Ambiguous Grief, AI, and Dreaming Myself Awoke

A headtrip around the universe

I struggle with words to find the power to accurately and authentically convey the experience of something. That’s why I work with images and why I’m a visual learner, and find my professional skill with image-making congruent with my nature. I know I bang on about it – a lot (indulge me, please) but it gives me a kind of verbal/visual dissonance when I have to toggle between the two, or merge the two together somehow.

Nevertheless I’ll persist, as I think it’s probably good for my few remaining brain cells – the majority of which were zapped in unravelling the mess over our daughters’ disappearance, which I wrote about in my “pinned story” We Used To Have A Daughter.

The words “Ambiguous Loss” showed up in the media this week, in relation to the terrible and terrifying absence of a young woman whose disappearance made her a “missing person”.

I always used to rely on the couplet, ambiguous loss, to describe the kind of unrelenting and unresolvable grief that afflicts parents of estranged trans children. You can’t actually grieve because that person is still alive. But your still-living child, who you continue to love, treats you as if you were dead. You can’t talk them round, challenge their concrete thinking, or even remind them of how much they are still loved, still supported, although the terms and conditions of that support appear to be determined by ONE person only, within that group.

The term “ambiguous loss” is pretty useful I think in giving language to a situation that places parents under a kind of psychologically damaging “spell”, a state of psychic “limbo” or a trauma for which there is no closure. A deep bond is smashed to pieces, and a loving parent is simply hard-wired to want to repair it. The only thing you have, when everything fails, is an ability or willingness to understand the roots of the thinking - the drivers of those behaviours, and eventually the insight and understanding you gain allows you to feel hope. Hope, as they say, makes anything possible.

That sense of hope can arise from an understanding of the requirement for a “change” by way of your own growth, or other circumstance or event that move things on from being permanently “stuck” in your own hell, in their own hell.

I’ve nothing really deep or significant to add to the research or insight on our own experience, or to comment on the written or spoken testimonies of others, other than to say that when exploring ambiguous loss, the definition itself seems to have expanded to include (as the practice websites of therapists will concur) situations whereby family members become drug addicts, are given long prison sentences, or are kidnapped, and so on.

As terrible as these fractures are for the families involved, these kind of terrors are of a different “order” to the ambiguous loss of a radicalised trans child. Not better, not worse – just of a different kind. Any sane, compassionate and reasonable human being can understand and empathise with the trauma of seeing a loved one become a drug addict, imprisoned, or held hostage. These are all tragic and awful, and also commonly understood threats to an individuals life and freedom. “If it wasn’t for X, I could have been homeless”. “I lost X through mental breakdown”, “The suicide of a sibling is a terrible thing.” We can all nod and agree, and thank god it wasn’t us.

Trans estrangement is not of the same order – because it’s so new and so poorly understood. Estrangement itself isn’t new, but the splitting of families through the imposition of gender ideology is. I included our own experience of this in my earlier 4-part series Transing The Young. Trace that thinking back further: most people I know who’s lives have not been confronted by gender ideology might ask “well why would any parent NOT affirm the self-declared gender identity of their child?”

I’m not weighing up these things on some better-than/worse-than comparison, like some oppression hierarchy or index of misery. I’m not even saying that one individuals tragic loss is more tragic than anyone else’s. I’m simply pointing out the big difference between “ambiguous loss” as shared and recognised universal human experiences, and the silent (often silenced) experiences of parents who are pre-emptively condemned and misunderstood.

Take widespread incredulity and misunderstanding of trans estrangement back even further: “I can’t understand why you wouldn’t support trans children” or “I can’t believe you think you’re the expert, the child is”. “How cruel are you?”

And so parents of sacred trans children who don’t immediately affirm are publicly shamed, their stories disbelieved, and we become evil perpetrators of conversion therapy or hate crimes against the people we love the most. A cycle of victimhood and depression builds and expands the more ones stays stuck in this unfathomable place. The parent feels the shame projected onto them, while simultaneously and absurdly, the child is elevated like some kind of religious icon. Only self awareness and deeper understanding can give way to hope. It’s a way to break free from being “stuck” ambiguously between competing concepts of deep love of (and for) the other, and recognising the need for nurturing and care of the self.

(I’m NOT a therapist, even though I’m aware I’m starting to sound like one, maybe even a fairly new-agey one :-D)

There are hundreds of visuals like these on “therapy” sites, all of which try to nail down a complex process, using a graphic or diagram to convey a kind of theory to contain this ever-expanding concept of ambiguous loss. I believe some of them even include the unresolved ending of relationships – awful, terrible, life-changing. But again, universally understood and experienced over millennia. Normally, when exploring various graphic models of explanation, I find things like flow diagrams very useful in getting to the source of an idea quickly and efficiently. Not here ‘though.

Instead, I found the idea of Ambiguous Grief, a much more powerful and encompassing concept to grasp. And yes, the words have won me over here, not the graphics.

Recognising ambiguous grief has allowed me to start becoming “unstuck”. It hasn’t dulled the pain, or diminished the trauma, or lightened the load. But it has helped me to free myself from the “stuck-ness” with change: to give voice to the emotional and interior world of dreams and consciousness that have been a part of my life for the last few years, and I can now externalise, safely.

Here’s one such dream below, more of a longing, it repeats and repeats and repeats, endlessly. I get stuck inside it, unable to quit, until something jolts and I’m released. Before embarking on this substack, I recognised that (being a platform for writers and all) I’d need to bring some WORDS to the party, my newfound love of screen-shotting seems the ideal vehicle to merge the two together.

The following are also glimpses into those dreams. I made them using an AI (Artificial Intelligence) system currently going through testing, and rather than immerse myself in the awe-inspiring ability to render fanciful imaginings with forensic precision, accuracy and total believability, I enjoy exploiting the flaws and faults of AI’s imprecision, to create images that seem to float somewhere between the real world and the world of the impossible, the matrix, the dream state. Of existing and being “stuck” in a kind of parallel universe that our daughters transition has put us in. I often find that I don’t know what’s real, and what’s not anymore, and I like to explore that idea in these AI-generated images.

More will follow; to accompany my musings over the months to come - provided I can make the time to keep exploring and developing. In order to do that, I have to rely on the generous support of paying subscribers. I’ve lost a lot of work from speaking out about gender nonsense locally, so if you’ve enjoyed any of my past posts, or have faith in what I’m trying to achieve, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Anything I put up here is available for free, but I’ve only just started. Please feel free to comment or share., and thank you for your continued support.

If you want to enjoy your own intro to AI AND create a new identity for yourself, have a go with https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com - every time you hit refresh in the URL bar, you create the face of a person who doesn’t actually exist. The face is constructed from  a kind of “scan” that refrences literally millions of faces in photographs. It’s unreal. But then again, is it?….well anyway, it’ll introduce you to some of the fascinating features of creating AI content. And personally, I find understanding Generative Adversarial Networks (GANS) much easier to understand that all that genderwoowoo.