Secondary losses important to acknowledge

This weekly column seeks to help educate our community about emotional healing through grief. People may write questions to Golden Willow Retreat and they will be answered privately to you and possibly as a future article for others. List a first name that grants permission for printing.

Dear Dr. Ted:

I am a senior at Taos High School. I saw your picture in the paper and decided to check out what you do and saw that you had this article to answer questions and respond to comments focused on emotional healing. I decided to send you a note to see what you had to say about all the silent losses that I feel daily as I feel so many losses each day due to the pandemic. What do you have to say on this topic?

Thanks, Ramon Dear Ramon,

Thank you for writing in and bringing up such an important topic of secondary losses, or as you state, “silent losses,” that are so often ignored and disenfranchised.

The level of losses for all people is enormous and for your age group, secondary losses are phenomenal, with very little acknowledgement to how large each loss is in your life. The pandemic, being the catalyst, is the identified loss in which this topic is the focus.

From that loss there are many secondary losses that need to be acknowledged and grieved as well. Changes in school, dating, playing or cheering for sports, socializing, hanging out, entertainment, socials, spending time at home, not having vacations, less opportunities for employment – and the list goes on for each person.

Your teen years are a time to expand your wings and start thinking about when you leave the nest. My guess is that there is a feeling of the nest being a lockdown rather than an expansion of freedoms and a celebratory time of moving from childhood to adulthood.

Acknowledging secondary losses and working with ways to heal and grow from these losses will help how you establish future behaviors during a loss. Ignoring these losses would be like leaving a couple of bricks in your backpack each time you go out and then wondering why your backpack weighs so much. Taking those metaphorical bricks out and acknowledging that they are causing you discomfort will allow you the opportunity to see what you can and can’t do about those bricks.

With COVID-19, you cannot magically make it go away, but you can wear a mask, take distancing actions, find new ways to socialize and take actions to decrease the weight of each of these losses and changes. Acknowledging these secondary losses allows you the opportunity to cognitively start to categorize your different losses, prioritize your focus, identify where you can have action and where you cannot, and find ways to transform losses into new ways of being.

When we have loss, grief does not fix that loss, but allows you to find alternatives of how you do your life and rebuilds autonomy in which, at first, it may feel you have no choices at all. As life seeps back in from a loss, you can start to also seep back into the new world with conscious choices.

I want to acknowledge the difficulty of this strange time in our world and commend your generation for your efforts of finding healthy ways to continue to celebrate your youth, while acknowledging the losses in the world right now.

Thank you for the question. I wish you well. Until next week, take care.