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February 11 - February 14, 2024
the brain has a problem to solve when a loved one has died.
the brain has a problem to solve when a loved one has died.
Losing our one-and-only overwhelms us, because we need our loved ones as much as we need food and water.
Losing our one-and-only overwhelms us, because we need our loved ones as much as we need food and water.
Grief is a moment that recurs over and over.
Grief is a moment that recurs over and over.
for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time.
for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time.
My mother felt very strongly about coming to visit me in my new place. “I need to be able to visualize you where you are now,” she said. It helped her to feel closer to me, and I think mapping where I was made her miss me less in my absence.
My mother felt very strongly about coming to visit me in my new place. “I need to be able to visualize you where you are now,” she said. It helped her to feel closer to me, and I think mapping where I was made her miss me less in my absence.
when we are upset, our blood pressure goes up, and when we feel comforted, it normalizes.
Our brain continuously logs the information received through all of our senses, building up a vast store of probabilities and likelihoods, noting associations and parallels between events.
learning is unrelated to our intentions,
In a room full of family members, you can feel as though you are on an alien planet, with no interest in sharing yourself and no belief that they would understand you anyway.
The overlap of our resources is an overlap in our identities, as “we” becomes more important than “you” and “me.”
You may wonder who you are now, or what your purpose is, without the other person.
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.
The time spent in communion with that famous person—in an emotional state, and possibly enhanced by dancing and screaming in the midst of a like-minded group, or even by alcohol and drugs—can mimic the time spent in attachment bonding.
We often feel close to musicians—we feel we can trust them, because they say what no one else says in their lyrics.
How could they write those lyrics if they did not deeply understand you, if they were not speaking to you directly?
That ability to take someone else’s perspective is an example of the cognitive aspect of empathy.
compassion, or caring, goes beyond empathy. It is the motivation to help or comfort the person when you can take their perspective and know how they are feeling.
In our early days as a species, those who persisted in the belief that their mate would return with food stayed with their young. The young of those parents who waited with them had a better chance of surviving.
It is because your loved one lived, and because you loved each other, that means when the person is no longer in the outer world, they still physically exist—in the wiring of the neurons of your brain.
Preparing for a memorial includes calling family and friends, and telling them of the death, and hearing their condolences.
When family and friends travel many miles, put on special clothing, and join together to give hugs and smiles and love—these all mark the moment as different, and that moment stamps in our memory the fact of the death.
physical proof that their bodies are no longer the vessels for the souls that we love.
memorials are proof that others share our new understanding that our loved one is gone.
When a loved one has died, we have a memory of learning that they died.
episodic memories; they are detailed memories of a specific event.
the implicit belief in the persistence of our deceased loved one may actually interfere with learning about our new reality.
this conflict leads to the extended period of time that grieving takes.
Resolving incompatible beliefs interferes with learning.
(denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance),
Many bereaved people do not experience anger, for example, and therefore feel they are grieving wrong, or have not completed all their “grief work.”
the stages are not linear, and that people go in and out of denial at different times.
The hero (griever) enters an unfamiliar and terrifying world, and after an arduous journey, returns transformed, with new wisdom. The journey is composed of a series of nearly impossible obstacles (stages) to be overcome, making the hero noble when they succeed in their quest.
The relative increase in acceptance as compared to the relative decline of grief distress does happen, thankfully, but over a long period of time.
On the waves of grief, eventually acceptance rises more often, and distress falls off in intensity without completely disappearing.
loss-oriented stressors—the painful emotions of losing someone, the way that everything seems to remind us of them, even though we know they are gone.
restoration-oriented stressors. These are all the tasks that we now have to do because the person is gone.
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.
depression tends to pervade every aspect of life.
the hallmark of their grief experience was yearning.
Feeling relief over a loved one’s death, though not uncommon, is terribly stigmatizing,
for a person with chronic grieving, the awful feelings stem from missing the deceased, and if there is guilt, it is also focused on something about the loss.
The primary symptoms of this chronic grieving included (1) preoccupation with yearning for the deceased, and (2) traumatic symptoms caused by the loss.
naming a disorder lets people know that others have struggled in the same way, which can be very reassuring.
one in ten bereaved people do not adjust over a long period of time,
This small portion of people do not return to feeling their lives are meaningful over time.
