The Grieving Brain Quotes

“In humans as well, it is because your loved one existed that certain neurons fire together and certain proteins are folded in your brain in particular ways. 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.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and 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. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“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.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and 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. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“When I say that grief is a kind of learning, I don’t mean learning something easy. This is not like mastering a specific skill such as riding a bike, learning how to keep our balance and how to use the brakes. This type of learning is like traveling to an alien planet and learning that the air cannot be breathed, and therefore you need to remember to wear oxygen all the time. Or that the day has thirty-two hours, even though your body continues operating as though it has twenty-four. Grief changes the rules of the game, rules that you thought you knew and had been using until this point.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“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.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Our loved ones are just as important to us as food and water. If I ask you right now where your boyfriend or girlfriend is, or where you would go to pick up your children, you probably have a pretty good idea of how to locate them. We use brain maps to find our loved ones, to predict where they are, and to search for them when they are gone. A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time. 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.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved one to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we can learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again. We must update our virtual maps, creating a revised cartography of our new lives. Is it any wonder that it takes many weeks and months of grief and new experiences to learn our way around again?”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“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.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and 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. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Grief-related ruminations tend to center on a few topics, as evidenced by Stroebe and Schut, and their colleagues, Dutch psychologists Paul Boelen and Maarten Eisma.2 The five topics include: (1) one’s negative emotional reactions to the loss (reactions), (2) the unfairness of the death (injustice), (3) the meaning and consequences of the loss (meaning), (4) the reactions of others to one’s grief (relationships), and (5) counterfactual thoughts about the events leading up to the death (what-ifs).”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Grief is similar, in that anyone’s life is forever changed because of loss, even when they have adjusted well.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“ability”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“In a way, mindfulness is moving one’s attention to awareness of here, awareness of now, and awareness of close. You might be paying attention to what you are doing, but that is not the same as being aware that you are doing it in the present, here in this room, and with the human beings around you.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Worry focuses on events in the future, our anxious thoughts about worst-case scenarios. The process of these thoughts tends to be repetitive, passive, and negative.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“In worrying and ruminating, we are also imagining an alternative reality, in a similar way to creating “what ifs” during counterfactual thinking. Rumination focuses on things that have happened in the past, like ruminating over something we did wrong, or about how someone treated us.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Although the involuntary memories are more upsetting, they are not actually more frequent than voluntary ones. Recalling memories of both types is more common after a stressful life event than when life is smooth sailing. The involuntary ones feel more frequent because they bother us more, probably because we are not prepared for the emotions they bring up.”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

“Intrusive thoughts are memories of personal events and people that come to mind suddenly and spontaneously, without our intending to recall them. Remembering the loss reminds us of how much we miss them, which leads to feelings of distress or grief. But are intrusive thoughts more frequent than other kinds of thoughts, or do they just feel that way?”
― Mary-Frances O'Connor, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss