Grief, type of loss, meaning, and risk analysis

One of the common observations about grief, these days, in most grief books, programs, and counseling, is that everyone grieves differently, and uniquely.  However, one particular book, noting that the type of loss has a bearing on the intensity of loss, also happened to use the word "meaning."

This reminded me of one of the important lessons in security, in regard to the difference between threat, vulnerability, and risk.  Many companies will have a process known as penetration testing performed on their enterprise.  Pen testing (as it is known in abbreviation), is an activity where either a team within your company, or contractors who are hired from outside your company, attempt to make some kind of entry or intrusion into the systems which you deem necessary to protect.  This is in order to test your defenses, although one of the observations that most people miss is that this really only tests your ability to detect an intrusion, and not all intrusions at that.

Many people who contract pen testing feel that it gives them a handle on risk assessment.  This is a sometimes serious misunderstanding of the situation.  Pen testing can reveal threats and vulnerabilities but it can never fully identify the actual risk.  Risk involves the threat to a particular asset, and the outside penetration team does not, and inherently cannot, understand the value of the asset to the enterprise.

In the same way, it is inherently true that no outsider, and that includes pretty much everyone outside yourself, can understand the grief that you suffer as a result of a loss, because they cannot understand the importance of the asset in your life, specifically.  They may be able to see, if they really try (and few people ever do) the objective results of the loss you have suffered.  But the totality of importance of that loss, or losses, to you, is known only to you.  You are the only one who can understand your loss.

This is why my standard response to any attempt at comparing losses as to greater or lesser is always just "a loss is a loss."