The Moos Room™

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Emily: Welcome, everybody to The Moos Room. OG3 back here this week. Of course, we have another guest for our May Mental Health Awareness Month series. Super, super excited about the guest we have today. She is a colleague of ours, an extension, and somebody that I have gotten to work with really, really closely these past couple of years on this really - I think it's cool and exciting - project and that's what we're going to be talking more about today. First, I just want to say welcome to Jenifer McGuire.
Jenifer McGuire: Thank you. It's good to be here.
Emily: Yes, we're really excited to have you. I'll just say briefly. Jenifer is a professor in the Department of Family Social Science at the University and she is an extension specialist with our Center for Family Development. We're kind of crossing over the lines a little bit as it were, and we're going to talk a little bit about topics that mix together both agriculture and family social science. You might be thinking, "Is there such a thing?" I'm here to tell you, "Yes, there is."
Before we get into that, I did give Jenifer a little warning beforehand that we have our super secret questions we ask all of our guests. I'm going to say answer to the best of your ability. Jenifer will claim she doesn't know anything about agriculture, which is a lie. She does know some things, enough to be dangerous, I would say. Has had exposure to other agriculture, spent some time in Washington state, so she talks a lot about lentils [laughs]. This is not a question about lentils. What I want to know, Jenifer, what is your favorite breed of dairy cattle? If you don't know the name of a breed, you can describe it and we'll help you.
Jenifer: I know one cattle breed name.
Emily: Okay, what is it?
Jenifer: A Holstein.
Emily: Holstein, right?
Jenifer: Yes.
Emily: That's the black and white dairy cow. Are you going to say that's your favorite?
Jenifer: It's my only known so yes, it's my favorite.
Emily: Yay.
[laughter]
Joe: Well, that is terrible news.
Emily: Terrible news for Joe because he's on team Jersey.
Joe: Yes. I was wondering--
Jenifer: Oh, Jersey?
Joe: Yes, Jerseys. Would you like to change your answer to--
[laughter]
Joe: Running down the totals, that puts Holsteins pretty far out there at 17, Jerseys at 11, Brown Swiss at 5, Montb�liarde at 3, Dutch Belted at 2, Normande at 2, Milking Shorthorn at 1, and one Guernsey named Taffy.
Jenifer: Old Taffy.
Emily: Now, Jenifer, the next question is what is your favorite breed of beef cattle? If you don't know the names again, you can describe them.
Jenifer: I feel like you should play the Jeopardy! music.
Emily: Names or what a beef cattle like--
Bradley: Red and white is a popular color.
Emily: Oh, quiet, Bradley.
Jenifer: I don't know any beef cattle breeds unless Holstein is also a beef cattle.
Bradley: They go into the beef market. They certainly do.
Emily: They do. Every dairy cow has a second career.
Joe: We'll skip that one. We're not going to mess with the total. I'm not adding--
Emily: You're not adding Holstein?
Bradley: Some beef people might get mad at us if we add Holstein to the beef list.
Jenifer: They might.
Emily: Yes.
Joe: Agreed.
Jenifer: Will you run over the beef list for me so I can be--
Joe: Sure. Totals, Black Angus at 11, Hereford at 8, Black Baldy at 4, Belted Galloway at 2, Scottish Highlander at 2, Red Angus at 2. Then all with 1, Stabilizer Gelbvieh, Brahman, Chianina, Charolais, Simmental, Nelore, Jersey, Normande, and Shorthorn.
Jenifer: Excellent.
Emily: Jenifer, we'll have to get you a book of cattle breeds so you can study.
Jenifer: I do really like Scottish Highland cows, but I did not know they were beef cows.
Bradley: We will accept that answer.
Joe: I would accept that if you like Scottish Highlanders. I'll accept that as the answer.
Jenifer: That's my favorite.
Joe: There it is. All right. That puts them at 3, just behind Black Baldies, and ahead of Belted Galloways.
Emily: Now that we've gone through all the fun and games, we can get down to business here. Again, I said at the beginning, we're talking on topics, well, all this month, when we talk about mental health, this is not just an agriculture issue. We know that. It's an everybody issue. At the University of Minnesota, we're really lucky in that we have a really awesome family social science department, and that we, in extension, are able to do a lot of work with those family development folks in order to best serve farmers because we know that all farmers are a part of a family as well. We really like to look at some of these topics from a family system also.
Jenifer and I got started a couple of years ago, working on ambiguous loss in agriculture. I think to start, I'll have Jenifer give her best attempt at a 30-second description of ambiguous loss. It's tricky, right? It has 'ambiguous' in the name. We're not expecting you to listen to this podcast and be an ambiguous loss expert. I've been doing this for two and a half years and I'm still learning. Jenifer, briefly, what is ambiguous loss?
Jenifer: Ambiguous loss is a theoretical perspective that was developed by one of the faculty who was now in emeritus faculty in family social science, so it's been around for a while. The gist of the perspective is that you think about loss as both physical and psychological. Someone might be physically missing like missing in action at war, but they're still psychologically a member of your family. You're still thinking about them all the time. Someone might be physically with you, but they have Alzheimer's or they're using substances or they're always preoccupied thinking about the farm, so they're psychologically away and that ruptures the relationship.
When you can consider loss in that way, it opens the door for thinking about resilience and ways to deal with those losses in a different way than traditional models of grieving a loss.
Emily: Yes. I think that that's so important. When Jenifer and I do trainings on this, we talk about grief and a lot of people think about there's the five stages of grief. It's viewed as this cycle, this process you go through and you're done. With ambiguous loss, in my mind, a unique marker of that is that you're not always going to have that really clean-cut clear, "This is what the loss is," so I know exactly what I'm grieving.
A really good example, I think, that has helped me explain it to a lot of people is - because we all experienced ambiguous loss whether we know it or not - COVID-19. When that first really hit in early 2020, we were seeing a lot of ambiguous loss in that our school-aged children, they lost a lot of experiences, a lot of different social things, some of these rites of passage we see like prom or a graduation ceremony. Those types of things are ambiguous losses.
Quite simply, ambiguous loss is a loss without clarity. We don't really know exactly every detail or we can list out perfectly, "This is what we've lost." Again, like Jenifer said, there's a disagreement. In a true loss, it's physical and psychological, like Jenifer said. In this case, this is one and not the other. That's what we're looking at, and that's where it gets tricky. Jenifer, could you talk a little bit about loss and grief and more how we see grief in ambiguous loss? I think this is really important where a lot of us are grieving without realizing it because it's due to something that's less clear.
Jenifer: A clear loss is something that's acknowledged. You have things like a death certificate and a funeral or even a change of location or something that marks the loss that you're leaving or changing. Then it can be acknowledged by outsiders. We have some standards in place and some mechanisms in our culture for handling that kind of grief. An unclear loss is typically not well acknowledged or people don't speak about it.
For instance, with COVID-19, there were, like you said, a lot of ambiguous losses. Part of it was this constant trying to manage it this way and trying to manage it that way and trying to find the way to management and never really knowing when is this going to end, is it going to end, is this our new normal. That's an ambiguous loss because we can't really mark what we've lost when we don't know how much more we're going to lose, so we're all in a suspended animation. We won't really be able to define this until years after it's over.
Emily: Yes, You know, Jenifer? That's a really good point. I think what you just said really encapsulates how this relates to farming when you said you don't know how much more you're going to lose. I would imagine that as soon as you said that, a lot of our listeners were like, "Oh, yes, I think that that's a really common feeling in farming." I think farmers are always prepared for loss or always expect some sort of loss of something. Maybe to make it even broader, they expect something bad to happen, something to go wrong.
With that, there's this anticipation that something is going to go wrong. We talk a lot about anticipatory grief and how, if you think this is going to happen or fear it may happen, you start to grieve it even while you still have it. That, I think, is something that we see a lot in farming. I know this isn't cattle related, but it's something we're seeing a lot right now with highly pathogenic avian influenza, with our poultry producers is, again, this kind of anticipatory stress, yes, but also grief, in that you've told yourself, "All right, I'm probably going to lose this." You start to move into that grieving.
Jenifer: Right. I feel like you've fully explained anticipatory grief right there. That's the kind of grief that you have when you're expecting to lose something or waiting to lose something. Even if you end up not losing it, you already had that grief. You already had the grief of anticipation. That's a type of grief that is often not acknowledged, is the waiting. The waiting is the hardest part, and that you're grieving something before you've lost it. Even if you end up not losing it, you still have that waiting period and that grief. That's one classic example of a type of grief that's tends to be under-acknowledged.
Another is disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is the kind of grief that people may not count. They say, "Well, that doesn't matter because of this, or because of that." For instance, if you're grieving something, but maybe out of status, or it's not something that other people acknowledge, then you don't get the markers that other people might get for grieving. You don't get the public funeral or the public acknowledgement or any of the warm wishes from friends and colleagues that you might get if you had a non-disenfranchised grief or griefs that people acknowledge.
Emily: Even if your favorite pet cow dies. Other farmers might think like, "It was just a cow," but if it was a little more special to you, you're going to be sad. Yes, that grief may be disenfranchised, and other people won't recognize it, and that might seem like a silly or trivial example, but it's real. It happens. We've seen it.
Jenifer: The loss of animals is a really good example of disenfranchised grief because sometimes, it can be considered in more of a spreadsheet way, like that it's a financial loss, or that you've lost something in your business. For people who raise and manage animals for a living, their bond to the animals is quite significant. Losing animals is not only the loss of the relationship to the animals, but the loss of the sense of self as someone who raises animals. If you sell your dairy cattle, then all of a sudden, you have to think, "Am I really a dairy farmer anymore if I don't have cattle?" That's a form of grief that can get disenfranchised.
Emily: Yes. Then there is one grief that we like to talk about with ambiguous loss, and I think is also really applicable to agriculture, and that is frozen grief. Jenifer, I'm going to let you explain that one, because you explained it a lot better than I do.
Jenifer: Frozen grief, it's the result of ambiguity and when you don't know whether or not an effort is going to be successful. It can go on for years, while you're making various efforts to try and salvage certain aspects of your business or your land or livestock. The uncertainty of the future, it doesn't allow any member of the family or the business to fully grieve and move on because you're always thinking, "Well, I'll try this, and we'll see if it works. Then I'll try this and see if it works." For some families and farms, that can go on for years and years and years.
Each year, you don't know, "Is this going to be successful or not?" You can't let go of anything until you know whether or not something's going to work. I think COVID has been a really good example of frozen grief because, obviously, there's a lot of clear grief when people died, but there's a lot of frozen grief of, "We're going to try this. We're going to make this adjustment. We're going to try this policy. We're going to try this vaccination. We're going to try all these different things." Each of them have some impact, but none of them has just pulled us out of this pandemic. None of them has ended the pandemic, and so we're frozen in our sense of what's been lost.
Emily: Yes, great example or explanation, I should say. I think of it as like sometimes, if you're in those situations, and we know that farms, unfortunately, end up in prolonging the inevitable, like Jenifer was saying. You're trying a few different things, whether it's to save the farm or save a certain enterprise of your farm. I almost think of it and, Jenifer, you can argue me on this if you think I'm wrong. It's like a defense mechanism, almost. Sometimes, I wonder if we lead ourselves to freeze our grief just because we're afraid or because we are hoping that things will end up differently.
We don't want to be more on that anticipatory side where we're like, "Yes, this is over. I'm going to start grieving it now because I think I see where this is going." Writing's on the wall, et cetera. That's what I think on that. Like I said, I don't know if that's right necessarily, but--
Jenifer: I can't speculate as to why, but I can say that the longer people keep trying to make something work, the longer that frozen grief is going to go on.
Emily: Joe and Bradley, you've been a little quiet. Before we move into what can we do about this, do you guys have any questions about ambiguous loss?
Bradley: I don't, but I've learned a lot. I'll tell you that. I'm an animal scientist. This is definitely not my specialty, but I think it's always good to learn about these issues that you might not be aware about.
Emily: Good.
Joe: I've learned a lot as well. I think the question that comes to my mind a lot when we talk about grief or loss in any way, a lot of times, what we think about is, or the word that comes to my mind is closure. I don't know where that word fits in this whole discussion, or if that's--
Emily: It doesn't.
Jenifer: It doesn't. That's the issue.
Joe: Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's the point.
Jenifer: There's no closure.
Emily: Yes.
Joe: Yes. I think that's the word that comes to my mind though with this is loss without closure. Even especially in the way you guys are talking about things. Loss without any possibility of true, what the person might consider closure. Is that a fair statement?
Jenifer: It's a fair statement. Although I would say that sometimes there is eventually closure. It may feel like there's no possibility of closure, and loss without closure is actually how Pauline Boss has described ambiguous loss many, many times. Sometimes closure can come, like, for example, if someone is missing, and 10, or 20, or 30 years goes by, and that person is still missing, there's never closure. Then sometimes, there's closure 30 years later. There can be closure. It doesn't take away the 30 years of ambiguity that were in between.
Emily: Yes, I think that's a really important point, in that if you get to that point of closure or if you get to that point where the ambiguity clears up, that doesn't negate the time you have spent with those feelings. Just like we were saying with the grief, anticipatory grief. If the thing you're anticipating doesn't actually happen, that doesn't cancel out the grief that you felt. That was still a really valid experience that you went through.
Joe: The situation that I think of a lot, and I think almost everyone's experienced it, is someone who is important to you maybe in periods of your life, where you've maybe drifted apart a little bit or you don't communicate as often as you used to, and then that person's gone. They die for whatever reason, and they're gone. Does that fit into this ambiguous loss type of situation where you're like, "Well, I never got to talk to them one more time. I had no idea this was coming. Now, there's no chance of talking to them one last time." All of a sudden, you don't know what you're dealing with. Is that a situation that fits into this category?
Jenifer: Typically, a death is considered a clear loss, because someone is then psychologically not with you anymore, and they're also physically not with you anymore. That time period when you were separate from them is certainly an unclear loss and a loss with no closure. I think the same kinds of resiliency strategies would be useful for that kind of loss. I'll refrain from getting into is that ambiguous loss or not, just because I think that's not really necessarily, from my perspective, as helpful as thinking about the same kinds of resiliency strategies that help us move forward in unclear losses would help with that kind of loss, too, like that loss of the relationship before of a death.
Joe: That makes a lot more sense. Thank you for clarifying that.
Emily: Yes, we've brought this theory into farming and how it impacts farm families. The biggest question Jenifer and I get is, "Oh, okay, yes, ambiguous loss. All right." You get it as much as you can get it. It has ambiguous loss. Ambiguous in the name, but the real question we get is like, "Well, what can I do about it? How do I stop it or get rid of it or cure it?"
First thing we say is it's not necessarily about a cure, or treating it, or making it go away. Really, what we want to help farm families learn is how they can help build more resilience. That, well as we know, resilience helps us in times of adversity, change, all of those things. Resilience can also help people get through their ambiguous losses. Although you may not get that all ultimate closure and clarity, I do think that some of the resilient strategies we recommend do help provide a little bit more of that clarity, or in my mind, I would say having a little more peace with what has happened. Lots of different things with resilience.
Before we really dive into that we just talk about how before you can even start with these resilience steps, you need to be ready to shift gears and to do something different. That is number one most important. Also with that, we remind people that we're really used to something called first-order change, which means when something isn't going well, we work harder. Bradley and Joe nod.
Jenifer: Nod your heads. Yes.
Emily: The best example, I can think of this in a farming context-- We should have started with this. Jenifer and I wrote a book about this, that's why we're discussing it. We'll talk a little bit more about the book at the end now, I guess. When we were writing this book, we met with some farm families in Minnesota that have dealt with some ambiguous losses. One of the farms we met with was a dairy farm. They were telling us about a time when they had stray voltage. This was several years ago before stray voltage was really a thing we knew much about or a thing that people talked about.
Basically, I just remember this farmer we're sitting at his kitchen table and he's telling us our production was going down, losing money. We were losing cows, cows were dying. We didn't know what was going on, so we were just working harder. They were putting in more hours, so everybody was tired and miserable, nothing was getting better. That again, that idea that this will get better if I simply work harder, work longer, do more that's first-order change.
Second-order change is really a shift in gears. Then in the stray voltage example, that was, "We're working harder and harder and harder, and that's not changing anything. Now we need to do something different." I believe they talked to some people, did some research, found out a little bit more about stray voltage, and then were able to really dive into that and discover that that was in fact the problem. No amount of hard work was going to make the stray voltage go away until they had the utility or whomever come in to do some grounding and what have you.
Jenifer: They had to learn to deal with not only the fact that they couldn't work their way out of this, but that they had a lot of convincing of the local community to do about how to deal with stray voltage because it wasn't something that was well known. This person who had been a multi-generational dairy farmer was all of a sudden the bank didn't want to give them another loan. People were questioning their capacity as a farmer. Really, when they started to understand it was stray voltage, then people still didn't believe that. They had to do a lot of education around what is stray voltage and how is it affecting things.
It was just a very different approach than getting up earlier or making new feed or doing all the kinds of ways that you might work harder.
Joe: That's hitting a little close to home for me at least. Probably Brad as well, with the way he was nodding his head. I feel like maybe it's everyone's response, maybe it's a Minnesotan response, maybe it's just farmers. Just the response of just working harder seems to be fairly common. Looking back now, just thinking about it, I saw it a ton in practice, what's the solution to any of the problems is work harder. It does help with a lot of problems, but not necessarily all of them. I always go back to the metaphor of running around and putting out fires, which you can work harder and harder and harder, but if you don't stop the source of the fires being started to begin with, then you're not making much progress.
That's how I felt in some cases in practice of just running and ragged, but not actually getting to the root cause. Then you're just working harder with no benefit.
Jenifer: That's a great example of shifting gears.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. We really get to the shifting gears piece and thinking about taking a different perspective, looking at your situation through a different set of eyes. As we're doing this and thinking about identity and all these other pieces like I said, we really bring people to resilience. Resilience is a word we hear a lot. We know what it means, but the real question is how do we build resilience? What can we do to make ourselves more resilient? Sometimes to me, it just seems like a totally lost idea. We do have some ways that we can build resilience and so many different things.
I think a lot of things that I know for me when we were first doing this work, things I would've never thought of. Like, oh yeah, I could see where that really helps and can help in-- I don't like to say getting over it, but again, finding peace with your situation is how I think of it. Jenifer, maybe you want to talk about maybe just a couple of the main resilience-building pieces that we like to discuss.
Jenifer: The core elements in resilience for ambiguous loss are not about fixing the problem, but about recognizing that you can't fix the problem and learning to live with the unfixed problem. For instance, in the stray voltage, a lot of things were lost in that time. There was money lost, there were cows' lives lost, there were relationships lost. Fixing the stray voltage is one strategy that helps fix the business side of the problem but it doesn't fix the unrepaired relationships that were injured during the time when this farmer questioned, "Am I still a good farmer?"
The goal for resilience with ambiguous loss is to recognize that it's a loss that you might live with forever and to develop some skills around coping with having that kind of an unclear loss permanently. For instance, you might find some meaning. This is a big one I thought about when you were talking about your friend, Joe, who somebody you lost touch with and then they died, is finding some meaning in that time when you weren't connected. What does that mean? What does that mean for you as a person about losing relationships? What does that mean in any greater scheme of things to have someone die when you're out of contact with them?
Then what does that mean for you moving forward in terms of being in contact or out of contact with relationships and where you place relationships in your value structure? That's a mechanism of finding meaning in something that's a loss. That what you lost was the chance to close up a relationship. Finding meaning is a big one. I'll just name off the others and then I'll go into some details about them. Adjusting mastery, reconstructing identity, normalizing ambivalence, revising attachment, and discovering hope.
Adjusting mastery is just changing your sense of what you're capable of doing. Sometimes people are raised to think they can do anything if they just work hard enough or try hard enough or study enough. Recognizing that you may not be able to do everything you thought you could previously do. You might have to adjust and recognize that the world is not always fair. This one was originally called tempering mastery, like pulling down your sense of mastery. Through Pauline's work over many decades, she realized that some people actually needed to recognize what they could do that they didn't think they could do. That's why it's called adjusting mastery.
Some ways to accomplish this, to adjust your sense of mastery are to just recognize that the world is not always a fair place. Even if you did everything you could do, this loss could still happen. We like to think that, and I'm sure that it's true in agriculture as well, that people like to think if they do everything right and if they are careful at managing their money and they work really hard, then they should be successful. There are a lot of things that are outside the control of everyone. It's not always fair what's outside the control of everyone. Recognizing that unfair things can happen to very fair people and letting go of your sense that you should have been able to handle it differently is a big one.
Emily: With adjusting mastery I have a little story I like to tell related to this because I think too with adjusting mastery, especially when we're talking in a farming context, especially when we have maybe somebody who is no longer farming or like in my family's example my dad no longer dairy farms, but he was still an able-bodied person of sound mind wanting to do something, but milking cows was not going to be what he did anymore.
Something that my dad has gotten really into is tapping the maple trees and our cow pasture and now he makes syrup every year. For me, that's such an amazing example of resilience, and more specifically, this mastery piece in adjusting it to here's something he can still do that allows him to be outside, which is always important to him, and to still have this really intimate connection with the land that we own. He's doing this in our cow pasture. where the cows used to go out and graze, and now he's finding a new use for that pasture. Using the resources that we already have there.
Like I said, I think it's just such a great exhibition of resilience. It's something that he's really into and takes up some of his time, which is very important too for retired farmers if you know any of them. It doesn't need to be this whole big, "I'm getting a whole new hobby and learning how to do something new." I think especially when we are talking about farmers that may no longer be farming and may be having a little bit of that identity crisis, showing them that a lot of the skills they have and a lot of the things they liked about farming are transferable to other things as well, like syrup making, for example,
Joe: Farmers, as we know, pick up skills over their lifetime, like pretty much no other profession. They have plenty of skills when they're not farming. I think part of it is just reminding them that they are most likely the plumber and the HVAC person and the equipment operator and all these other things that they do on the farm that they take for granted, that that's knowledge that they can use in a lot of different ways.
Jenifer: That brings us exactly to another of the resiliency components that I think is especially relevant for farmers, which is about reconstructing your identity. Losing animals or losing land or losing the farm can hit really hard if that's your life's work and that's your identity, especially if maybe it's your multi-generational. My grandparents own this farm and then my parents and now me. What does it mean if I don't have animals or if I'm not farming, am I still a farmer if I'm now working in town? Setting up and thinking through, what is your identity and how do you reconstruct that in the face of this change?
Some ways to facilitate doing that is to redefine who you are now with your new identity and with your new skills. You facilitate that partially by defining the psychological family. Who are the people that you love and care about? Who's your close family? Your psychological family might not be the same as your physical family. Who are the people you connected to and how are those relationships changed by this change in your professional identity or by this change in your work? Some of them might not be changed, and some of them might be changed, and there may be people who leave the psychological family or who join the psychological family as part of the restructuring of identity.
Like in Emily's example, this new identity of maple syrup maker as part of an identity, that also brings with it a whole new set of relationships and a whole new set of connections and a whole new pie slice of your identity about the maple syrup piece. I've heard Emily say many, many times, if you ask my father who he is, he would say he's a dairy farmer. That part of identity never goes away, but you reconstruct who you are and how you view yourself in light of your new circumstances.
A final one that I'll discuss, which is a really fun one, is discovering hope. Discovering hope is rather future-oriented and it's about learning to be comfortable that there's ambiguity, that there will always be ambiguity, and that you can have hope for a brighter future, even if the ambiguity never goes away so that there can be good times and a positive future even if you never let go of the ambiguity. Some of the ways to discover hope are think about what you can control and what you can't to redefine what justice means.
Most people have some sense of what it means to be in a just world. If you can rethink, well, what is justice now that I have this new knowledge, now that I have this new self-knowledge, how do I think about justice? One of my favorite is also to just have good humor about what has happened. Making jokes about where you are and the absurdity of the kinds of things that you are dealing with as part of your loss.
Many people joke and laugh in what might be viewed as inappropriate ways, but those are really appropriate mechanisms for dealing with ambiguous grief that you can learn to move forward and have some hope for the future when you recognize the absurdity of some of the losses that you have.
Joe: I'm definitely guilty of that last one. You said that humor in potentially an inappropriate or what may be viewed as an inappropriate way. I think my family, it's definitely a family thing. It's part of the way we deal with something like that, is humor. All of this is hitting hard, to be honest. I'm looking back at my life and all the times that I've experienced these things as you guys are talking about. It's much more often than I ever expected coming into today and learning about all of this.
I had a general idea of what ambiguous loss is, but it's still so new. It's hard to read about and find material that's relevant to my experience. This has been really helpful for me. I'll say that. This has been a nice little learning opportunity and I'm looking back at my life in all sorts of different spots where this is totally been what's been going on.
Emily: We need to have a future episode like The Moos Room does group therapy about all of our ambiguous loss.
Joe: There's a lot of topics on my end, so I'm there.
Jenifer: Some of the forms of resiliency are most established by seeking some professional support and doing a lot of journaling to just designate what exactly is loss? What kind of loss is this? Then how are relationships affected? The core element of loss is not so much the loss of money or of a thing, it's the loss of the people who you love and the, the loss of the way that you relate to them. When you can identify that, then you may or may not be able to rebuild those relationships, but at least you can recognize and be clear about what's been lost.
Joe: When I graduated vet school, I just spent four years of my life studying and doing nothing but school with these people, with these 100 people. We knew each other way too well in a lot of cases. Then graduation happened and all of us just, boom, scattered across the country. That feeling was really overwhelming.
Jenifer: That's a classic ambiguous loss. It's like any migration, you're leaving someone physically behind, but they're still psychologically part of your life. Those relationships get ruptured when someone's not physically with you as much as you try to keep them psychologically present, you're not all together anymore. Those relationships just get changed and get ruptured.
Joe: Sorry if I'm derailing us a lot here, Emily, but-
Emily: No, you're learning, which I love.
Joe: I'm learning a ton.
Jenifer: That's a great example. I feel the same way about my graduate school friends. I see them at-- We have an annual conference and there's a lot of people who I've now known for 20 to 30 years, and you recognize that when you're not with them, there is a huge loss of relationship that these are people you came up with and that you've known for a long time. They know you [inaudible 00:37:17] no one else does.
Joe: Definitely in a different way. How does social media play into all this? I feel like it's a way to stay connected, but for me maybe it's because I didn't grow up with social media, it wasn't around until I was in college. It feels like a fake connection-- I don't know how else to explain it. It's not a real connection. It's not enough of a connection for me to feel like I'm avoiding some of these things you're talking about. Does it play a role? Do people feel like they can connect enough to help with these feelings?
Jenifer: I would love to see some studies of social media with ambiguous loss. I have not seen one. That doesn't mean there aren't any, but there could be. I will certainly affirm what you're saying that social media it's really hard to have a genuine relationship unless you are very careful about who you're connecting with and how on social media. A lot of social media is not super genuine. It's more like, look at my vacation, and here's my kid, look at my new dog. That kind of stuff. You don't really know what's going on with someone. It keeps people psychologically present, but it also can be misleading. It digs an even deeper hole into that psychological loss.
Emily: I don't know that I have really much to add, but I want to reemphasize what you said, Jenifer, social media I see it more as it's basically people's virtual photo albums. You see their vacations and their play their kids did at school. That stuff is all great but are your social media friends, the people you actually have true relationships with? I don't really have a good answer to that, Joe, but I definitely think that there is some sort of relationship there.
Jenifer: There is some research on social media that shows that people tend to feel worse the longer they've been on social media. We think of like, "Oh, let's go on social media. I'll see all my old friends, I'll see what they're up to." The truth is most people experience mood depression after some time on social media.
Joe: That's one more reason to take it off my phone, I guess.
Jenifer: Spend less time with it.
Emily: One more reason to get outside.
Joe: We talk a lot about that kind of thing when we're talking about -- You went through some of these mechanisms through which you build resilience, but that doesn't necessarily sound like an easy road to go down. When you're struggling to get down that road to building resilience, what do you do? Where do you go? Obviously, you lean on the people around you, but what else?
Jenifer: Well, I think start with leaning on the people around you. Also going inward, what does this mean to me? Really defining meetings, creating what your relationships are, understanding who are your important relationships, and then not being afraid to ask for guidance. Guidance from the people you know, but also guidance from professionals. Most counseling professionals will have had some training in ambiguous loss, and/or clear loss. They should be able to talk with you about and move away from the physical loss to the ruptured relationship and start talking about what that means to have a ruptured relationship.
Emily: I would add too, this is influenced by my own journey dealing with loss and everything else. That is, like Jenifer said, looking inward, but also sitting and just be honest with yourself about what happened and what are you feeling. We call it naming and framing. Put a name on what happened. Was it loss? What are you feeling? Is it grief? Is it confusion? That way you can frame or build out what the situation really is. I think that that, again, for me personally, has really worked because sometimes when we're in these really stressful or just dark places, mentally, it can be easy to just avoid it because you don't want to confront it.
I think a first step is just going, "I'm going to confront this and this is what I'm confronting." Again, that naming piece is saying this is what it is. I think once we've learned to do that, to name those things and then sitting with that like, "Now it has a name and now I know what I'm dealing with." Again, I know for me personally, that is something that has really helped me get on that road towards building resilience of just stop pretending it doesn't exist. Ignoring it's not going to make it go away.
Jenifer: That brings me to the workbook that we put together. It's the second edition. Pauline Boss had actually written a first edition back in 2000 in response to a farm crisis. We updated it and added some different ways of thinking and some of Pauline's new work to it. One of the things that the workbook does, it gives some background on ambiguous loss and resilience, but also there are pages to fill in. You define what have I lost psychologically? What have I lost physically? What are the relationships that are related to this? Is any of my grief disenfranchised or people saying, "Oh, that's not important." Am I frozen in any aspect of grief because I can't really grieve until I find out what's going to happen?
I'm going to try this and I'm going to try that. What's frozen? Just spelling out what the specifics are of what you've been going through can really help to move you out of a place of the depression of loss and into the place of dealing with it and creating some resiliency on navigating this long-term loss.
Joe: This is oddly similar to the discussion we had last week about honesty with yourself, figuring out how to know yourself. Then I guess this is the piece that we've been missing from that discussion, which is, what does the new you look like and how does that affect everything around you? Which I think we didn't really get into last week when we were talking with Monica, but this makes a lot of sense as far as we've learned to be honest with ourselves, see what's happening in our lives. Then I like that this also incorporates looking forward as to what does that mean and where are we going with it?
Emily: We're having a very reflective mental health awareness month here on The Moos Room. I think that that self-reflection piece is so important, but we have been yapping here for a while. I do want to mention that if you are interested in the workbook that Jenifer and I have been talking about or want to learn a little bit more about it, I would encourage you to go to the extension website, extension.umn.edu, search for Ambiguous Loss, and you'll find the information about the workbook.
We've also made a curriculum to go with it as well so we will be having workshops on this in the future for farm families that may be interested. If you have just some more general questions or you're curious, you can always reach out to me, reach out to any of us on The Moos Room and we can get you connected to myself and Jenifer and we can chat more about this. Jenifer, I want to thank you so much for coming on today.
Jenifer: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Emily: It was really exciting to have you on and to show people that family social science is not a scary thing and certainly has a place when we talk about agriculture, and specifically, farming and farm families. With that, we are going to wrap this episode in earnest. If you have any questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals, you can email those to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: If you have a question that you would like to ask on our voicemail and potentially have your question played live on a future episode of The Moos Room, you can call our voicemail at 612-624-3610. You can also find us on Twitter @unmmoosroom and @unmfarmsafety. That is all we have for you this week. Be well.
Joe: Bye.
Emily: Bye.
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[00:45:38] [END OF AUDIO]

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