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stress of grieving feels particularly awful because they are facing it without the one person they would usually turn to in difficult times.
The magnificence of the brain gave me great empathy for what bereaved people overcome in order to make a life when their loved one will not return. Their adaptation requires the support of their friends and family, the passage of time, and some considerable bravery to overcome what part of our brain may think is best for us. There
being reminded of our loved ones is the nature of having a relationship. You get reminders because these people are important to us.
you are missing all the mornings you sat there with your husband, mornings you will never have again.
brain is orchestrating an experiential simulation, a virtual reality of how things could be now, contrasted with how they actually are, sitting there alone. By generating the “what ifs” in response to yearning, your brain is imagining events that might have played out very differently than they actually did. The alternate reality your brain vividly dreams up, where he did not die but is here with you, is unfavorably contrasted with the present moment in real life. In acute grief, these “what if” responses to the pangs of grief are common and completely normal.
large toolkit of strategies to deal with one’s emotions and deploying the right strategy at the right time.
Rather than asking which are the best strategies, the more appropriate question might be whether using a particular strategy is counterproductive at a given moment or in a specific situation.
If we never allow the feelings of grief to surface, and we cannot contemplate them, or accept them, or share them, they might continue to plague
Positive emotions broaden people’s attention, encourage creative thinking, and expand people’s coping toolkit. Psychologists Barbara Frederickson and Eric Garland describe this as the upward spiral triggered by positive feelings. In a second part of the study by Soenke and Greenberg, bereaved participants wrote
humans are pretty bad forecasters of how they will feel in future situations.6 I
How we handle what our minds do moment to moment can help.
if we have great courage, we may be able to learn to respond to these indisputable circumstances with greater skill and deeper understanding.
The number of possible counterfactuals is infinite. Their infinite nature gives us endless thoughts to focus on, to consider and reconsider, turning the scene around and around in our mind.
Even when the counterfactual thinking involves the painful experience of guilt or shame, like believing we killed our baby, our brain still seems to prefer it over the terrifying, gut-wrenching truth that our loved one is no longer here.
Developing the ability to tolerate the strong feelings of grief, of helplessness, or existential loneliness brought up by the memory of the death, or by the realization that the loved one is truly gone, made the constant “what ifs” unnecessary.
The mind ruminates when it cannot resolve the discrepancy between its current state, such as feeling down, and its desired state, such as feeling happy or content. During grief, the source of your awful mood is less ambiguous.
trick is not to determine whether the thoughts are true, but rather whether they are helpful.
when they stopped trying to avoid feeling grief, grief was not as hard to tolerate as the effort required to avoid it.
Avoidance—trying to circumvent the knowledge that the death has happened—is effortful.
There is no point in cursing these showers, no point in being upset when the rain falls in the middle of your perfectly good softball game or picnic. They are just going to happen, and they do not particularly care what you are up to at the time. I came to think of these afternoon crying spells in the same way: a familiar feeling when the dark clouds came over me, a somewhat predictable pattern in the afternoon, and the knowledge that they were unlikely to last.
key to accepting is not doing anything with what you are experiencing; not asking what your feelings mean, or how long they will last. Accepting is not about pushing them away and saying that you cannot bear it. It is not about believing that you are now a broken person, since no one can bring your parents back and you will never get another set. It is about noticing how it feels at that moment, letting your tears come, and then letting them go. Knowing that the moment of grief will overwhelm you, feeling its familiar knot in your throat, and knowing that it will recede. Like the rain.
For the following year I felt completely untethered in the world, without all the usual attachments that had held me in place.
When we allow ourselves the flexibility of mentally time-traveling away from the present, we are trying to protect ourselves from pain, especially when reality is just too painful to bear. Coping this way is very typical in acute grief. But
Ignoring the present makes it difficult to learn what works in the new ways you are living your life.
Being in the present moment is awareness beyond your focal point, awareness that includes those who are with you in the here and now, whether they are friends, cashiers, children, old folks, or strangers. In a way, mindfulness is moving one’s attention to awareness of here, awareness of now, and awareness of close.
It took months to remake my life into something I lived fully, and in some ways, it is still a work in progress.
can force ourselves to get up at the same time every day, the most powerful of the zeitgebers.
when we focus on the idea simply that there is grieving, and we are part of it, we find connections.
In the very best moments together, we learned to love and to be loved. Because of our bonded experience, that loved one and that loving are a part of us now, to call up and act on as we see fit in the present and the future.
she lives a life restored.
Even if it all turns out less enjoyable than you hoped, there was a reason, an intention behind what you did—you are trying; you’re out in the world, learning how to carry the other person inside; learning to listen to others, not just the voices in your head; and you’re making new memories, testing yourself in new experiences (and surviving).
We may not feel as good as we had hoped we would. We expect to feel good because we are exploring a new relationship, and a new relationship is supposed to be fun and exciting. We may expect to feel less grief, because we have chosen to do something new in our lives, after a period of mourning. Note the significantly high bar those two expectations demand, however. If losses are psychologically twice as powerful as gains, then we would have to feel twice as good in a new relationship as we did in our previous relationship in order to feel the same level of happiness.
Carrie liked this
If an attachment figure is lost, then the great trust invested in that person over many years and through many shared adventures is lost as well. There will not be another person available who can easily fill that role. A huge investment must be made again.
learn to be connected to them with our feet planted firmly in the present moment.
Our relationship with our deceased loved one must reflect who we are now, with the experience, and perhaps even the wisdom, we have gained through grieving. We must learn to
Grief changes the rules of the game, rules that you thought you knew and had been using until this point.
Your brain is sorting out what works and what does not. If you feel as though you are treading water, or barely keeping from going under, it is time to try some new approaches to your memories, your emotions, and your relationships.
pay attention to what works, what actually makes you feel better in the present
Death adds meaning into life, because life is a limited gift. I
We will be separated from our loved ones, in ways large and small, from death, to divorce, to misunderstanding, to unintentional slights.
