The art of grieving well

(I'm Pete, I work for CFAR, and I'd like to post things, so please upvote this comment to 20 karma.)

Thank you.

One thing I've found to be helpful when continuously deciding to look into the pain is remembering that I don't have to (or don't have to right now, at least). Staring into the pain is exhausting, and trying to force yourself to do it faster than you're ready for can add to the pile of pain to deal with.

At the same time, the reasons to do it (and do it now) don't go away. It's just easier to do it without distraction or self-deception when you're allowed to take a break if need be.

Great post. A few gut level thoughts before chewing on it.

1. This feels richly entangled with conscientiousness somehow.
2. Refusal to deal with a world full of horror seems potentially superrational to me, IIRC charity workers dealing directly with the magnitude of suffering in the developing world commit suicide at pretty high rates, although I'm having trouble sourcing this now and I imagine this is difficult to get good numbers on.
3. Tearing away illusions all at once is itself traumatic, avoiding the pain and only taking it in doses, especially if it can be taken in doses with qualified supervision, seems better than many alternatives. In particular, one interpretation of stuff like this that I've seen is something like "it is virtuous to try to take the pain all at once." Law of equal and opposite advice applies there, some people need to lean in more, but others likely less. Calibrating this is exactly what a good therapist can do.

This article made me realize how far I've gone in healing myself. My mother abused me. As a coping mechanism when I was about 15 years old I became disattached from pretty much everything I have/can have, in order to not feel much of a loss when it is taken from me. In order not to grieve.

And the fragment about two kinds of grief after a relationship ended made it even more clear. I never imagine the future. I tell myself I live so much in the present that it just doesn't occur to me, but the thing is that I learned not to. Because anything I imagine or want - can be taken away from me, and I would look stupid for being angry at the world/fate for taking away from me something that was not even yet mine. There are parts of my life where this seems a reasonable thing to do, for example my son has a diagnosis of a genetic disease that kills 90% of affected people in infancy. He's almost 7 years old, so he's already an outlier. Any day the disease can activate and the dying will start. Not planning a future for and with him feels reasonable. In autumn I finally visited local association of deaf people with a vague intention of giving him a community, in which he'll be able to feel compatible in the future, but that doesn't count as a plan. It's a vague intention. "I'll put him in one place with the people that are a bit more like him than me and he'll have a better chance of fitting in".

Last year, for the first time in my life I bought for Tadek and me a week-long holiday in Greece. And when it was close to the end, I started planning: I want to do that again, maybe a bit closer to the season than mid-May. And in two years I want to take the kids with us for this kind of holiday. I keep that thought, I return to it. It's very strange to me, I've never had one like this. I've never made plans for me or my family and here I am making them. Making it. One plan.

Recently another plan has shown up. About owning a flat, provided that my parents give me a lot of money once they sell their valuable house (one version of this plan has them not giving me money, but buying a flat and then renting it to me at no charge for a few years until we move out of the area). There is a proverb in Polish: nie dziel skóry na żywym niedźwiedziu (do not divide the skin of a live bear), warning against planning too far in the future or basing your plans on something that is not particularly likely to happen. This plan feels a lot like a live bear. Add to that my craving for emigrating caused by gaslighting politics of the new government (I've been gaslighted over half of my life and seeing it happen on this scale makes me quite anxious). But I keep it. I've even looked at some offers, to get the idea of prices. And just now I realized there is even a third and fourth plan.

So altoghether it seems that I'm finally allowing myself to care. I'm finally allowing myself to get attached and (at least to some extent) ignore the all-pervading fear of losing things and people.

I think the first step to this revelation was rephrasing the classic greek "panta rei". Earlier only temporal permanence could give things reason to exist (since nothing is permanent, nothing had the reason to exist and I was not entitled to "have" anything) and I managed to change that a few years ago. Everything passes. But you know what? For now, for this year and maybe next and maybe even some years more - this boy is mine. Everything passes and everything will be lost, but this is my home now, even if it will not be the last, final home of my life. Impermanency does not make it any less of a home than the final one. There was the thought "therefore I am allowed to attach myself to owning this car/having this child" but I never truly believed it. Until recently, that is.

I'd like to suggest that grieving is how we experience the process of a very, very deep part of our psyches becoming familiar with a painful truth. It doesn't happen only when someone dies. For instance, people go through a very similar process when mourning the loss of a romantic relationship, or when struck with an injury or illness that takes away something they hold dear (e.g., quadriplegia). I think we even see smaller versions of it when people break a precious and sentimental object, or when they fail to get a job or into a school they had really hoped for, or even sometimes when getting rid of a piece of clothing they've had for a few years.

Worth noting that a pretty mainstream emotion research theory agrees in that it suggests that the function of sadness seems to be to disengage from goal pursuit:

What is appraisal theory? In simplest form, its essence is the claim that emotions are elicited by evaluations (appraisals) of events and situations. For example, sadness felt when a romantic relationship ends may be elicited by the appraisals that something desired has been lost, with certainty, and cannot be recovered (Roseman, 1984; see, e.g., Frijda, 1986; Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987; Scherer, 1993b; Smith & Lazarus, 1993; Stein & Levine, 1987) [...]

In contrast to early work that viewed emotion as disorganized and disorganizing (e.g., Young, 1961), contemporary analyses maintain that in many cases emotions are likely, at beyond chance levels, to have adaptive value in coping with the situations that elicit them (e.g., Izard, 1977; Lazarus, 1991b). For example, the behavioral passivity of sadness (which involves a diminution in approach behavior) is often an appropriate response to the death of a loved one, whereas angry protests would be a futile waste of energy. In contrast, the protest and attack behavior that is characteristic of anger seems an appropriate response to physical or psychological harm inflicted by another person (insofar as it can alter the harm-doer's behavior or deter its recurrence), whereas passive acceptance might well perpetuate or exacerbate the injury (see, e.g., Milgram, 1974; Staub, 1989). [...]

Physically dissimilar events (such as the death of a parent and the birth of a child) may produce the same emotion (e.g., sadness) if they are appraised in similar ways (e.g., as involving a loss of something valued). An infinite number of situations can elicit the emotion because any situation that is appraised as specified will evoke the same emotion, including situations that have never before been encountered. Thus, the loss of one's first love or first cherished possession is likely to elicit sadness; and if people develop the ability to clone copies of themselves, a man who wants this capability but believes that he has lost it will feel sad. [...]

Several theorists maintain that the appraisal system has evolved to process information that predicts when particular emotional responses are likely to provide effective coping (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988a; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Roseman, 1984; Smith, 1991). Appraisals then guide coping by selecting the emotional responses from an organism's repertoire that are most likely to help attain important needs and goals under those conditions

For example, as discussed earlier, the typical response profile of sadness involves passivity and failure to pursue reward (Klinger, 1975; Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994; Seligman, 1975), whereas anger prototypically involves protest or attack responses (e.g., Averill, 1982; Roseman et al., 1994). In several appraisal models (e.g., Roseman, Antoniou, & Jose, 1996; Scherer, 1984a), one appraisal distinguishing sadness from anger is whether the person perceives control potential in the situation to be low versus high. This makes functional sense because if nothing can be done about a motive-inconsistent situation, then the passivity of sadness conserves resources— resources that protest or attack would waste; whereas if something can be done, then protest or attack could deter, reduce, or prevent the recurrence of another person's harmful action while passivity would result in a suboptimal adaptation (see also Perrez & Reicherts, 1992)

-- Roseman, I. J., & Smith, C. A. 2001. Appraisal theory: Overview, assumptions, varieties, controversies. In Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research.

Thank you!

I resonate with a lot of this, and it's really reassuring to hear that this is a common human experience. In particular, I've been choosing amongst job options lately, and I notice that I grieve for the choices I've passed over: I imagine the futures that could have been. For a while, I tried to ignore the pain - avoid confronting the fact that I could only choose one of a few possible futures - by prolonging the decision. And I found that, with time, I came to confront the true state of the world, and that at that point I had a better understanding of who I am and what matters to me.

Great read!

I agree that resisting grief is a very bad idea. Resisting negative emotions strengthens them and prevent us from processing them. I feel that suffering is mainly about resisting emotions.

Pain alone doesn't cause suffering. Suffering comes with resisting the pain.

A while ago a hypnotist told me that a feeling takes around 90 seconds to be processed if it doesn't get restarted. I think the loss of a loved one does take 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more time but, it's still not that long provided one doesn't resist the process.

After that point the feeling is dealt with and the whole body still needs time to integrate the change and come back to full power, but feeling don't need much time if you feel them intensively instead of resisting them.

I could instead turn my mind to the pain, and look at it in exquisite detail. Where exactly do I feel it? Is it hot or cold? Is it throbbing or sharp or something else? What exactly is the most aversive aspect of it? This doesn't stop the experience of pain, but it does stop most of my inclination to jump and yell and get mad at myself for dropping the object in the first place.

I do think that first order perception like that has value but I don't think it's enough. Second-order effects or the relationship to the experience is also important.

Good guiding questions are:
What is this experience doing with me?
What changes for me through having this experience?

This is a superb post: very well written, pointing to a skill of extreme importance for every rationalist.

I just want to add my two cents on the modality of grieving.
In my life I've been quite lucky, having had to mourn only the death of my grandparents, of two dogs and one relationship.
All but the last have had little emotional impact on my life: thanks to technology and modern medicine, they happened very slowly, and I feel that I had the time to adjust to a life without those beings, taking a little dose of grief every day until the loss eventually happened.
Losing that relationship instead was much harder. It happen very abruptly, and the woman chose to cut completely the contacts with me afterward. It took me years to process it completely, although the pain subsided in weeks, there was always a process gnarling at the corner of my subconscious. I guess this means there is a kind of inertia, an emotional quality that must be digested, and when it can happen slowly it becomes far easier.

I'm sorry for your pain, and glad you didn't, so to speak, waste it.

I wonder whether statements like "He's in a better place" might not be helpful to people who really believe it?

But I also wonder whether people grieving over a death are really grieving over the person's death, or over their loss of that person. Resentment of "he's in a better place" might be resentment of making the griever aware that she doesn't really care if he's in a better place.

As to humans, well, I suspect the best chance we have of not destroying ourselves is genetic or machine augmentation of intelligence on a massive scale in the near future. We may be smart enough to come up with solutions for our problems, but we aren't anywhere near smart enough for half of the population to agree on practical solutions to difficult problems. Practical solutions are inherently unpopular. The main message taught by our movies and literature is that you can solve all problems without making compromises, because that's what people will pay money to hear.

(I didn't say it was a good chance. I said it was the best chance.)

Of course, we'd then quickly come up with new, more-complicated ways of destroying ourselves more thoroughly.

I'm reminded of Ozy's posts on radical acceptance, specifically this one.

It looks to me like it's possible to resist grief, at least to some extent. I think people do it all the time. And I think it's an error to do so.

It is only an error if it continues on too long. Avoidance in most circumstances is a natural and innate part of the process of dealing with grief.

Avoidance is sometimes an adaptive strategy in coping with adversity and sometimes maladaptive. In the case of bereavement, experiential avoidance usually plays a role in facilitating the healing process. The emotional pain associated with new information that a loved one has died is so severe that people need time interspersed with periods of respite in order to be able to fully acknowledge the unwanted reality. Respite can be achieved using cognitive avoidance, and sometimes by also avoiding contact with triggers of emotion. When avoidance is used adaptively, it facilitates processing of the painful information as well as restoration of the capacity for a satisfying ongoing life. As processing and restoration are achieved, the need for avoidance diminishes and the strategy must be relinquished. If it is not, or if avoidance is over-used in the wake of bereavement, the strategy can backfire. Processing difficult information is impeded rather than facilitated and acute grief is prolonged. (Shear, p. 357)

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I could instead turn my mind to the pain, and look at it in exquisite detail.

This sounds potentially dangerous to me. You could easily retraumatize yourself or deepen your grief by doing this. It is probably best to try to do this when with someone else and also not too early in the grief process. This does not mean that you should never do this, however, as this is something that has to happen eventually.

The feelings from grief have an undulating or wave like motion. There will be times where you can face your feeling and times when you cannot. This is totally fine. It does, however, become important as more time progresses for you to make sense of the loss and find benefit in it, which fortunately often becomes easier as time progresses:

Those who were able to make sense of their loss typically did so by seeing the death as predictable or as a natural condition of life or by suggesting that the death was comprehensible within the context of their religious or spiritual beliefs. On the other hand, those who were able to find benefit in the experience tended to report that they had learned something important from it, about themselves (e.g., that they had the strength to cope with the adversity), about others (e.g., the value of family and relationships), or about the meaning of life (e.g., learned what is important in life). (Davis, C.G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J. p.570)

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I think the first three so-called "stages of grief"

I don’t think these stages are currently accepted anymore as they are seen to be too rigid. See here for some recent developments on the understanding of grief and bereavement.

It required a choice, every moment, to keep my focus on what hurt rather than on how much it hurt or how unfair things were or any other story that decreased the pain I felt in that moment. And it was tiring to make that decision continuously.

I think the power from this actually comes from the perspective that you are taking on the loss rather than the simple fact that you are thinking about it. For example, I think there was a big benefit from not thinking about how unfair it was.

In summary, I think your post is describing something that should happen in the later stages of the grief process. It might also not be suited for people with avoidant attachment styles. There is no doubt that they are some ways to do it better than others, for example this looks pretty good. My opinion, though, is that if you were trying to find out how to handle grief well, then it would be more important to look at things like what your strategies are: to handle it, to seek help from others for it, to compartmentalise it, to challenge the unhelpful thinking it will induce etc. See here for more.

P.S. can you please add a summary break somewhere in your post.

"I think skillful grief can bring us more into touch with our faculty of seeing the world plainly as we already know it to be."

Perhaps. But I think grieving need not do so, grieving can be destructive. I also think "skilled grieving" can often mean let it go, move on. I think "skilled grieving" is another aspect of thinking clearly. It seems we agree, so far.

But then "skilled grieving" is a positive aspect of grieving. I think it possible to argue that avoiding grief is another way of saying "skillful grieving". Embracing grief, wallowing in grief, those are to be AVOIDED, skillfully.

If grief simply means realising the painful truth of something and getting over it then, of course, we're all in favour of that. But that isn't all what grief encompasses, it's more than that. It's often unavoidable, emotional not rational. The term "skilled grieving" seems to ignore that aspect.

Beautifully written; thank you for sharing this.

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"When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Lao Tzu