Grieving process

Photo by Alex Green on Pexels.com

Clinical psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor says, “Grief is a universal experience, and when we can connect, it is better.”

O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, studies what happens in our brains when we experience grief. She says grieving is a form of learning — one that teaches us how to be in the world without someone we love in it. “The background is running all the time for people who are grieving, thinking about new habits and how they interact now.”

Adjusting to the fact that we’ll never again spend time with our loved ones can be painful. It takes time — and involves changes in the brain. “What we see in science is, if you have a grief experience and you have support so that you have a little bit of time to learn, and confidence from the people around you, that you will in fact adapt.”

O’Connor’s upcoming book, The Grieving Brain, explores what scientists know about how our minds grapple with the loss of a loved one.

When we have the experience of being in a relationship, the sense of who we are is bound up with that other person. The word sibling and the word spouse imply two people. And so when the other person is gone, we suddenly have to learn a totally new set of rules to operate in the world. The “we” is as important as the “you” and “me,” and the brain, interestingly, really does encode it that way. So when people say “I feel like I’ve lost part of myself,” that is for a good reason. The brain also feels that way, as it were, and codes the “we” as much as the “you” and the “I.”

Difference between grief and grieving

Photo by Kat Smith on Pexels.com

Grief is that emotional state that just knocks you off your feet and comes over you like a wave. Grieving necessarily has a time component to it. Grieving is what happens as we adapt to the fact that our loved one is gone, that we’re carrying the absence of them with us. And the reason that this distinction makes sense is, grief is a natural response to loss — so we’ll feel grief forever.

But “grieving” means that our relationship with that grief changes over time. So the first time, maybe even the first 100 times, you’re knocked off your feet with grief, it feels terrible and awful and unfamiliar. But maybe the 101st time, you think to yourself, “I hate this, I don’t want this to be true. But I do recognize it, and I do know that I will get through the wave.”

Emotions involved in grieving

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

The range of emotions that someone experiences when we’re grieving is as long a list as the range of emotions we have in any relationship. Commonly there’s panic, there’s anxiety, there’s sadness, there’s yearning. But what we sometimes forget is that there’s also difficulty concentrating and confusion about what happens next.

We have neuroimaging studies basically of grief, of the momentary reaction where you have that emotional yearning experience. There are less than a handful of studies looking at more than one moment in the same person across time — so looking at their grieving trajectory. What we know right now in these early days of the neurobiology of grief is really coming from snapshots.

Having said that, one of the things that we know is that grief is tied to all sorts of different brain functions we have, from being able to recall memories to taking the perspective of another person, to even things like regulating our heart rate and the experience of pain and suffering. So lots of different parts of the brain are orchestrating this experience that we have when we feel grief.

Prolonged grief

Photo by Inzmam Khan on Pexels.com

When you’re knocked over by that wave of grief, you want to know, “When will this end?” From a research perspective, there is a very small proportion of people who might have what is called prolonged grief disorder, something we start looking for after six months or a year after a death or loss.

It’s less than 10% of people experience prolonged grief disorder. And what that means is 90% of people experience difficult grief and suffering, but don’t have a disorder after losing a loved one.

Grief and grieving are not the same

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, who specializes in grief, says that there is a difference between grief and grieving.

You will likely never stop grieving the loss of your loved one, 20 years later, the sadness and yearning will still be there, but it won’t always be the overwhelming waves of pain that bring you to your knees at the beginning. Those pangs can last for months or even years, but eventually, they will start to be balanced by the resiliency and the return to a meaningful life without the person.

There is no right or wrong way to grieve. You might be feeling sadness, disbelief, anger, guilt, or numbness right now, or all of the above at different times. “I think it’s useful for people to know that what they’re experiencing right now is a normal reaction,” O’Connor says.

O’Connor has studied these pangs of grief in the brain, and she sees a reliable pattern of activity among people who are thinking about a lost loved one. Areas involved in strong emotion, autobiographical memory, and emotion regulation are all activated during grief — the posterior and anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex, respectively. The brain’s reward circuit also gets activated, which O’Connor says corresponds to a feeling of yearning for the deceased.

A big part of the grieving process in the brain is trying to adjust to the new normal of life without that person. You remember them, you miss them, you crave them, and you don’t understand why they’re not there. You have all of these established memories and routines with this person, and now your brain has to try to relearn life without them in it.

“There’s this learning process that has to happen where that encoded person still exists in the brain but doesn’t exist on a physical plane, and we have to learn how to make sense of that mismatch,” O’Connor says. “Grieving is partially a form of learning that this person is no longer here and figuring out how to have a meaningful life with the presence of that absence.”

In order to accept the loss, you have to create new memories about it. As distressing as it may be at the time, one thing that makes this updating process easier is being with the person as they die. Our rituals around death — the funeral, crying and hugging, and sharing stories with family and friends — can also be helpful to lay down new memories that acknowledge the person isn’t coming back.

When that disconnect continues to exist, grief can become harder to resolve.