Secondary losses
The losses that follow from a death or other major loss: income, home, role, routine, friends who drift off, a future planned together, the person who did the cooking or the paperwork. Each can carry its own grief and may land months after the first loss.
What drives it
Secondary losses explain why grief can get harder at six months, when the casseroles have stopped and the house sale or the first tax return comes due. For identification they separate the pain of missing the person from the pain of the life that went with them, which may call for different kinds of help.
How it shows
Work
Losing a business partner and then the business. A widow going back to work for the first time in twenty years. A redundancy that also takes the company car, the team and the reason to get up.
Relationships
Couple friends who stop calling. In-laws who drift away after the funeral. Moving out of the family home and leaving the neighbors too. Children who lose a parent and then their school when the family moves.
Self
Notice which losses you have not counted because they seem small next to the death: the Sunday phone call, the person who knew your history, being someone’s wife.
What tells it apart
Grief (complicated, disenfranchised, anticipatory): The grief overview covers the response to the main loss. Secondary losses are the separate losses it sets off, and a person who says ‘it’s everything else that’s breaking me’ may be describing them.
Financial strain: Financial strain is ongoing money pressure from any cause. After a death it may be a secondary loss, and it is more likely to carry grief when the lost income stands for the person or the life shared with them.
Prolonged grief disorder (ICD-11, DSM-5-TR): Distress that rises months after a death may come from secondary losses piling up. Prolonged grief is more likely when daily yearning for the person, more than the practical fallout, is at the center.
A test
Ask the person to list everything that changed because of the loss, beyond the loss itself. If the list is long and the distress tracks it, rising each time a new change lands, secondary losses may be carrying much of the weight.
Questions to carry
- Which change this month did I not let myself call a loss?
- What did I lose of myself when I lost them?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
clinical. The idea is standard in grief counseling, and measured studies are few. In a British mixed-methods study (Corden and Hirst, Death Studies, 2013), 44 bereaved people described money setbacks such as selling the family home as ‘an additional loss’, and in national panel data on 655 people, women who felt worse off after a partner’s death had about twice the odds of high distress, while men showed no clear effect. The authors suggested that piled-up economic losses might raise the risk of prolonged grief and did not test it.
Where it comes from
Therese Rando listed identifying and mourning secondary losses as part of mourning in Treatment of Complicated Mourning, Research Press, 1993. Stroebe and Schut’s dual process model (1999) treats many of them as restoration stressors