Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers

by Faith G. Harper

Depression takes away our lives and our will for life.

Our cultural expectation is to possess rather than release. Loss (abandonment) is a forced release for which we have few mechanisms to heal ourselves or support healing in others. We don’t talk about the inevitable letting go of that which we think we possess.

Grief means, most simply, deep sorrow. The word grief comes from the old French grever, which means “to burden.” Grief becomes a literal burden we carry.

Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small calls ceremonies the punctuation marks of life.