When it comes to the coronavirus outbreak, what’s the word related to mental health that you hear most? If you said “anxiety,” you’re not alone. But if you were to sit (virtually, of course) in a therapist’s office like mine or any of my colleagues’, what you might hear just as often is the word “loss.”

This may seem obvious, because many people are experiencing tremendous loss as a result of this pandemic: loss of life, loss of loved ones, loss of health, loss of jobs and income. For those who are losing loved ones at this time, there is also the loss of the normal rituals of funerals and communities gathering to grieve together.

But what might be less obvious are the smaller losses that also affect our emotional health.

As a therapist, I always say that there’s no hierarchy of pain — pain is pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. I believe, too, that there’s no hierarchy of grief. When we rank our losses, when we validate some and minimize others, many people are left alone to grieve what then become their silent losses. The thinking often goes: You had a miscarriage, but you didn’t lose a baby. You had a breakup, but you didn’t lose a spouse. It’s hard to talk about these silent losses because we fear that other people will find them insignificant and either dismiss them or expect us to “get over them” relatively quickly.

Right now, in addition to the tragic losses of life and health and jobs are the losses experienced by people of all ages: missed graduations and proms, canceled sports seasons and performances, postponed weddings and vacations, separation from family and friends when we need them most. We have also lost the predictability that we take for granted in daily life: that there will be eggs and toilet paper on supermarket shelves, that we can safely touch a door knob with our bare hands, that we can get a haircut and our teeth cleaned or spend a Saturday afternoon at the movies.