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. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.

You see, grief never ends, and it is a natural response to loss. You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even years after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience. But, whereas you will feel the universally human emotion of grief forever, your grieving, your adaptation, changes the experience over time.

And because the brain excels at prediction, it often just fills in information that is not actually there—it completes the patterns it expects to see.

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. The loved one has, with no explanation, stopped returning our calls—stopped communicating with us altogether. How could someone who loves us do that? They have become distant, or unbelievably mean, and that is infuriating. Your brain doesn’t understand why; it doesn’t understand that dimensions can simply disappear. If they don’t feel close, then they just feel distant, and you want to fix it rather than believe they are permanently gone. This (mis)belief leads to an intense upwelling of emotions.

Grief emerges as distress, caused by the absence of a specific person who filled one’s attachment needs and therefore was part of one’s identity and way of functioning in the world.

the process of grieving is not just about psychological or metaphorical change. Grieving requires neural rewiring as well.

We appear to be hardwired to be influenced by the people around us, to be sensitive to cues of what they are feeling—in other words, we are hardwired with the neural building blocks of closeness.

The problem, and the damage that this has caused for bereaved people, is that the model she developed has been considered more than a description of grief of those she interviewed, and taken as a prescription for how to grieve. Many bereaved people do not experience anger, for example, and therefore feel they are grieving wrong, or have not completed all their “grief work.” Clinicians may say that a patient is in denial, without understanding that the stages are not linear, and that people go in and out of denial at different times. In sum, very few people experience the orderly progression of stages that Kübler-Ross proposed, and tragically, they may feel they are not normal if they do not. This old, outdated model has been replaced with models that have more empirical science behind them, but clinicians sometimes persist in using it, and the general public is usually not aware that our understanding of grieving has developed significantly.

Grieving is very mentally demanding. The mental capacity to plan for the future after the death of a loved one requires us to draw on our past experiences, generate and anticipate possible outcomes, and keep our larger values, goals, and desires in mind—all while considering our present circumstances and our general knowledge of the world. Integrating all of this information into a coherent plan that we can act on requires quite a lot of cognitive capacity!

One brain region distinguished the complicated grief and resilient groups; it was the nucleus accumbens,

It seemed very strange that the group who was not adjusting as well, the complicated grief group, would have more activation in the network responsible for reward. To be clear, reward as used by neuroscientists is not just something pleasurable. Reward is the encoding that means, yes, we want that, let’s do that again, let’s see them again.

The most reliable predictor of good mental health is having a large toolkit of strategies to deal with one’s emotions and deploying the right strategy at the right time.

both concurrently and at the later time point. Notably, women tend to ruminate more than men, and women also have higher levels of depression. Women scored higher on both reflecting and on brooding than men, suggesting they are more contemplative overall.

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

wrenching. Stroebe and her colleagues formulated a remarkable hypothesis: letting our thoughts run through our mind again and again may be a way to distract ourselves from the painful feelings of grief. Thinking about the loss and the consequences of the loss might actually be a way to avoid feeling the loss. She and her colleagues called this the rumination as avoidance hypothesis.

The eyes are literally an extension of the neurons of the brain, a window into where the brain’s attention is focused.

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.

Yearning is not only for the past, for something that was. Yearning also means that there is something we do not like about the present.

Human beings have the capacity to override all sorts of behavioral patterns that evolution has set in motion.

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.

Although many aspects of what is happening right now may be painful, there are also aspects of the present moment that are wonderful.

It is a remarkable idea, that the content of our thoughts, or where we deploy our attention, changes the hard drive of the brain, the wiring of our synapses. This is a dynamic process. Our neural connections generate the content of our thoughts, and at the same time, our guiding the content of our thoughts changes those exact same neural connections.

During grieving, we are sometimes redefining our identity, based on what the brain is learning about our new world and what we enjoy or find worthwhile.

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.

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

Psychologists have defined learning as “the process by which changes in behavior arise as a result of experiences interacting with the world.”

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