31/05/2022
What Is Grief.
Grief is the natural reaction to loss. Grief is both a universal and a personal experience. Individual experiences of grief vary and are influenced by the nature of the loss.
It is a state of sadness, but also it is a state of yearning and desire for something that it’s outside your reach.
Going through grief requires a reordering of brain connections.
How we show up to grief strongly dictates whether we end up in complicated (prolonged) or non-complicated grief.
The Biology of Grief
The brain areas that are associated with craving, motivation, and pursuit, are the primary brain areas that are active in the state of grief.
When we lose somebody, the activation of these areas puts us in an anticipatory state. The mind is seeking how to resolve the craving.
People with Complicated grief show reward-related activity (activity of neurons associated with motivational states) in the nucleus accumbens (brain center in which dopamine acts to make us desire and pursuit things).
The hippocampus is a brain area involved in the formation of new memories.
There are cells in the hippocampus that fire anytime that we enter a particular familiar location. We also have cells that represent proximity.
Trace cells: activated when we expect something to be at a particular location but it is not.
Trace cells become very active when we lose someone.
The Five Stages of Grief by Elisabeth Kubler Ross
Denial: the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible.
Anger: Underneath anger is pain
Bargaining: We want life returned to what it was; we want our loved ones restored. We want to go back in time.
Depression: Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined.
Acceptance: This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality.
However, modern psychology suggests that not everybody experiences all the stages and not everybody moves thru those stages in a linear manner.
The 3 Dimensions of Relationships
We map our experience of people in 3 dimensions:
Space
Time
Closeness
There is a unique brain region that is activated in all three conditions and has to do with how far you are from somebody in space, time, and emotional closeness. This area is called the inferior parietal lobule.
Our map of people is not a map of emotional closeness per se, it is a map of an emotional closeness that is connected with your map of where they are in physical space and where they are in time.
Tools For Grief — Summary:
Dedicate some time for rational grieving: acceptance of the new reality while anchoring to the attachment.
2. Quality sleep, for handling emotions better and neuroplasticity.
3. Non-Sleep Deep Rest protocols.
4. Prepare yourself for grief: regulate the levels of catecholamines (epinephrine) and engage in a healthy cortisol pattern.
5. Dr. Frances O’Connor’s grief questionnaires: https://www.maryfrancesoconnor.com/ysl-scale
Keep reading to understand more about the tools.
Tool: Remapping Relationships
Our ability to find someone in space and time is a prediction of the requirements to engage in the attachments.
After the loss of someone, the map has to be reordered.
When someone is taken away, grief is the process of untangling that relationship between where people are in space, in time, and our attachment to them.
Our memory bank, and our ability to predict where and when they will be, change. The whole map is obliterated. But the problem is that the attachment persists.
Best way to go thru grief: Remap the dimensions while maintaining closeness. Don’t try to trick yourself into thinking that what you lost was not important.
The knowledge that someone is gone is something that we can understand logically but emotionally is hard to undo from a memory perspective.
Tool: Adaptively Processing Grief
You don’t want to break the attachment or reduce it.
Maintain your sense of attachment. But engage differently with that attachment.
Set a period of time (5 minutes or 1 hour, whatever you can handle) in which you feel the attachment deeply, but DO NOT engage in counterfactual thinking.
Counterfactual thoughts are the “what ifs”. These thoughts are related to guilt. [Most likely] we are not responsible for that person passing away.
Think about the attachment in a rich way, but hold that grief in the present, and connect it to your immediate physical environment. Orient yourself in current space and time.
Grief is like a phantom limb. It feels like the limb is present when it is actually not there. You expect something to be there but it is not.
Tool: Manage Adrenaline
People with the highest levels of adrenaline pre-treatment have the highest levels of complicated grief symptoms post-treatment.
Practical conclusion: by reducing stress and anxiety, you are preparing yourself to access grief in a healthy manner.
Tool: Mind-Body Connection
When you have a high degree of vagal tone (mind-body connection), you are always activating the break in your stress system.
If you feel challenged in accessing the feelings of attachment, practicing a mind-body relationship (breathing exercises for example) can be helpful.
If you already feel the attachment very intensely, it might not be useful to strengthen that mind-body connection, because it’s already high.
Tool: Cortisol and Sleep
We are a diurnal species.
Diurnal pattern: Cortisol is going to be high right around waking, and is going to be highest about 45 minutes post waking. Then it drops gradually, such that at night it is and remains very low.
For people experiencing complicated grieving, the afternoon and night cortisol levels are significantly higher.
Getting adequate sleep and establishing a normal pattern of cortisol can be really helpful to have a healthier period of grief.
The best way to establish this healthy pattern is through sleep and sunlight.
