The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died.

That is what you are aware of—not feeling something, something specific. The absence of something is what has drawn your attention.

from the perspective that the brain is trying to solve a problem when faced with the absence of the most important person in our life.

grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world.

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.

For that moment, his brain believed his wife was arriving home. And then the truth would bring a fresh wave of grief.

We need enough new lived experiences for our brain to develop new predictions, and that takes time.

Keep in mind that the brain cannot learn everything at once.

From your brain’s perspective, ghosting is exactly what happens when a loved one dies. As far as the brain is concerned, they have not died.

Grieving requires neural rewiring as well.

In addition to being sensitive to what others are feeling, compassion is defined as also having the motivation to care for their well-being.

Emotional empathy, on the other hand, is being able to feel the way another person is feeling.

The implicit knowledge is stored in circuits of our brains distinct from where episodic memories are stored.

Kübler-Ross and others applied the stages of grief she originally described in terminally ill patients to grief in the wake of bereavement, which is a big leap.

The five stages are not an empirically proven model of the process of adaptation after loss.

The key to coping well after you lose someone is flexibility, attending to what is happening day-to-day, and also being able to focus on coping with whichever stressor has currently reared its ugly head.

So, even in the trajectory of chronic grieving, adaptation is possible, even if the process is much slower.

depression and grief, even severe grief, can be distinguished.

depression tends to pervade every aspect of life.

In other words, if the deceased loved one were once again alive, the person with depression might be glad, but the return of the loved one would not solve everything. They would still be depressed.

I like the term complicated grief, because it reminds me of complications that can happen in any normal healing process.

Aching for a loved one while they are alive but far away is useful for maintaining our bond with them; the ache can become unbearable when we know they will never return.

Most of us can learn over time to have our attachment needs met in a new or different way. This happens through strengthening the bonds we have with other living loved ones, by developing new relationships, and by transforming the bonds we have with the person who has died.

Depression is a more global experience, a hopeless and helpless feeling that attaches itself to everything that is happening and has ever happened and ever will happen.

Intrusive thoughts are memories of personal events and people that come to mind suddenly and spontaneously, without our intending to recall them.

These push notifications from our brain intrude on our consciousness whenever our mind wanders, and they help us to remember those things that are most important.

That does not change right away because the person has died. Your brain has to catch up.

There are good reasons to ignore our grief some of the time, in order to give the brain and the body a break, or even to give a break to those around us who feel emotional contagion. Distraction and denial have their usefulness.

But now we know that mood-boosting activities are beneficial in their own right, so we might allow ourselves to do something fun, and even encourage our bereaved friends and loved ones to do so. In any case, it’s another option for our toolkit.

It feels better to have bad outcomes in a predictable world in which we failed, than to have bad outcomes for no discernible reason.

Rumination focuses on things that have happened in the past,

Worry focuses on events in the future, our anxious thoughts about worst-case scenarios.

Only brooding, however, was associated with greater levels of depression in women. So, brooding is one link between gender and depression.

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.

Rumination predicts depression, and grief-related rumination predicts complicated grief.

The sneaky problem with rumination is that while one is ruminating, it feels as though you are seeking out the truth of the matter.

Repeatedly returning to aspects of the loss or one’s grief that cannot be changed does not help us learn to tolerate the painful reality over the long term.

when they stopped trying to avoid feeling grief, grief was not as hard to tolerate as the effort required to avoid it.

passive discussion of the same negative feelings again and again is different from problem solving, encouragement, or advice.

But when accepting comes, it brings a certain sort of peace with it.

accepting also feels different from avoidance.

does not have any bearing on whether or not you hate the fact that your loved one died.

Accepting is focusing on life as it is now without the deceased, without forgetting the deceased.

Accepting is simple awareness of the reality, with the hope that the reality of the present moment can be meaningful or hard, joyful or challenging. Hope is a fundamental part of human psychology, when people are given enough support and time.

Accepting means that we don’t spend time in the past to the exclusion of spending time in the present, and that we don’t use our ability to time travel in order to avoid the present.

She told me she knew she could not bear to deal with what that reality meant, but she convinced herself she could probably think about it for two seconds. And that the next day, she could probably bear to think about it for twice that long. And twice that long on the next day. And so on and so on, until she could decide what to do.

only in the present moment can you feel joy or comfort.

you can remember times you felt joy or comfort, but you are actually feeling them in the present moment. Memories, or plans for the future, may stimulate you to have these feelings, but the feelings are happening in the here and now. Your body is making cortisol or opioids right now.

Human beings cannot choose to ignore only unpleasant feelings.

Ignoring the present makes it difficult to learn what works in the new ways you are living your life.