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

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

The “undoing” of negative emotions with positive emotions works because positive emotions change cognitive and physiological states. Positive emotions broaden people’s attention, encourage creative thinking, and expand people’s coping toolkit.

There are at least two reasons why we usually don’t choose mood-boosting activities when grieving. First, doing fun things is not considered the “right” way to act, so we worry what other people will think about our choice. Second, we anticipate that doing something enjoyable after a sad experience will make us feel guilty. When we violate social norms or expectations, guilt is a common response. However, even though people anticipated that they would feel guilty doing something fun, no one in the study felt guilty after watching the funny clip. But the anticipation of guilt can deter people from engaging in enjoyable activities. Other research supports this finding that humans are pretty bad forecasters of how they will feel in future situations.6

Flexibility, as I mentioned before, is beneficial, like contemplating what happened, feeling the gravity of our situation, expressing our anger or sadness, attempting to understand how our life story has changed, and more. 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.

Yearning, anger, disbelief, and depressive moods decrease across time after the death of a loved one.7 These feelings do not follow stages, and people still experience them years after their loss. But their frequency declines as the frequency of acceptance increases. Acceptance may be the outcome of learning that a new reality is here to stay and that we can cope with it.

What we spend time thinking about matters. How we react to what we are thinking about, and what we feel, matters. How we handle what our minds do moment to moment can help. These insights remind me of the Serenity Prayer. Inherent in that plea for help is a recognition we have to flexibly deal with the trials we face: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

We cannot change mortality. We cannot change the suffering that accompanies loss. We cannot change intrusive thoughts and waves of grief. But if we have great courage, we may be able to learn to respond to these indisputable circumstances with greater skill and deeper understanding. The challenge is, of course, the wisdom to know the difference, learning when to pause and reflect and when to push on. The mysterious and overwhelming feelings of grief require wisdom, but wisdom is gained through experience. We turn to our loved ones for what wisdom they can give us. We may turn to our spiritual or moral values to gu...

Psychologists call our thoughts about what could have happened counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking often involves our real or imagined role in contributing to the death or the suffering of our loved one. It is the million “what ifs” that roll through our mind: If I had done this, he never would have died. If I had not done that, he never would have died. If the doctor had done this, if the train had not been late, if he had not had that last drink . . . 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.

The irony is that this type of thinking, creating the myriad situations that could have happened, is both illogical and unhelpful in adapting to what has actually happened. Our brain may still be doing it for a reason, however. Some would say the reason is to try to figure out how to avoid deaths in the future, but it may be simpler than that. Our brain, by focusing constantly on the limitless number of alternatives to reality, is numbed or distracted from the actual, painful reality that the person is never coming back. 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.

Or, mulling over these counterfactuals can become a habit, a knee-jerk way of responding to pangs of grief. Although we are trading painful guilt for equally painful grief, at least guilt means we had some control over the situation. Believing we had control, even though we failed to use it, means the world is not completely unpredictable. It feels better to have bad outcom...

Of course, it is one possibility, but it is also possible that he might have died despite getting there earlier. We can endlessly consider what could be true in the counterfactual world where we wish we lived.

Well, the truth is, psychologists do not yet have all the answers to when (or how much) processing of thoughts about grief is helpful and when it is not. Researchers are actively grappling with the paradox that you cannot learn about what has happened, and therefore why you feel terrible grief, without focusing on yourself, on your sad and angry feelings. You cannot fully understand what has happened without letting your mind wander through the territory of rumination. At the same time, these ruminative thoughts can develop a life of their own, and when grieving people persist in these repetitive thoughts, they tend to develop complicated grief or depression. Although we do not have all the answers yet, some paths through the paradox are becoming clearer.

Rumination can be divided into two aspects, which Nolen-Hoeksema called reflection and brooding. An example of reflection is writing down what you are thinking, perhaps several days in a row, and analyzing your thoughts. Reflection is an intentional turning inward, engaging in problem solving in order to alleviate your feelings. On the other hand, brooding reflects a passive state. Brooding is finding yourself thinking about your mood even though you did not set out to think about it, and persisting in these thoughts even when you try to stop thinking about it. Brooding is passively wondering why you feel down or comparing your current situation with how you think things should be.

Let’s look at some examples. Often people worry about their own reactions to the death of a loved one, trying to understand the range and intensity of their feelings and whether those reactions are normal. Thoughts about the injustice of the death include feeling that the person should not have died and wondering why this happened to you and not someone else. Focusing on the meaning of the death includes thoughts about what the consequences of the death are for you, or how your life has changed since the loss. Relationships with friends and family are often affected by grief and loss, and these ruminations are about whether they are providing the right support, or the support that you desire. What-ifs are the counterfactual thoughts covered at the beginning of this chapter.

So, rumination is an avoidance process, although not intentional. 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. I have known people who have told me that when they stopped trying to avoid feeling grief, grief was not as hard to tolerate as the effort required to avoid it.

The 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.

that will never allow us to forget. Choosing to spend time thinking of someone you care for now does not mean forgetting someone you loved intensely, and whom you will love forever. 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. In the next chapter, we’ll explore what it might mean to live in the present in the face of grief.

In A Grief Observed, the beautiful book C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife, he writes: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

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 the present moment also offers us possibility. For example, it offers us other members of our species. And only in the present moment can you feel joy or comfort. You cannot feel those things in the past or in the future. If that sounds unlikely, think of it this way: 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. If you are stuck focusing your awareness in a virtual world where what if is true, or where your loved one is alive or your friends understand your grief better, there is a downside: you are missing what is actually happening right now. Although

Human beings cannot choose to ignore only unpleasant feelings. If you are numb to your momentary experience, you are numb to it all, the good and the bad. You forgo having your heart warmed by the barista who gives you a bright smile or being amused by the puppy loping in the park. If you avoid painful feelings by avoiding the awareness of what is going on around you, what you end up with is being unaware of what is going on around you. It is not possible to avoid only negative feelings. Ignoring the present makes it difficult to learn what works in the new ways you are living your life. On the other hand, when you are present in the moment, the dopamine, opioid, and oxytocin feedback help you move toward a restored, meaningful life.

There is a poem called “The Sleepless Ones,” by Lawrence Tirnauer, that I like a lot. In the poem, Tirnauer writes about being awake in the night, twisting and turning, unhappy about his state. He wonders how many other people are also awake, in this tortured state. If they all got up right now, and came out of their houses to walk in the street, he imagines how a river of people would flow together, all unified by their sleeplessness. It is beautiful.

Ben’s Bells has been so impactful because it was born out of a very real truth that can happen in grieving. Not everything that people said to Jeannette was kind or helpful. Often their words were hurtful, even with the best of intentions. I spend my life thinking about grieving and yet I still cringe when reflecting on things I’ve said to a grieving person. It’s hard to know what to say and we so often get it wrong.

As I described in this book’s introduction, grief is different from grieving. Grief is the painful emotional state that naturally rises and fades away, again and again. People might imagine that grief is “over” when the waves happen less often, or less intensely. They are right in one sense: if the goal is to suffer less-intense and less-frequent pangs of grief, this reduction is likely to happen naturally over time with experience. On the other hand, if a bereaved person does not experience the lessening of intensity and frequency over time as they were anticipating, they may begin to ruminate not just on their loss but on their reaction to it as well. They may begin to wonder, Is my grief normal? Others are expecting me to “move on” and I do not feel as though I have “moved on.” Does that mean that I will always feel this way? Monitoring like this has the unfortunate effect of keeping grief at the forefront of your mind, which can heighten and prolong your grief reaction instead of allowing it to gradually become less painful with time.

Grieving is the change from having your attachment needs fulfilled by your deceased loved one, to having them consistently fulfilled in other ways. That does not necessarily mean fulfilled by one other person. Having a meaningful life is not the same as remarrying or having another child. In fact, these relationships might distract you from pursuing a meaningful life, if they get in the way of reaching your goal.

Moreover, what constitutes a meaningful life has very likely been changed by your recent close acquaintance with mortality. Death has a brutal way of clarifying to us what is meaningful. This clarity can lead to the discovery that our day-to-day activities are completely unrelated to the values we hold. Such a realization is frustrating and depressing and can lead to great upheaval if we are willing to change our day-to-day lives in pursuit of the newly realized values.

While I felt grief over her absence in this new part of my life, I continued to adapt to her death, and I continued to learn how to restore a meaningful life. My relationship with her, present and past, was transformed when I focused on all the good she wanted for me, despite all the difficulties we’d had throughout our relationship.

We can also allow our interactions with our beloved ones who are gone to grow and change, even if only in our minds. This transformation of our relationship with them can affect our capacity to live fully in the present, and to create aspirations for a meaningful future. It can also help us to feel more connected to them, to the best parts of them. It can allow us to become the best daughter, son, friend, spouse, or parent they would have wanted us to be if they had lived to see it. Our love for them is still there, but we must find a different way to express it, a different outlet for our love for them. Although they can no longer benefit from our kindness and care directly, their absence from our physical world does not make our relationship to them any less valuable.

As important as it is to study those who are having the greatest difficulty adjusting to life after loss, there might be much to be gained by studying the people who have created beautiful, meaningful, loving lives after terrible losses. Although this resilience has not yet been the subject of investigation in neuroscience, in psychology it is called post-traumatic growth. People who have experienced enormous growth have much to teach us, and their brain may have an important role, from how they process reminders of their loved one to the ways they become loving, compassionate, and effective in their present lives.

Now you know that grieving is a form of learning. Acute grief insists that we learn new habits, since our old habits automatically involved our loved one. Each day after their death, our brain is changed by our new reality, much as the rodents’ neurons had to learn to stop firing when the blue LEGO tower was removed from their box. Our little gray computer must update its predictions, as we can no longer expect our loved one to arrive home from work at six o’clock, or to pick up their cell phone when we call them with news. We learn that our loved one does not exist in the three dimensions of here, now, and close that we are expecting. We find new ways to express our continuing bonds, transforming what close looks like, because while our loved one remains in the epigenetics of our DNA and in our memories, we can no longer express our caring for them in the physical world or seek out their soothing touch.

Instead of imagining an alternate what if reality, we must learn to be connected to them with our feet planted firmly in the present moment. This

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 restore a meaningful life.

Extrapolating from what Dweck writes, if you find yourself saying, “I am not able to adapt to life after loss,” try adding “yet” to the end of that sentence. The frustration in learning about your new world, the despair that you will never create a restored life, are feelings created when your brain is growing and changing. 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. Learning how others have restored a meaningful life can provide new things to try. Your pastor, your grandmother, your favorite novelist or blog writer, a psychologist—consult with someone new, with whom you have not yet talked about your personal experience of grief. Choose someone who has had experience with grieving. Ask what they did to cope, or, even more likely, what they still do to cope. Try out these new approaches, try out what worked for them even if you feel foolish, and then pay attention to what works, what actually makes you feel better in the present moment. Even if none of their ideas work, you may at least feel more connected to someone, more connected to humanity. And since connection is part of what is missing from a grief-stricken life, there is opportunity in it.

What they do with their lives tightly links with their mortality. The finite nature of our life affects what we do, what we value, how we conduct ourselves.

Death adds meaning into life, because life is a limited gift. I close by reading to them a quote from the great Zen Master Dōgen: “Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”

Coming into contact with death when we lose a loved one can be overwhelming. It can fill us with awe, and it can cause us to reevaluate our view of the world, of our life, of our relationships. Death changes us, and we cannot function in the world in the same way we once did. If you now understand, deeply and truly, that people we love can disappear forever, it changes how we love, what we believe, and what we value. This reevaluation is a form of learning. Coming into contact with great suffering, experiencing the devastation of wanting so desperately for your loved one to be here as they once were, and suffering the reality that this is no longer the case, can be overwhelming. These experiences are part of the nature of getting to be born and getting to live.

MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab in investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body. O’Connor earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona in 2004 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Having grown up in Montana, she now lives in sunny Tucson, Arizona.