The virtual map
Our brains create a virtual map of our world. This map includes familiar places, objects, and most importantly of all – our loved ones. We’ve evolved to know how to find the essentials, no matter what: we know how to find food, water and shelter, and - just as essential - the people we love. If these people aren’t with us, our virtual map has a pretty good idea of where they are and how to get to them if necessary.
But when a loved one dies, they are no longer in the physical world. Our brain can’t put a pin on the virtual map for that person anymore. The result is often terror and confusion. It can take weeks, months or years for our brains to update our virtual map without our loved one in it.
And even then, our brains are still left with the dilemma of where this person is, if not in the world with us. We have always had a ‘place’ for them, and now, depending on whether we hold spiritual beliefs, there may be no place at all. We’re left with a horribly confusing absence our brains will always struggle to make sense of – the person is too important to just be gone, but they are also not here: a contradiction researcher Mary O’Connor calls ‘gone but everlasting... you are walking through two worlds at the same time.’ (O’Connor, 2023, p. 5)
How can knowing this help me?
If we know that our brains are struggling to make sense of the concrete facts of the death, we’re more likely to be patient with ourselves and our whānau.
Because of the way our brains are wired, they desperately want to understand where our loved one is. Depending on your beliefs, some people find it helpful to create a place (e.g. the cemetery, the beach, the garden) where you can go to feel close to them. This could be a place that has memories of them, the place where they’re buried, or just somewhere you like to be.
Fight or Flight
Our brain sees the death of a loved one as a threat – to who we are, our understanding of the world, even to our survival. Grief often triggers a ‘fight or flight’ response, where our entire body goes into overdrive. This may happen occasionally or often, in the early days of a loss or when you're further down the track. Stress hormones flood our bloodstream, blood pressure and heart rate increase and breathing speeds up. Every part of our brain and body is affected by this response: sleep, memory, the immune system, our energy levels. It can also contribute to brain fog – a very common grief symptom and one of the brain’s many ways of trying to protect you from this hard new reality (Shulman, 2021).
How can knowing this help me?
Our brains can get stuck in a pattern that reinforces this stress response, so that it happens more and more often when we’re triggered. The good news is that over time and with patience, we can rewire our brains: changing this pattern by choosing other ways of coping with the intense waves of grief. These ways of coping are often called ‘healthier’, but we could just think of them as being gentler – gentler for your own system and for those around you. For example, you might talk through your experiences, feelings and triggers with a therapist, express them creatively through art, gardening or writing, exercise and care for your physical health, or join a support group of like-minded people. These modes of coping help your brain to learn to regulate the stress response to grief, and channel it into something gentler.
Bonding
Like many creatures, we’re built by evolution to want to keep our loved ones close to us. Our relationships with our partner and our children (and other closely connected loved ones) literally rewire our brains. When we’re physically and emotionally close to our loved ones, our brains are rewarded with chemicals like oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’). We are programmed to feel good when close to them, and to feel stressed when we're not. When we’re separated, we feel an intense urge to go out and look for them.
When a loved one dies, we’re left with the urge to go and make sure they’re safe, but we will never again feel the relief of finding them. This distress is a big part of the grief we feel. Many people describe it as losing a part of themselves, and that’s actually really accurate. That person has left an imprint on your brain, and they are a part of you, even after they’ve died (O’Connor, 2023).
How can knowing this help me?
The beautiful thing is that the person has left a physical mark on us – they are imprinted on our brains. That doesn’t mean we won’t still feel intense yearning for them, and distress that we can’t have them physically close again. But in a very real way you carry them with you, and always will.
Grief is learning
Your brain has to go on a steep learning curve to figure out how to live in this new way - without your loved one in the world with you. And perhaps the hardest part is that this is a learning curve many of us don't want to go on. If your parent, partner or child has died, it’s normal to feel like you don’t want to learn to live without them.
But if we're still alive, and our loved one isn’t, our brains do work to find a way to exist without them. Researchers think that a big part of grief is learning what this new reality looks and feels like. And over time, adapting so that you can navigate it. This work is hard, and it’s exhausting (O’Connor, 2023).
How can knowing this help me?
Part of the struggle of grief is envisaging a future without your person in it. Grief research has shown that imagining the future is especially hard for grieving people.
In her book, Mary France O’Connor talks about the benefits of trying to be in the present - as much as possible. The present is what you have right now, in this moment. Of course, if it helps you to look forward to the future, that’s great too. But when things feel really difficult, being in the present can help you find your footing: let yourself really feel your emotions without judging them, prioritise just what’s needed of you in the here and now (even if that feels like something mundane like stacking the dishwasher), and be patient with yourself.
Looking at grief from a neuroscientific point of view tells us that what’s happening in our grieving brains is completely normal. This can help us understand why our brain does certain things and works in particular ways when we’re grieving – and that all of this is not only normal, but is also designed to help us learn to navigate and adapt to our new reality.
The impossibility that our loved one is no longer in the world with us is the hardest thing our brain will ever have to work through. But we also know that the human brain is incredibly good at learning and adapting, and that it’s working to find a way for you to keep your loved one close as you live in your present and look towards your future.
If you’d like to read more on this topic, this article was written using these two resources. Please do have a look at them if you’d like to find out more:
O’Connor, M (2023). The Grieving Brain. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Written by Jenny Zilmer
