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

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

When people practice new ways of thinking—from learning meditation to undergoing psychotherapy—neuroimaging studies show their patterns of brain activation change.

Here is the punchline: more slowing, or more unconscious processing of the loss when doing other tasks, was linked to reports of fewer and less-intense grief symptoms.

On the other hand, they are not gone, because they are with us in our brain and in our mind. The physical makeup of our brain—the structure of our neurons—has been changed by them. In this sense, you could say that a piece of them physically lives on.

Neuroscientists have discovered two pieces of compelling evidence for the idea that retrospection and prospection share neural machinery. First, when people’s brains are scanned as they are remembering their past and imagining their future, there is significant overlap in the brain regions used for these two mental functions. Second, when people have difficulty remembering events in the past that happened to them, they also tend to have difficulty imagining the future and what they might do.

Restoring a meaningful life is half of the dual process model of coping with bereavement. To restore a meaningful life, we have to be able to imagine that life. The inability to generate possible future events is at the heart of hopelessness. We have to be able to imagine the future sufficiently enough at least to make plans, even if only for next weekend.

human beings find losses to be twice as powerful as gains. This is called loss aversion, and although I have not seen it applied in the context of bereavement, I think the concept may help us to understand the common experience of having misgivings about a new relationship.

Gaining a new relationship is simply not going to fill the hole that exists. Here is the key—the point of new roles and new relationships is not to fill the hole. Expecting that they will can only lead to disappointment.

When explaining who an attachment figure is, I ask two questions. First, does this person think I am special, and do I think they are special, compared to other people in the world? Second, do I trust this person would be there for me if I needed them, and do I trust I would make the effort to be there for them, if they needed me?

Now you know that grieving is a form of learning.

Grief changes the rules of the game, rules that you thought you knew and had been using until this point.

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.

Choose someone who has had experience with grieving. Ask what they did to cope, or, even more likely, what they still do to cope.

Death adds meaning into life, because life is a limited gift.