What happens to the brain when we're grieving?

I chatted with a neuroscientist to find out...

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

For about a year, when I was around eight or nine, I felt sick almost every day. Each morning I’d wake up to a wave of nausea that wouldn’t settle. I just wanted to stay curled up in my padded Garfield sleeping bag, safe within my cabin bed. 

My parents took me to our doctor, a family friend, who told me - as I sat, legs dangling from the treatment bed - that there was nothing wrong with me. I was faking it. When I picture that memory it feels murky: the room I sat in, receiving this diagnosis of fakery, is shadowed black. I can see now that the doctor was right. Physically I was fine. But she was also wrong. That stomach swirling sickness I felt was real. I was being bullied: taunts to do with my protruding teeth followed me around the playground. Instead of admitting that this was the reason I didn’t want to go to school (something which was perhaps too painful to admit to) I avoided my reality. But my brain and my body knew… and they reacted as such. 

I remembered this period of time only recently, as I sat down to discuss the impact grief as on the brain with Mary-Frances O Connor, PHD. My behaviour back then was nothing to do with grief, or grieving, and yet avoiding things until my body forces me to acknowledge them has become a pattern of behaviour. Why? It’s been proven time and time again that it doesn’t serve me.

If anyone knows the answer to that it’s Mary-Frances. As associate professor of psychology at The University of Arizona where she runs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress lab her days are spent teaching students, reading and designing new research studies around grief and working with other clinical psychologists to help shape the direction of the field of grief. Together with psychiatrists Harald Gundel and Richard Lane, she was also the first to complete a neuroimaging study of grief (essentially putting people currently grieving into an MRI scanner to see the impact on their brains). She puts all this research, alongside her own story of grief, in her book The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss. So essentially she’s an expert in what’s happening inside our bodies when we grieve, and how much control we have over it. 

There are chunks of my life that I regret. Moments with my mum that I missed; conversations that I turned away from deeming them too painful. More recently, caught within the continuing lockdowns, my need for human contact led me towards red flags. My instincts were lowered and vulnerable… danger fluttered like bunting in the wind. If I could go back and change those things would I? Or perhaps the real questions is could I? How much control do we have over our own behaviour? Over how our body’s (and brain’s) respond to life’s more traumatic moments? When I was in primary school I didn’t know the reasoning behind my sickness, I just knew I was sick. When mum was ill I didn’t know I was sinking into a form of denial. I thought I was ‘coping.’ During lockdown I felt ashamed of my own suffering, and it made itself known in other ways. I now realise that when we bury things they will find their own way of climbing back up. 

This is why I found my conversation with Mary-Frances so comforting. As she is attempting to answer the why. Why does the death of someone we love, as she writes, “lead to behaviour and beliefs that are inexplicable, even to you?” So much of my past behaviour feels alien to me, yet I did it. And it led me here. What was going on in my brain, did it think it was protecting me? Did it, in some ways, succeed?

Of course, there’s so much neuroscience can’t figure out and much of my conversation with Mary-Frances is spent discussing the real life examples she has come across in her years of work. It’s this that makes speaking to Mary-Frances so special, she knows that science can sound unsympathetic, that its learnings can be hard to relate to our own lives. She takes what science has found and translates it with kindness and understanding. 

Before I arrived to meet her, I had emailed to say I’d recently been mugged and wasn’t feeling my best self as I was still quite shaken from it. She replied: “you can be whichever self arrives.” Her warmth led to one of the most interesting and comforting conversations I’ve ever had. I hope you can also gain perspective and understanding from it, like I did…

In all your years of work, what would you say you’ve found the most fascinating? 

Back in the 1980s and 1990s the way we were thinking about grief was that it was this stressful event that happens to you. As if you’ve gone to work and all of a sudden you have twice the workload; that’s the way we were thinking about it. It was extra stress and extra emotions that you had to work through. In some ways that’s true, but what neuroscience has taught us - more recently - is that’s not the only way to think about it. As a lot of grief is down to pair bonds, that for grief to occur there has to be a bond first that physically encodes in our brain.

When that person dies it’s the subtraction of something. It isn’t so much that something has been added but that something has been amputated from your functioning. 

In your book you write that “the idea that a person simply does not exist any more does not follow the rules the brain has learned over a lifetime.” That it’s akin to making yourself breakfast, sitting down and there suddenly being no food on your plate. 

That loss isn’t something you’re ever going to recover. That’s different from a workload that might go down after a while. It’s added a piece to the conversation that I think people will find really helpful. 

If you think of it as a workload, you’ll be thinking all this time “I’m not working hard enough to feel like myself again”. 

We even call it ‘grief work.’ But perhaps the idea should be more reaching a place of acceptance.

In your book you differentiate between ‘grief’ and ‘grieving.’ Saying that while you will feel the “universally human emotion of grief forever, your grieving changes over time.” I found this helpful as one of the reasons I set up this newsletter is because, for a long time, I was ashamed that I was still feeling grief, as if I’d failed somehow. That people would think ‘why is she still banging on about that?’ But now I see that how I live and behave within that grieving has adapted over time.

That realisation actually came from doing studies, as I was putting people in a scanner and I’m getting these images for ‘grief’ but the questions I’m asking are about grieving. But I was studying that current moment. I’d have to put people in the scanner more than once to see grieving. They’re different so I needed to make that distinction. 

I see a lot of people on Twitter now saying “grief never goes away” which, while that is true, at some level that is a terribly upsetting to hear if you’re in the throes of turmoil. It’s like hearing ‘this is how I’ll feel forever.’ I think making the distinction shows that [how you feel] will change over time, and that you can be both a person who has grief and a person who has a happy life. It won’t be like this forever.

What I like about your research is that while we may all experience grief different ultimately what’s happening inside can be quite similar. It gives you a feeling of normalcy. 

I also think it’s helpful to know what’s coming. That once you’ve gotten through one awful wave you know how to handle it. Familiarity in grief makes a big difference – sort of like “OK I know what this is, this is the sort of day I’m going to have, I’ve had a day like this before, it’s not going to be fun, but I will get through it.” Which is different than [the beginning] when it just feels completely overwhelming. 

When you tell people what you do, what are the most commonly asked questions?

The most commonly said thing is ‘you seem way too happy to be studying this’ 

That’s what people say to me! 

I say, ‘it’s not unrelated’ I am this happy because I study grief (and myself). Because it really does give you some perspective. I think it really changes the way you live your life. But the most common questions I get include: how long does it last? Then mostly ‘is this normal, let me tell you about X, Y, Z’ 

What would you say is the answer to the ‘is this normal’? 

The vast majority of things that I hear are normal. So things like ‘I know this sounds crazy but I can’t get rid of his clothes as I think he might need them’ or ‘this sounds bizarre but I keep looking for her in a crowd.’ Yet when I say everything is ‘normal’  I mean ‘what’s happened to other people.’ It doesn’t mean that there aren’t skills we could learn to make navigating that totally normal experience easier. 

I was talking with someone earlier about his sister’s death. His mum would visit the grave every day but he found he couldn’t visit the grave at all. The reality wasn’t about the action of going to the grave, it was about what the grave meant to each individual. What does visiting it (or not) do in ongoing life? For his mum it didn’t seem like it was giving her any comfort, she simply felt this obligation. For him, it was more he just didn’t want to touch it too closely. He was OK as long as he didn’t get upset and going to the grave would make him upset. So it’s not to do with the action itself, but how it fits with you. For him it was avoidance, for her it was rumination - doing the same thing again and again, which often isn’t very helpful.

When family members grieve in completely different ways I’ve seen it cause clashes.  As you so desperately want that person - who has experienced the same thing as you - to be on the same level as you. 

This is all to do with how people express grief. There was a study which looked at couples who had lost a child that found that fathers (often, in this instance) tried very hard to be strong for their wives. But what that meant was that the mother didn’t think that the father was experiencing grief, as he wasn’t expressing it. It’s important to be able to explain that even if the two of you are experiencing the exact same thing how you react is going to be different. So talking about it and asking ‘what’s going to be the most helpful’ for each of you could help. 

Do you have any examples of this? 

I knew a couple who had lost their daughter and one of them could not bear to see photographs of her. But the other wanted to look at her photograph every day. They came to this agreement where they had one room which had photographs everywhere, which he could go in but she could avoid. It’s that sense of what do you need, what do I need and how can we navigate through that, without assuming the needs or intentions of the other person. 

One of the things I think about a lot is, when thinking about my own grief, is how much I flipped into almost auto-pilot. I look back and I wonder how much control do we have on our own grief, and the actions it leads us to? 

That’s why I say everything at the beginning is normal, but maybe at some point [those behaviours] stop being useful. I think your brain and your body will react and that is, often, not at a conscious level. Much of what we feel and think and do, and how we react physically, is out of our control. For example, our blood pressure goes up - no one would choose that. But it happens. At some level it’s not just you who is in control. Some people feel incredibly angry, in a way they’ve never experienced before. They don’t want to feel that way and they don’t want to do the things they’re doing… yet there they are, doing them. The more we talk about that it makes it a little more understandable for those who have not had an extreme loss. It can be bizarre to be around someone who has changed so much.

When I look back on how much I was drinking, in the wake of my mum’s death, I thought it was normal behaviour for an early twenty-something. It’s only now that my friends and I can see that it was perhaps a reaction to what had happened to me. But there was no way I could tell them that when I didn’t even know myself. I was just trying to pretend that this thing hadn’t happened. 

The loss of a parent during that time of your life when you’re supposed to be turning outward and turning away from your family, that will get in the way of [recognising] avoidant behaviours. It’s really difficult to extrapolate the two. You just don’t know yourself very well yet, think of all those strong emotions that you’re still learning how to navigate and now here’s the strongest of emotions. And your friends aren’t going to be able to know, as they’re all 19 too! Grief education in schools is also so poor that most of us don’t know what we can say or what we can do.

I struggle to remember my mum, even all these years later. I know lots of other people feel the same. Is there an explanation as to why? 

It’s very uncommon to think about memory from this perspective. There’s not a lot written or studied. It’s known that [during the initial period of loss] your concentration is affected. But long-term memory hasn’t been studied as such. But our memory isn’t as under our control as we think it is. It’s not like a library you can wander, and pick and choose. As sometimes we will be flooded by our memories, brought back by a smell or handwriting. Yet, other times, we think ‘I can’t remember them any more.’ But just because the memories you want can’t come to consciousness, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. This can be so frustrating - and we genuinely don’t know why it is. [What we do know] is that the state you are in can impact the memories you’re retrieving, so if you’re in a state of avoidance where you don’t want to think about what’s happened, you can’t just switch into suddenly remembering them. I know, for myself, because I had a lot of anger with my mum after she died. I wouldn’t have described it that way then but now I can see that I was angry and that was blocking me from having happy memories. But as I processed that over time, and began to forgive her, then other memories would appear. As I didn’t have any memories of cuddling her but now I do. 

Time will slowly unravel things, just because you feel something now doesn’t mean you will feel that way forever. That’s the same with memory, just because you’re blocked now doesn’t mean you always will be.

It can also be that there’s so much going on under the surface. We all have internal relationships with our loved ones that go beyond what’s actually happening on the outside. When we are apart from them we can picture where they are, what they’re doing and it doesn’t really matter if they’re actually doing those things. And even when they die that goes on. It’s a continuing bond and you can continue to develop that relationship. 

With my mother I feel both angry with her and I feel guilty [for that] and it’s like ‘what that’s about? She’s gone!’ The attachment bond means you still want them to approve of you or you still feel guilty for the way you’re living… so often talking through and writing what you wish you’d said, what you wish they’d said to you can help. That thing we’re avoiding, that’s the piece we’re trying to get to so that we can work with it. Sometimes [it’s just about] knowing what it is: writing it out and reading it, again and again.

It can be hard when your body naturally pushes away pain. But I like the idea of a relationship living on in our head, and evolving in its own way. One that’s different from what it would be if they were alive but which is special in its own right.

I’ve had people say that [eventually] it was much harder to live avoiding than it was to face [whatever it was they were avoiding]. But then for so many people I don’t think they even know they’re in a state of avoidance - after all, that’s what the brain is trying to do: avoid it! So it may not even be letting you know it.

So you think writing letters could help us confront certain realities? 

It’s so hard to give blanket advice. As it could help some but then if you feel guilty, writing letters again and again might be ruminating. I think the best way is to use grieving as a form of learning. If what you’re doing isn’t creating any change in how you’re living your life it’s probably time to do something different. What is it that helps me live a meaningful live? If that’s the direction you’re going in you’re doing alright. It may take a lot of time. I joke about having a big tool kit [but what I mean] is try different things. It’s tough. Get support. Seek out the people who really get it.

Since launching this newsletter I’ve been afraid that perhaps it might not be helpful for me. That I could be, weekly, pushing myself back into a state that is unhealthy. That I should focus my efforts more on ‘moving on.’ But having this conversation with Mary-Frances showed me that what I’m doing is right. That I’m using grieving as a form of learning, trying to see how it can shape my life. I’m also using this newsletter as a way to get support and find the people who really get it. So thank you to Mary-Frances for this revelation but also to whoever is reading this. You’re really helping me and I hope this landing in your inbox each week is helping you too.