Living in the Liminal Space
Exploring the hidden grief of ambiguous loss, Living in the Liminal Space guides social workers and caregivers to support those left in uncertainty with resilience and hope.
What happens when a person is gone, but not lost—when grief takes hold without the certainty of death? Living in the Liminal Space explores this profound emotional terrain, where families and communities exist between hope and despair, struggling to find meaning amid ambiguity.
Drawing on more than 25 years of research and practice, Professor Sarah Wayland brings together her experiences working with families of missing people in Australia and internationally. Through a powerful blend of lived experience, academic insight, and compassion, she offers a framework for understanding and supporting those navigating unresolved loss. Extending the foundational work of Pauline Boss and integrating social theories of hope, loss, and uncertainty, this book challenges social workers, counsellors, psychologists, and therapists to view “living grief” not as paralysis, but as a space where resilience and connection can flourish.
This book is essential reading for students and practitioners in social work, counselling, psychology, sociology, and community services, as well as organisations offering postgraduate or professional programs in grief, loss, and trauma support.
What happens when a person is gone, but not lost—when grief takes hold without the certainty of death? Living in the Liminal Space explores this profound emotional terrain, where families and communities exist between hope and despair, struggling to find meaning amid ambiguity.
Drawing on more than 25 years of research and practice, Professor Sarah Wayland brings together her experiences working with families of missing people in Australia and internationally. Through a powerful blend of lived experience, academic insight, and compassion, she offers a framework for understanding and supporting those navigating unresolved loss. Extending the foundational work of Pauline Boss and integrating social theories of hope, loss, and uncertainty, this book challenges social workers, counsellors, psychologists, and therapists to view “living grief” not as paralysis, but as a space where resilience and connection can flourish.
This book is essential reading for students and practitioners in social work, counselling, psychology, sociology, and community services, as well as organisations offering postgraduate or professional programs in grief, loss, and trauma support.
- Cover
- Half-Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Abstract
- Content warning
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction: The learnt experience of ambiguity
- The first exposure to loss
- Beginning the journey of learning
- 1 What is ambiguity in the context of loss?
- How does liminality and liminal spaces engage with uncertainty?
- How do we prepare ourselves to work and live in liminal spaces?
- How does hope feature in the ways to support uncertain losses?
- What is hope theory and how is it conceptualised?
- Hope in a bereavement context
- Liminal spaces, social constructions and loss
- So how does this social construction of what we are allowed to grieve and not grieve shape ambiguity?
- 2 Preparedness to step in
- How does community impact awareness of liminal spaces?
- What’s the inner work that you need to do on yourself to be comfortable in those liminal spaces?
- Consider the socio-cultural lens that you bring to your work
- Learn by doing
- Be open to multiple truths
- Tolerating uncertainty, developing resilience and not shying away from the deficits of the human experience
- Being alert to vicarious impacts of the work
- 3 Case studies for reflection
- Case study one: Ambiguity and incarceration
- I can’t reach back in; he can only reach out – the ambiguous loss of a family member into the justice system
- The 10-minute touchpoint
- Disengaging from the spectators
- Sometimes you just need one stranger to help you
- What does this mean on a larger scale?
- Case study two: Missing and homicide
- Trying to out-think what happened: The unresolved loss of a missing, murdered mum
- Contextualising the case study
- Case study three: Forced adoption and liminality
- Greeks do not say, ‘I miss you’ – they say, ‘You are missing from me’
- Contextualising the case study
- Case study four: Suicide attempt and the space in between
- ‘Just keep an eye on them’: The liminal space between relationships and surveillance for families with a loved one who attempts suicide
- Contextualising the case study
- 4 Leaning in: How to teach about liminal spaces
- Reflection on teaching uncertainty: Voluntary assisted dying and the role of the social worker
- Ambiguity in the discipline of psychology, counselling and psychotherapy
- Ambiguity in the discipline of social work
- Embedding ambiguity and loss into your curriculum or continuing professional development
- What are the support needs and family experiences
- Political, collective and cultural dimensions of grief
- Curriculum and teaching recommendations
- Conclusion
- References
- Appendices: Teaching resources
- Assessment exemplar for case study one
- Assessment exemplar for case study two
- Assessment exemplar for case study three
- Assessment exemplar for case study four
- Index
Professor Sarah Wayland is an internationally recognised social work academic and researcher whose work focuses on grief, ambiguous loss, suicide prevention, and the psychosocial impacts of missing persons. She is a national leader in research addressing the experiences of families living with the uncertainty of a missing loved one, including refugees and people affected by forced migration, disaster, and complex trauma.
Professor Wayland’s research bridges theory, policy, and practice, with a strong emphasis on lived-experience informed approaches and trauma-responsive service delivery. Her scholarship draws heavily on the theory of ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, and socio-ecological frameworks to understand how individuals and communities navigate prolonged uncertainty, hope, and despair. She has worked extensively with police agencies, mental health services, community organisations, and international partners to develop guidance, education resources, and interventions that improve responses to families experiencing unresolved loss. A core feature of Professor Wayland’s work is knowledge translation — ensuring research findings are accessible and usable for practitioners. She has developed training programs, counselling frameworks, and professional education resources used across health, social work, and community sectors. Her work has informed national conversations on suicide prevention, missing persons policy, and trauma-informed care.
Professor Wayland is also deeply committed to workforce development and practitioner wellbeing, recognising the emotional demands placed on clinicians working with chronic uncertainty and trauma. She regularly delivers professional development masterclasses internationally, supporting clinicians to build confidence in working with complex grief and ambiguous loss.
Her teaching and research emphasise compassionate, culturally responsive practice that honours both hopefulness and hopelessness — particularly for people where someone is missing.
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Wayland, S. (2026). Living in the liminal space: Understanding the lived experience of ambiguous or unresolved loss to enhance how we care for those left behind. Lived Places Publishing. 221 pp. ISBN 9781917566964.
In Living in the Liminal Space, Sarah Wayland offers a thoughtful, practice-oriented examination of ambiguous and unresolved loss. Written for social workers, counsellors, psychologists, educators, students, and people with lived experience, the book asks how individuals and communities continue living when certainty, ritual, and conventional closure remain unavailable. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of practice, research, and teaching, Wayland combines theoretical discussion, professional reflection, case narratives, and pedagogical resources. The result is an accessible and emotionally intelligent contribution to grief scholarship and human-services education.
The book develops from Pauline Boss’s influential theory of ambiguous loss, which distinguishes between physical absence with psychological presence and physical presence with psychological absence. Wayland extends this foundation through the concept of liminality: the unsettled space between presence and absence, knowing and not knowing, hope and despair. Her argument challenges linear models that frame grief as a progression toward acceptance or closure. For unresolved losses, distress cannot necessarily be “solved”; practitioners must instead learn to tolerate uncertainty, validate contradictory emotions, and accompany people without imposing premature resolution. This emphasis on “both/and” thinking is among the book’s strongest conceptual and ethical contributions.
Across four chapters, Wayland moves productively from theory to preparedness, lived experience, and education. Chapter One situates ambiguous loss in relation to missing persons, dementia, mental illness, migration, disaster, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It also examines hope, not as uncomplicated optimism, but as a fluctuating and potentially painful presence within uncertainty. Chapter Two turns inward, asking practitioners to consider their sociocultural positioning, emotional responses, tolerance of uncertainty, resilience, and vulnerability to vicarious trauma. Particularly valuable is Wayland’s insistence that professional preparedness involves reflexivity rather than mastery: practitioners cannot eliminate ambiguity, but they can become less defensive and more relationally available within it.
Chapter Three provides the book’s emotional and analytical centre. Case studies concerning incarceration, missing persons and homicide, forced adoption, and caregiving after a suicide attempt demonstrate how ambiguous loss is shaped by institutions, power, stigma, and social recognition. These narratives resist reducing grief to an intrapsychic condition. The forced-adoption case, for example, reveals how law, administrative records, dominant scripts, and national history can produce identity rupture and disenfranchised grief. Likewise, the suicide-attempt narrative exposes how health systems may quietly transfer surveillance and responsibility to family members. Such accounts show that uncertainty is not merely experienced; it can also be institutionally organised and unequally distributed.
The final chapter makes a persuasive case for embedding ambiguity throughout social work and allied-health curricula. Wayland recommends unfinished case narratives, simulations without neat solutions, reflective writing, supervision, and explicit teaching about uncertainty as a relational skill. The discussion of voluntary assisted dying is especially effective because it illustrates professional, legal, ethical, and emotional ambiguity operating simultaneously. The teaching appendices and recurring reflective questions enhance the book’s utility for classroom discussion, professional development, and supervision.
The book’s integration of scholarship, autobiography, practice wisdom, and lived-experience narratives enhances its accessibility and emotional depth. Wayland writes with clarity, humility, and sensitivity, encouraging thoughtful reader reflection. Further methodological detail and broader engagement with Indigenous, Global South, and culturally diverse perspectives could strengthen this valuable contribution. Although grounded in Australia, the book’s humane and reflective approach gives it considerable international relevance.
These limitations do not diminish the book’s considerable value. Living in the Liminal Space succeeds because it does not promise closure for experiences that cannot be neatly resolved. Instead, it proposes a disciplined practice of accompaniment: naming loss, recognising uncertainty, sharing emotional space, and resisting false reassurance. Its distinctive contribution lies in connecting ambiguous-loss theory with practitioner reflexivity and curriculum design while preserving the authority of lived experience.
As an educator, I intend to recommend this book to my students in the Master of Social Work (Qualifying) program. I would also welcome the opportunity to translate it into Bangla so that its important insights can reach Bangla-speaking readers, students, educators, and practitioners in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. Compassionate, challenging, and highly teachable, this book deserves a place in social work, counselling, psychology, bereavement, and trauma studies. It will be particularly valuable to those seeking ethically responsive ways to support people whose losses remain unresolved, socially unrecognised, or suspended between absence and presence.