief wasn’t a thing, then breakups (personal, romantic or plantoic) would be way less painful.
Your question reminded me of a recent meditation course I took from Lama Rod Owens, and I thought I'd share a passage he wrote:
"I want to offer a few of the different kinds of grief.
There's anticipatory grief which is the kind of grief we begin to experience when we're anticipating something being lost or changed or shifting. You are anticipating so there's a lot of anxiety with this kind of grief.
There’s also delayed grief when something has already been lost in the past and we didn't experience or connect to that sense of that sense of loss or that sense of space that's open up and now sometime later you're moving through it right and some of us experienced that I experienced that quite often in my life when I experienced something else younger and there wasn't who I was maybe in my adult years so I didn't experience degree from my pass under my childhood
There's complicated grief and it's something that feels like there are just multiple layers of grief that we can’t name exactly what it is.
Complicated grief is also really related to what I call ambiguous grief. Ambiguous grief is the grief that we struggled to really name. We struggle to say “OK what is this? I know that there's grief in my experience but where is it? What's going on?”
Another kind of grief is cumulative grief and I think this is something that many of us are really struggling with. It's just like one thing after the other. It's the loss of this, it's the loss of that and everything piles up and then there's a sense that we just kind of get trapped.
Another kind of grief is distracted grief I think it's really quite interesting to explore. Distracted grief is the kind of grief that we experience but we aren't naming it. It's happening but we're not showing up to it and as it's happening— as we talked about in Love and Rage in terms of our heartbrokenness— heartbrokenness will always inform what we're doing even if we're not paying attention to it even if you're not aware of it. We're distracting ourselves to something else but that loss, that sadness is still really deeply influencing us."
Just yesterday, I was able to see my husband in person for the first time in three months. He lives in a nursing home that was on lockdown because of the pandemic. Five & a half years ago, he had a motorcycle accident that left him with a severe traumatic brain injury (at age 54). The man that yelled 'woman of mine, where are you?' when he came home was gone, along with the twinkle in his eye & everything that made him the man I fell in love with. Until I learned about ambiguous loss, I had no way to describe the pain I felt. How did I explain to people that I was a widow to a person that was still alive? Learning about this term gave me an odd sense of relief.
I'm listening to "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk - sooooooo much to do with everything you're talking about here. Thanks for another insightful piece.
The term "ambiguous grief" is so helpful to me. One of the hard things has been trying to articulate that very feeling I've had since Covid started, and this really, really helped in giving me language for it.
At my college last year, I created a survey for faculty about how they were doing because every time I had a meeting with someone, invariably they would say something to indicate how much they were struggling. I was union president and my meetings with admin were this constant narrative of me saying "people aren't doing okay, we have to do something," and them kinda shrugging it off, or saying things like, "But they are working from home, so are safe," or comparing them to our students (who were also definitely traumatized). The survey results were so hard to read (22 pages single space of comments about how they felt) that it broke me in a way when no one in power did anything. I couldn't even articulate 100% what I wanted them to do but now I think a big part of it was just the acknowledgement that we were in a traumatizing situation, and that this was happening to all of us--even if a lot of us had job security and enough food and safe housing. The lack of acknowledgement was really a big part of the trauma for people--I feel like this interview helped me truly understand that and put value to that concept.
Interesting to hear it called "ambiguous grief" here! I did research around similar feelings about a pregnancy loss during the dark heart of the pandemic and came across the very helpful term "disenfranchised grief," a sense of real loss, but one that is less visible or socially acceptable.
One of the things about my Peloton that surprised me most was how much I cried - sobbed - every time I got on the bike for the first few months. I wonder reading this if I was dealing with some sort of ambiguous grief that the bike helped me metabolize. (I suspect my pre-COVID lifestyle was even more traumatic than I realize). I have personally found engagement with the Peloton XXL group to also be almost entirely positive.
One question I found myself asking while reading this is, "are there any communities that don't cost money to join?" Or, if not money, a huge amount of time? I'm probably doing community wrong.
Delayed reply but the first time I did a short workout video at home during covid, I cried during it. I had been taking some walks outside in those first few weeks of lockdown. But that video felt like the first ‘taking care of my body’ thing that wasn’t the absolute bare minimum to keep my sanity
Interesting interview on many levels, though the language about the Peloton experience is nearly identical (in substance, if not words) to that of the yoga craze of the late 1990s, early 2000s. The same focus on uplifting language, the formation of community with a unique vocabulary/clothing/diet, etc. The digital experience, of course, is the outlier.
I love thinking with this, such an interesting comparison! I think the big difference here is how curated the Peloton is - there was a definite language that circulated yoga and a culture of mindfulness really took off, this feels a bit more contained in that they really harness the brand power and control their messaging in very deliberate ways . With yoga, because it was so prolific, your experience could have been more varied and a lot more of traditional diet culture sort of snuck in under the guise of mindfulness. Your comment has for sure made me think a lot about these conversations and I so appreciate this comparison, it's making me draw lines and comparisons in really useful ways, I have been doing a lot of reading and, for example, I don't think other spin or workout apps are necessarily catalyzing the exact same thing in people, even though they do form community/ritual spaces in their own ways. At any rate, thanks so much for this comment! I also am super interested in the digital as a special site - loads of workout programs have used digital space to cement their cultural values but to also have that be the central mechanism for delivery of the workout is really interesting!
This was helpful for me after a miscarriage this summer - a totally unexpected pregnancy that I miscarried about 30 hours after finding out I was pregnant. It was such a confusing loss - ambiguous grief - and it made my world feel unsafe and unsteady. Add to that the pandemic fatigue and loss and it made for a very rough summer. It was so validating to read Samira's work here.
Samira, if you see this, I would love to hear more about all the parts of a culture that is *not* seen in the celebration events. Anne quotes you saying: "I’m hoping to dig into how users respond to this notion of having your culture seen and honored…but also employed as a marketing catalyst." And that is an interesting question. But what part of gay or lesbian culture is never on display in pride celebrations by companies, what part of LatinX culture is never talked about in marketing driven celebration. Take Peloton for instance. There is only so much their medium can bear, however, even in music that is their forte they have a fairly narrow definition of Latin music. There is no representation of alternative music or metal. What does it mean to be celebrated yet only superficially so?
The question "what it means to be a part of a community that you pay to be a part of?" struck me. Makes me think of other cult (and bougie!) workout classes like The Class by Taryn Toomey, what Gwyneth has built with Goop, and even college Greek life. It's interesting to think that a sense of belonging can be so easily and steeply commodified. I wonder what the implications are behind communities built for and only afforded by the affluent.
several parts of this interview struck me, and I imagine that I'll come back to it and take it in again in new ways.
it also clarifies a couple of things that I'm wondering. when I was reading the sections focused on ambiguous grief, I kept thinking about the ways that historians (and literary scholars) talk about WWI's "lost generation" (which was also at the same time as the influenza epidemic). This cultural moment is different from that one in key ways, but as i think about all of those lost to COVID, this general comparison keeps coming to mind. is this a useful comparison? are there things that can help us now by how folks coped then? I know others have talked about this in relation to the previous epidemic, but I don't know that people really separated these losses in the way that we often do for them, over a century later.
I was also struck in Samira's descriptions of the peloton space by just how much some of it sounded like what many religious spaces are/strive to be/are complicated by. I'm pretty sure others have talked about various gyms, diets, health initiatives, etc as religion replacements for an increasingly agnostic population, but are such comparisons useful?
Thank you so much for this engagement. I definitely think of this as much like what religious spaces do/are/try to be as well. I think there is a component of the sacred and the ritualization of things like Peloton that is interesting here. A lot of workouts strive for this kind of ritual commitment, Crossfit being a good example, Peloton just seems to have a tighter grasp on the representations they use to cultivate this space which is maybe why it feels so compelling. I think the comparisons are useful in that they help us understand the mechanisms that make these spaces so salient for us as users. I'd be so interested to think more on this, and I am thinking a lot about your comparisons to the lost generation as well.
Kinda interesting: years ago I hopped on a Peloton at a gym while I was traveling. It was my first use of the bike, and I can’t remember who the instructor was—but it was the holidays and despite being with family I was feeling sad and alone (not uncommon). Whatever the instructor said that day made me emotional—I got off the bike and tweeted “almost cried on a Peloton”—which I thought was funny at the time but now I’m seeing… it was built for that!
I found this interview fascinating, especially the Peloton portion. I've been thinking about my Peloton experience a lot this past week and how it has been positive both as support for ambiguous grief (much better term than the one I was using--"psychological malaise") and acute loss. One of our power zone team members died this weekend, and while a number of us over the past year have lost parents and siblings and pets, this hit pretty hard. She had breast cancer and had been up and down for almost a decade. And her husband is also on the team, so there is a shared grief--that while is 'virtual' in the sense that many of us have never met in the physical realm--is also very real and comforting and cathartic. The way the group rallied around the husband is one of two really amazing things that the Peloton platform enabled in my life this year. The other was the introduction, courtship, and marriage of two team members who lived on opposite sides of the country when the pandemic hit. Even though this seems surreal and unlikely, like Samira said, there is already a gatekeeper--the platform itself. It's fairly expensive and that barrier is one that is easier to overcome with education and employment and the corollaries that come with those. And then for our team itself, when we laud how support and love we give each other and how well we get along? I always think "Well, yeah. Of course. We are all well-educated, fairly well-to-do professionals, who are ex-athletes or fitness enthusiasts, who have access to Peloton AND understand the science of power zone AND have time to do it." Looking at it that way, how could we not have met? Anywho, just some thoughts I had as I read this. Glad I found your newsletter. It's proving to be thought provoking. Thanks!
Ambiguous loss is a concept I’ve found helpful in living with my father’s Alzheimer’s disease. The book “Ambiguous Loss” by Pauline Boss is a good discussion of it in various contexts, primarily with a focus on experience of an ambiguous loss of a loved one.
Yes, the article I used to describe ambiguous loss theory references Pauline Boss. She is a leader in this space!
This post really made me want to revisit the book, in part because since I read it, my brother has become estranged from my family. Some of the estrangement is certainly rooted in his response to my father's disease. And now my family (and particularly my mom) is simultaneously dealing with two ambiguous losses. It is rough.
Related to your work, I'm a big fan of Reddit and I assumed that I would be able to find a community around loved ones of people with Alzheimer's but the subreddits related to these topics really haven't resonated with me in the same way, for example, pregnancy or pregnancy-loss related subreddits have. I've found that a little strange given that Alzheimer's is so common. I wonder if that could be related to the fact that there is no redemption narrative which can be related to Alzheimers. It is a disease without any hope of an alternative outcome, as opposed to say cancer, in which there are survivors, or miscarriage, in which you can have your rainbow baby. In fact the only thing left is for people (at least those genetically related to the person with Alzheimer's) to wonder if it will happen to them. I'd be curious as to the role in these online communities that those who have "made it through" play and if it's particular to the online communities. My mom has found a lot of solace in being in an in person support group where most of the other caregiver's partners/parents have passed (my dad hasn't, it's a very slow progression). Maybe that community format is more appropriate for this particular disease.
Anyways, lots of rambling thoughts here -- thank you for provoking them!!
This article struck home for me. As a soon to be psychologist who works with trauma—including with 9/11 first responders—the concepts of rupture and repair and of reframing the narrative from us in relation to our bodies to us AS our bodies are at the heart of my personal and professional work. It’s so hard, y’all.
There is so, so much to say, so I’ll leave it at this for now: We are all trying our best and that is enough.
This is such a resonant piece for me.
I have a question from reading — do you believe anticipatory grief can exist? I don’t mean anxiety. But rather - knowing that a change or loss will be coming. And feeling that sense, well before it arrives?
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of decarbonisation and the radical changes coming. Knowing we must change. Losing « the before times » - but in this case the before is before we tackled climate change fulsomely.
It seems like the answer should be yes? A sadness over What Cannot Be, in a sense. If anticipatory grief wasn’t a thing, then breakups (personal, romantic or plantoic) would be way less painful.
*platonic
Oh absolutely
Your question reminded me of a recent meditation course I took from Lama Rod Owens, and I thought I'd share a passage he wrote:
"I want to offer a few of the different kinds of grief.
There's anticipatory grief which is the kind of grief we begin to experience when we're anticipating something being lost or changed or shifting. You are anticipating so there's a lot of anxiety with this kind of grief.
There’s also delayed grief when something has already been lost in the past and we didn't experience or connect to that sense of that sense of loss or that sense of space that's open up and now sometime later you're moving through it right and some of us experienced that I experienced that quite often in my life when I experienced something else younger and there wasn't who I was maybe in my adult years so I didn't experience degree from my pass under my childhood
There's complicated grief and it's something that feels like there are just multiple layers of grief that we can’t name exactly what it is.
Complicated grief is also really related to what I call ambiguous grief. Ambiguous grief is the grief that we struggled to really name. We struggle to say “OK what is this? I know that there's grief in my experience but where is it? What's going on?”
Another kind of grief is cumulative grief and I think this is something that many of us are really struggling with. It's just like one thing after the other. It's the loss of this, it's the loss of that and everything piles up and then there's a sense that we just kind of get trapped.
Another kind of grief is distracted grief I think it's really quite interesting to explore. Distracted grief is the kind of grief that we experience but we aren't naming it. It's happening but we're not showing up to it and as it's happening— as we talked about in Love and Rage in terms of our heartbrokenness— heartbrokenness will always inform what we're doing even if we're not paying attention to it even if you're not aware of it. We're distracting ourselves to something else but that loss, that sadness is still really deeply influencing us."
Just yesterday, I was able to see my husband in person for the first time in three months. He lives in a nursing home that was on lockdown because of the pandemic. Five & a half years ago, he had a motorcycle accident that left him with a severe traumatic brain injury (at age 54). The man that yelled 'woman of mine, where are you?' when he came home was gone, along with the twinkle in his eye & everything that made him the man I fell in love with. Until I learned about ambiguous loss, I had no way to describe the pain I felt. How did I explain to people that I was a widow to a person that was still alive? Learning about this term gave me an odd sense of relief.
This was very interesting! I feel like Samira could find a lot of similar things researching the knitting and crafting communities.
omg, do say more and also do feel free to email me :)
I'm listening to "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk - sooooooo much to do with everything you're talking about here. Thanks for another insightful piece.
The term "ambiguous grief" is so helpful to me. One of the hard things has been trying to articulate that very feeling I've had since Covid started, and this really, really helped in giving me language for it.
At my college last year, I created a survey for faculty about how they were doing because every time I had a meeting with someone, invariably they would say something to indicate how much they were struggling. I was union president and my meetings with admin were this constant narrative of me saying "people aren't doing okay, we have to do something," and them kinda shrugging it off, or saying things like, "But they are working from home, so are safe," or comparing them to our students (who were also definitely traumatized). The survey results were so hard to read (22 pages single space of comments about how they felt) that it broke me in a way when no one in power did anything. I couldn't even articulate 100% what I wanted them to do but now I think a big part of it was just the acknowledgement that we were in a traumatizing situation, and that this was happening to all of us--even if a lot of us had job security and enough food and safe housing. The lack of acknowledgement was really a big part of the trauma for people--I feel like this interview helped me truly understand that and put value to that concept.
Interesting to hear it called "ambiguous grief" here! I did research around similar feelings about a pregnancy loss during the dark heart of the pandemic and came across the very helpful term "disenfranchised grief," a sense of real loss, but one that is less visible or socially acceptable.
One of the things about my Peloton that surprised me most was how much I cried - sobbed - every time I got on the bike for the first few months. I wonder reading this if I was dealing with some sort of ambiguous grief that the bike helped me metabolize. (I suspect my pre-COVID lifestyle was even more traumatic than I realize). I have personally found engagement with the Peloton XXL group to also be almost entirely positive.
One question I found myself asking while reading this is, "are there any communities that don't cost money to join?" Or, if not money, a huge amount of time? I'm probably doing community wrong.
Delayed reply but the first time I did a short workout video at home during covid, I cried during it. I had been taking some walks outside in those first few weeks of lockdown. But that video felt like the first ‘taking care of my body’ thing that wasn’t the absolute bare minimum to keep my sanity
Interesting interview on many levels, though the language about the Peloton experience is nearly identical (in substance, if not words) to that of the yoga craze of the late 1990s, early 2000s. The same focus on uplifting language, the formation of community with a unique vocabulary/clothing/diet, etc. The digital experience, of course, is the outlier.
I love thinking with this, such an interesting comparison! I think the big difference here is how curated the Peloton is - there was a definite language that circulated yoga and a culture of mindfulness really took off, this feels a bit more contained in that they really harness the brand power and control their messaging in very deliberate ways . With yoga, because it was so prolific, your experience could have been more varied and a lot more of traditional diet culture sort of snuck in under the guise of mindfulness. Your comment has for sure made me think a lot about these conversations and I so appreciate this comparison, it's making me draw lines and comparisons in really useful ways, I have been doing a lot of reading and, for example, I don't think other spin or workout apps are necessarily catalyzing the exact same thing in people, even though they do form community/ritual spaces in their own ways. At any rate, thanks so much for this comment! I also am super interested in the digital as a special site - loads of workout programs have used digital space to cement their cultural values but to also have that be the central mechanism for delivery of the workout is really interesting!
This was helpful for me after a miscarriage this summer - a totally unexpected pregnancy that I miscarried about 30 hours after finding out I was pregnant. It was such a confusing loss - ambiguous grief - and it made my world feel unsafe and unsteady. Add to that the pandemic fatigue and loss and it made for a very rough summer. It was so validating to read Samira's work here.
Samira, if you see this, I would love to hear more about all the parts of a culture that is *not* seen in the celebration events. Anne quotes you saying: "I’m hoping to dig into how users respond to this notion of having your culture seen and honored…but also employed as a marketing catalyst." And that is an interesting question. But what part of gay or lesbian culture is never on display in pride celebrations by companies, what part of LatinX culture is never talked about in marketing driven celebration. Take Peloton for instance. There is only so much their medium can bear, however, even in music that is their forte they have a fairly narrow definition of Latin music. There is no representation of alternative music or metal. What does it mean to be celebrated yet only superficially so?
yes! This is so important - What gets highlighted and also what is at stake, if you're a user I'd love to interview you and pick your brain about it!
I do use peloton however I'm not part of any minority except perhaps people who want more metal for their rides :-)
I'm looking forward to hearing what you learn.
The question "what it means to be a part of a community that you pay to be a part of?" struck me. Makes me think of other cult (and bougie!) workout classes like The Class by Taryn Toomey, what Gwyneth has built with Goop, and even college Greek life. It's interesting to think that a sense of belonging can be so easily and steeply commodified. I wonder what the implications are behind communities built for and only afforded by the affluent.
several parts of this interview struck me, and I imagine that I'll come back to it and take it in again in new ways.
it also clarifies a couple of things that I'm wondering. when I was reading the sections focused on ambiguous grief, I kept thinking about the ways that historians (and literary scholars) talk about WWI's "lost generation" (which was also at the same time as the influenza epidemic). This cultural moment is different from that one in key ways, but as i think about all of those lost to COVID, this general comparison keeps coming to mind. is this a useful comparison? are there things that can help us now by how folks coped then? I know others have talked about this in relation to the previous epidemic, but I don't know that people really separated these losses in the way that we often do for them, over a century later.
I was also struck in Samira's descriptions of the peloton space by just how much some of it sounded like what many religious spaces are/strive to be/are complicated by. I'm pretty sure others have talked about various gyms, diets, health initiatives, etc as religion replacements for an increasingly agnostic population, but are such comparisons useful?
Thank you so much for this engagement. I definitely think of this as much like what religious spaces do/are/try to be as well. I think there is a component of the sacred and the ritualization of things like Peloton that is interesting here. A lot of workouts strive for this kind of ritual commitment, Crossfit being a good example, Peloton just seems to have a tighter grasp on the representations they use to cultivate this space which is maybe why it feels so compelling. I think the comparisons are useful in that they help us understand the mechanisms that make these spaces so salient for us as users. I'd be so interested to think more on this, and I am thinking a lot about your comparisons to the lost generation as well.
Kinda interesting: years ago I hopped on a Peloton at a gym while I was traveling. It was my first use of the bike, and I can’t remember who the instructor was—but it was the holidays and despite being with family I was feeling sad and alone (not uncommon). Whatever the instructor said that day made me emotional—I got off the bike and tweeted “almost cried on a Peloton”—which I thought was funny at the time but now I’m seeing… it was built for that!
I found this interview fascinating, especially the Peloton portion. I've been thinking about my Peloton experience a lot this past week and how it has been positive both as support for ambiguous grief (much better term than the one I was using--"psychological malaise") and acute loss. One of our power zone team members died this weekend, and while a number of us over the past year have lost parents and siblings and pets, this hit pretty hard. She had breast cancer and had been up and down for almost a decade. And her husband is also on the team, so there is a shared grief--that while is 'virtual' in the sense that many of us have never met in the physical realm--is also very real and comforting and cathartic. The way the group rallied around the husband is one of two really amazing things that the Peloton platform enabled in my life this year. The other was the introduction, courtship, and marriage of two team members who lived on opposite sides of the country when the pandemic hit. Even though this seems surreal and unlikely, like Samira said, there is already a gatekeeper--the platform itself. It's fairly expensive and that barrier is one that is easier to overcome with education and employment and the corollaries that come with those. And then for our team itself, when we laud how support and love we give each other and how well we get along? I always think "Well, yeah. Of course. We are all well-educated, fairly well-to-do professionals, who are ex-athletes or fitness enthusiasts, who have access to Peloton AND understand the science of power zone AND have time to do it." Looking at it that way, how could we not have met? Anywho, just some thoughts I had as I read this. Glad I found your newsletter. It's proving to be thought provoking. Thanks!