More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The unlikely situation that they are not on the map at all, the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us.
The idea that a person simply does not exist anymore does not follow the rules the brain has learned over a lifetime.
This confusion is not the same as simple denial, although that may be how others describe it. Instead it is the utter disorientation people experience in acute grief.
When you wake up one morning and your loved one is not in the bed next to you, the idea that she has died is simply not true in terms of probability. For our brain, this is not true on day one, or day two, or for many days after her death. We need enough new lived experiences for our brain to develop new predictions, and that takes time.
or futile to be angry at ourselves for not keeping them close, and at the same time be furious anyway. Just as the brain may sometimes believe that our deceased loved one is out there, and we may feel motivated to search for them, the brain can also believe that by repairing our relationship with them, we can somehow bring them back.
here, now, and close,
This study provides evidence that the ephemeral sense of closeness with our loved ones exists in the physical, tangible hardware of our brain.
the process of overlapping our identities.
but because these are expressions of love and caring. In fact, research shows that providing selfless support has health benefits for the provider as well as for the beneficiary.
The overlap of our resources is an overlap in our identities, as “we” becomes more important than “you” and “me.”
Or it may feel like you cannot go on without your partner. You may feel at a loss for what to do in situations where you previously decided things together. Unable to share your day’s events when you get home in the evening, you might feel almost as though they never happened.
“Do you ever feel that a part of yourself died along with your husband?” Her eyes got big and she stared at me, with a look that said, How could you possibly know? “That’s exactly how I feel,” she replied.
I also feel broken, even after more than three years.
These representations of the self and the other, this closeness, is mapped as a dimension in the brain. Consequently, the process of grieving is not just about psychological or metaphorical change. Grieving requires neural rewiring as well.
Compassion from a friend who is grief adjacent will not fill the hole where their deceased loved one has been torn out of their overlapping sense of “we.”
But it will place supports around the hole, while your friend begins to restore her life. It will help her at least to get through the confusion about what has happened as her life is turned upside-down,
The gone-but-also-everlasting theory suggests that grieving is different from other kinds of learning, because the implicit belief in the persistence of our deceased loved one may actually interfere with learning about our new reality.
These attachment bonds, these tethers, are both invisible and intensely real. They keep us connected to our loved ones; motivate us to return to them, like a pliable elastic band; and create a feeling that something is missing when we are apart.
Grief-related ruminations tend to center on a few topics, as evidenced by Stroebe and Schut, and their colleagues, Dutch psychologists Paul Boelen and Maarten Eisma.2 The five topics include: (1) one’s negative emotional reactions to the loss (reactions), (2) the unfairness of the death (injustice), (3) the meaning and consequences of the loss (meaning), (4) the reactions of others to one’s grief (relationships), and (5) counterfactual thoughts about the events leading up to the death (what-ifs).
She and her colleagues called this the rumination as avoidance hypothesis.
How remarkable it would be if we could use this physiological understanding as a unique drug delivery method. A
doctor might recommend, “To temporarily relieve your distress, have two conversations with caring people, preferably including a hug, and call me in the morning.”
What if you can't talk, if there is no one to talk to and no hug in sight?
