Ambiguous Loss After Lesbian Couples With Children Break Up: A Case for Same‐Gender Divorce*

Abstract

Abstract: The theory of ambiguous loss is applied to structural ambiguity and personal transcendence in the parent‐child relationship following a same‐gender relational ending. Working recursively through the six guidelines of ambiguous loss (finding meaning, tempering mastery, reconstructing identity, normalizing ambivalence, revising attachment, and discovering hope), I use reflexive personal narrative to describe the impact of a child’s psychological presence but physical absence on a nonbiological parent. Three themes are identified: (a) naming the problem—the loss of our family unit, (b) the paradox of presence and absence—fractured parent‐child ties, and (c) recursive discovery of meaning and hope. Implications for practice include the following: (a) applying ambiguous loss to nonlegal relational loss, (b) public policy—the right to same‐gender divorce, and (c) telling our stories as transformative practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.