An interview with University of Chicago's Froma Walsh
The 1990s are clearly an age of loss. The AIDS crisis is wiping out whole communities. America's largest population group--the baby boomers--is experiencing the loss of its much-touted youth. More profoundly, they are coming to grips with death as they face the loss of their parents. For all Americans, the undiminished expectations of the '60s and '70s are now mired in economic uncertainty, at best. The same economic climate is daily taking its toll in business loss--from the smallest entrepreneurs to seemingly invulnerable multinational corporations.
At the University of Chicago, where Froma Walsh, Ph.D., co-directs the Chicago Center for Family Health, loss is a subject of cutting-edge research. How to deal with loss? How to explain it? There are important lessons to be learned in how we face loss--even a chance to grow. Walsh, who is also president of the American Family Therapy Association, spent a day at the offices of PSYCHOLOGY TODAY talking to Owen Lipstein and Hara Marano. This is the first of several articles on the subject to run over the next few months. It is deliberately wide-ranging in content and emotional reach.
PT: It's spring, a time of renewal. I suppose it is appropriate for us to talk about salvation in loss.
FW: It is in how you do the death. When people feel a lack of control about the outcome, one way of helping them is to see that they have control over the dying process. You can control, for example, whether you bring a dying father home or leave him in the hospital. Whether you spend time with him and how that time is spent. Now, with the AID'S crisis, that's what many are reporting: Once they've realized that time is limited, they think about how they want to experience the time they have. "Okay I may not be able to control the outcome and this is likely to be fatal, what I have control over is the relationships, what T do with my part in those relationships--being with the dying person." When people come to accept that they cart's control other things, they usually report they get into a much fuller, deeper experience of connectedness with the person who is dying.
PT: They experience their relationships through the process of loss.
FW: I'm teaching a course on this now, and a woman who was a minister reported a wonderful experience she had with a dying grandmother who made everybody come and visit her. The old woman had wonderful conversations with them about the things she wanted to pass along to them, things she wanted to share with them. The times they had together during that last month were the most precious of their entire life. They all said that was the way to die.
PT: What about the people who die poorly, a person who draws his dying breaths by making everybody experience the moment-by-moment pain, fear, blackness, or whatever?
FW: That's where you see legacies of loss that are destructive for generations to come.
PT: So something gets passed on if loss is traumatic or isn't handled right.
FW: That is why it's important to look at loss from a systems perspective. Loss is usually looked at from an individual perspective; there's the individual who dies, the individual who has the loss, their dyadic relationship, and the consequences of that loss for that individual throughout his or her life. But that doesn't even begin to suggest all the indirect influences through the family, to everyone in the family, then to the generations after, so that individuals who never knew the deceased are affected by the way the family handled the process.
PT: What is the damaging agent in the legacies of loss?
FW: First, let me say there can be positive legacies when loss is handled well. The negative legacies tend to be where there's tremendous cover-up, secrecy, distortion around the circumstances of the loss, or denial of a very traumatic death. The worst example I experienced was a young adult hospitalized for very serious mental illness. This kid had a dissociation episode at 15; he went out in the street and stabbed an elderly man, out of the blue. The family did nothing. The kid had another episode, almost repetitive, a year later, and a third one at age 17. He had no remorse, no feelings about it at all. The mother was a very disturbed woman who had bizarre religious fantasies. One was that she and her son had been present at the crossing of the Red Sea. Everyone was focused on her contribution to the boy's pathology, just as in our culture we look at what mothers do more than at what fathers do.
I am very careful in my interviews always to ask each parent about the other parent's experience. I learned from the woman that the boy's father, at the age of 15, had witnessed the stabbing death of his father. Such events are so traumatic, there's a dissociating process, where the family can't process the loss. It goes underground. When there's not permission in the family to communicate about it, it tends to come out in some kind of action, like a repetition compulsion, in the next generation. The next generation acts it out at precisely the same point in the life cycle. When I see somebody in a suicide attempt or having difficulty with a separation, I always ask whether there were traumatic losses at the same moments in the life cycle a generation earlier
PT: How common is this?
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