In the professional literature about loss and mourning, the terms "resolved" and "unresolved" are used. When the healthy mourning process has run its course and been completed, the mourning process is described as having been resolved.
However, people who are not able to mourn in a healthy way do not experience the resolution of their mourning process. As a result, their uncompleted mourning process is described as unresolved. Unresolved mourning remains in their lives -- perhaps to be resolved at a later time, if and when they later learn how to experience a new pattern of containment experience to replace their old pattern of abandonment experience.
The mourning process is work, the work of mourning. The mantra to feel the feelings applies to the mourning process. In addition to feeling the feelings of mourning, one needs to express one's feelings somehow, sharing them with others who are able themselves to serve as Exquisite Witnesses (or care providers), as Jeffreys describes them. The Exquisite Witnesses serve the purpose of containment. The emerging process of containment facilitated with the help of the Exquisite Witnesses enables the mourner to learn a new pattern, the pattern of containment, to replace the old dysfunctional pattern of abandonment. However, as Jeffreys emphasizes, there is no one right way to mourn.
Jeffreys forewarns would-be Exquisite Witnesses to be alert to experiencing what he vividly terms Cowbells. He tells a personal story to explain his use of this term (page 5). The basic point is that the Exquisite Witness needs to be alert to how she or he is responding to the mourner. In other words, the mourner is expressing her or his feelings. As the Exquisite Witness listens attentively and empathetically, the Exquisite Witness may experience feelings in herself or himself that signal some unfinished business (i.e., unresolved mourning) from the past.
Now, regarding the work of mourning nondeath losses, such as the nondeath losses that young Barack Obama and his mother experienced, I would suggest that Susan Anderson's book THE JOURNEY FROM ABANDONMENT TO HEALING (2000) is basically about mourning nondeath losses. Even though she focuses on the experience of being abandoned by one's marital partner, or by one's lover, she is basically discussing abandonment feelings. In nondeath losses, we experience abandonment feelings. For this reason, her book can be read by anyone experiencing abandonment feelings connected with nondeath losses.
At her website, Susan Anderson, C.S.W., makes her essay "Suffering the Death of a Loved One" (2006) available. The URL for her website is www.abandonment.net. In this essay, she emphasizes that mourning losses due to death is not the same as mourning nondeath losses, even though both kinds of losses involve attachment bonds.
Anderson's claim that mourning the death of a loved one (bereavement) is not the same as mourning nondeath losses strikes me as an important claim. Her efforts to explain as explicitly as she could how the two mourning processes are different helped me sort out my own experiences into the two broad categories discussed by Jeffreys, mentioned above: (1) mourning the loss due to death and (2) mourning nondeath losses.
However, Anderson herself does not explicitly discuss how mourning the death of a loved one (also known as bereavement) might be accompanied by mourning a backlog, as it were, of unresolved mourning of nondeath loss or losses.
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