Deliberate Grieving

post by Raemon · 2022-05-30T20:49:19.860Z · LW · GW · 16 comments

Contents

  Examples
    Example 1: Grieving for Justice
    Example 2: Grieving for a no-longer-good doctor
    Grieving for Decisions-At-Work
    Grieving vs Letting Go
  What's my deliberate grieving process like?
None
16 comments

This post is hopefully useful on its own, but begins a series ultimately about grieving over a world that might (or, might not) be doomed [LW · GW]. 

It starts with some pieces from a previous  coordination frontier sequence [LW · GW] post, but goes into more detail.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I didn’t have much experience with grief [? · GW]. By the end of the pandemic, I had gotten quite a lot of practice grieving for things. I now think of grieving as a key life skill, with ramifications for epistemics, action, and coordination. 

I had read The Art of Grieving Well [LW · GW], which gave me footholds to get started with. But I still had to develop some skills from scratch, and apply them in novel ways.

Grieving probably works differently for different people. Your mileage may vary. But for me, grieving is the act of wrapping my brain around the fact that something important to me doesn’t exist anymore. Or can’t exist right now. Or perhaps never existed. It typically comes in two steps – an “orientation” step, where my brain traces around the lines of the thing-that-isn’t-there, coming to understand what reality is actually shaped like now. And then a “catharsis” step, once I fully understand that the thing is gone. 

The first step can take hours, weeks or months. The second step often goes quickly for me (but, ultimately grieving is messy. See notes towards the end)

You can grieve for people who are gone. You can grieve for things you used to enjoy. You can grieve for principles that were important to you but aren’t practical to apply right now. 

Grieving is important in single-player mode – if I’m holding onto something that’s not there anymore, my thoughts and decision-making are distorted. I can’t make good plans if my map of reality is full of leftover wishful markings of things that aren’t there. 

I now think of grieving as relevant for coordination as well – if I’m hanging onto something that’s not real anymore, the distortion in my map also affects people who are trying to negotiate with me and find the least-bad-option available. My clinging becomes their problem.

Grieving is tricky because it’s often unclear when you’re supposed to grieve, and when you’re supposed to fight for something you still care about. 

Grieving healthily takes time. But I now think grieving healthily and quickly is a skill you can learn. 

Unfortunately, practicing the skill of grieving requires you to actually experience loss. The biggest things to grieve are (hopefully) rare. But there are smaller, day-to-day losses you can practice on.

Examples

Example 1: Grieving for Justice

What's grieving actually like?

My first explicit model of "applied grief" came early in the pandemic. It was a bit of a "grieving on hard mode", because I had to grieve for an abstract concept. I had a conflict in my quarantine-bubble about covid policy. We had disagreements about the facts-of-the-matter of how dangerous covid was, or what mitigation efforts would help. We had disagreements about the best ways to negotiate over policy, and how to interpret our policies, and how to enforce violations. We were also just, like, really stressed out.

Different bubble members have different takes on exactly what happened. My from vantage point, what I remember is: 

Some bubble-members did things that I felt hurt by. A few months later, I found myself recovered from the raw-stress of the experience, but still feeling psychologically messed up, waking up crying about once a week.

For awhile, I was confused about what I actually wanted. Maybe I wanted a bubble-member to admit they were wrong and apologize. It became clear that wasn't going to happen. 

After several weeks of ruminating, I eventually figured out I actually wanted something like: "Bring in community elders that I respect, and that the bubble-members in question respect. I want the hypothetical elders to interview everyone, forming a judgment about what went wrong and whether anyone was at fault. And somehow I want this to enter into my social sphere's overall accounting." 

Maybe the result might be "No Ray, your story about the situation is wrong", but at least it'd feel resolved.

And the fact was... it just wasn't really possible to get that. There weren't many contenders for "community elders" that my bubble-members and I all respected. One of such community leader was kinda available. But actually adjudicating the dispute properly was a big time commitment, in a period where the entire world was reeling from the pandemic. It required buy-in from other bubble-members. Insofar as everyone was willing to spend time on it, it wasn't really worth the rest of my social world's time to track the social accounting for one particular quaranbubble's disputes.

At some point, I was talking through all of this with a friend, and things sorted themselves out in my head. I saw clearly that the particular flavor of justice I wanted wasn't practical, and wasn't going to become practical, and wishing for it wasn't helping me. And that was sad.

And with that...

...I understood the shape of the world. And I let my wish-for-justice go. And I cried. It felt cathartic.

I wasn't fully healed, but I felt a weight lifted, and could focus on moving forward.

Example 2: Grieving for a no-longer-good doctor

I had a friend who had a doctor that was really good for them. The doctor was attentive to their problems and their psychological state. The doctor paid attention to lots of details, formed models of what might possibly go going wrong with my friend's body... but also listened when they got contradicting evidence and updated those models.

The doctor was respectful of particular traumas and triggers that my friend had. This was important, because the sorts of problems my friend needed a doctor to fix often related to those triggers and traumas.

But, slowly, over a couple years, the doctor started seeming more impatient and sharp. They stopped listening to my friend's requests. And meanwhile the hit rate of "new useful interventions" that they proposed started dropping. (I actually knew multiple friends with the same doctor, who around this time reported the doctor being increasingly unpleasant to work with.)

At some point my friend decided "Man, this doctor is no longer net-positive in my life."

And this sucked, because good doctors are really hard to find. My friend's expected search process for a new doctor is really labor intensive and painful. And meanwhile... once upon a time, the doctor had been both really competent and actively nice, which was so rare. There had once been a really good working relationship there. And the health problems that were triggering and traumatic were going to make it particularly challenging to find a new doctor.

So my friend decided to hold a little funeral for the relationship-that-once-was.

My friend sat in her room, and lit a candle. She thought about all the good memories that her doctor had given her, and the help they had provided. She spent time reflecting on each of those memories. 

And then, she blew out the candle, and moved on with her day.

Grieving for Decisions-At-Work

My most common type of grief, which I do most deliberately, is for decisions at work. 

Often, it is the case that I want to execute a project one particular way. My teammates want to implement it some other particular way. 

Maybe my way really is better. But often the relative value of my solution is less than the value of the time I'd have to spend arguing with my colleagues about it. It's not worth the time to hash out every single decision. And it's not worth the damage to the coordination-fabric to constantly be second-guessing the authority of the decisionmakers in charge of a project.

Some examples of minor-grievings-at-work:

Grieving vs Letting Go

In an earlier version of this post, I considered focusing on "Letting Go" rather than "Grieving."  One of my goals was to highlight how grieving was relevant to coordination. "Letting go" was the actual thing coordinators need to do. Grieving is one particular way to do it, and isn't always the right approach.

But I decided to focus on the grieving frame. It highlights that there was actually something important about your-preferred-way-of-doing things. "Letting things go" sort of implies you're the one with the problem, and you just need to stop clinging. Grieving acknowledges that there was something special and meaningful to you. It's sad that it can't exist.

In an earlier Facebook post on this subject, Logan Strohl noted, and I can't think of better phrasing than:

I prefer "grieving". I think "letting go" is more likely to cause people a kind of confusion that leads them away from the correct action, while "grieving" will only cause them confusion of a "what is that supposed to mean?" kind. 

In practice, it seems to me that people who talk about "letting go" tend not to maintain a clear distinction between "letting go" and "giving up". But I don't think anybody accidentally gives up when their intention is to grieve. They do something like the opposite. Grieving is holding onto your awareness of the value of something while you take that awareness into the new world you're learning to live in, the one where the valued thing itself does not exist.

What's my deliberate grieving process like?

"Deliberate Grieving" is my process of noticing "Oh man, I sure do seem to be clinging to something that is maybe not real, or is gone now, or is no longer serving me. It's starting to look like that clinging is shooting myself in foot, and it'd be nice if I could stop."

And then... grieving, on purpose.

Despite having gotten a kind of ridiculous amount of practice at this, I'm still not that great at it, and not sure my current process is best. But here's what I currently do:

Your process might be different. I have no idea what the typical mind experience [LW · GW] is of grief. But hopefully this is at least a useful starting point.

Step 4 is where most of the work lives. The exact details vary depending on what I'm dealing with. Sometimes, once I've gotten to step 4, it happens kinda automatically. Once my attention is directed to the thing, my mind just starts adapting and loosening its resistance, and the thing fades away. Sometimes I deliberately reflect on it with explicit, verbalizable thoughts, and then I figure out what's going on, like a puzzle.

Sometimes step 4 takes months or years. I had several massive life transitions last year, which were extremely confusing to orient to. I left a relationship that'd been important to me. I changed my orientation to the concept of "community", which had been a major deal for me for the previous decade. I grappled with the question of how to relate to existential risk, and whether I felt "obligated" to work harder to prevent it.

Knowing that "it'd be helpful to grieve" couldn't make it go much faster. I'd spend a couple weeks reflecting deeply on the subject of my grief, and then I'd be pretty exhausted and need a month or two of not thinking about it. 

Sometimes step 4 benefits some kind of major ritual. Last year culminated with a small, personal solstice ceremony [LW · GW]with a few close friends. We leaned harder into "facing the darkness" than larger, public solstices [LW · GW] usually do, and deliberately didn't structure the event with an explicit "return to the light." We sat by a fire, mostly silently, for about an hour. 

Something about this dislodged some of my "stuckness" with grieving for community and x-risk. It didn't fully process the grief, but I felt something like 1/3rd of the heavy melancholy had faded away.

Sometimes, steps 4 and 5 repeat. I think one source of repetition is when you're not actually grieving a single thing. If you've lost a friend, you might be grieving many different aspects of the relationship. In the Art of Grieving Well [LW · GW], Val notes:

When I watch myself grieve, I typically don't find myself just thinking "This person is gone." Instead, my grief wants me to call up specific images of recurring events — holding the person while watching a show, texting them a funny picture & getting a smiley back, etc. — and then add to that image a feeling of pain that might say "…and that will never happen again." My mind goes to the feeling of wanting to watch a show with that person and remembering they're not there, or knowing that if I send a text they'll never see it and won't ever respond. My mind seems to want to rehearse the pain that will happen, until it becomes familiar and known and eventually a little smaller.

My own experience is that I might have grieved many different aspects of a person no longer being in my life. But months later I might find another aspect missing that I still hadn't processed. So I have steps of tracing and catharsis that repeat.

I have more to say on the subject of grief, but this seems like a good stopping point for now. Grieving isn't just a thing-that-happens-to-you. It is a skill, which can be cultivated. It can be practiced on relatively "minor" things (which may still feel like a major deal). Minor and Major grievings can have significantly different feel to them, but I think there is transfer in the skill between them.

I'm interested in hearing what other people's grieving processes are like.

16 comments

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comment by Raemon · 2022-08-27T18:19:43.553Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In an earlier discussion of these ideas, John Wentworth left this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], which I think is worth adding here:

Somewhat tangential, but I sometimes think about the sort of tradeoffs you're talking about in a different emotional/narrative lens, which might help spur other ideas for how to communicate it.

(I'm going to use an analogy from Mother of Learning, spoilers ahead)...

There's this scene in Mother of Learning where the incredibly powerful thousand-year-old lich king realizes he's in some sort of simulation, and that the protagonists are therefore presumably trying to extract information from him. Within seconds of realizing this, without any hesitation or hemming or hawing, he blows up his own soul in an attempt to destroy both himself and the protagonists (at least within the simulation). It's cold calculation: he concludes that he can't win the game, the best available move is to destroy the game and himself with it, and he just does that without hesitation.

That's what it looks like when someone is really good at "letting it go". There's a realization that he can't get everything he wants, a choice about what matters most, followed by ruthlessly throwing whatever is necessary under the bus in order to get what he values most.

The point I want to make here is that "grieving" successfully captures the difficulty aspect, in a way that "letting it go" doesn't. But a sometimes-workable substitute for grieving is ruthlessness.

Say you have to trade off between two sacred values. My Inner Villain says something like:

Humans hate trading off between sacred values, they'll hem and haw about it, make a big dramatic show out of the whole process - "grieving". But a large chunk of "grieving" is performative - not all of it, but a lot. Cultivate an identity of ruthlessness and coldheartedness, and you can instead perform a role which just makes the hard choices without the drama.

comment by Ruby · 2022-08-19T23:44:18.635Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Curated. While we tend to think about grief in the context of major loss, I think the mental skills involved are a big part of one's regular practice of rationality (both epistemic and applied). Grieving well is about navigating the difference between reality-as-is and reality-as-you-wish-it-was. The difference between the two is most salient when there's been loss, but the tension is always there as we always have to navigate it: either giving up on attaining our desires, clinging/fighting towards how we want things to be, or something more mature and effective that lies between. I think the last one is right yet is hard to do well. This post isn't the entire answer, but I'd love to see more in this genre of how to tackle this hard problem.

(A related problem, in my mind, is how to work hard on something when you assign a very low probability of success.)

comment by pjeby · 2022-05-31T05:19:59.795Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Upvoted: deliberate grieving is a critical self-improvement skill. I personally mostly frame it in terms of admitting, rather than letting go or accepting; in terms of your two steps, I've been calling the orientation part "admitting", and the catharsis part "grieving".

A lot of critical motivation drivers are hung up on trying to get positive things from people that we didn't get as kids, and that we created a bunch of coping mechanisms (e.g. most kinds of perfectionism) to work around.

Admitting that we were hurt by not getting those things and that our coping mechanisms will in fact not magically fix anything is a prerequisite to moving past them and actually living life. (Because otherwise our brains will keep insisting that if we try hard enough we can retroactively make everyone love and respect us.)

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2022-05-31T06:04:53.382Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hmm. I think admitting also makes sense to be considered a step in the process, but one of the important elements of what I'm calling "orientation" is locating-the-thing-that-needs-admitting, in the space of all the possible things you might need to admit.

I think sometimes the admitting part also is pretty trivial (although definitely sometimes even after locating it, admitting sucks and is super hard)

Thinking back to my experience... I'd say that in my grieving-for-justice, most of the process was "figuring out what needed grieving". But, in a lot of grieving-at-work, more of the work lives in the "admitting" part.

(I might update the post fleshing this out)

Replies from: pjeby
↑ comment by pjeby · 2022-05-31T13:18:35.777Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

one of the important elements of what I'm calling "orientation" is locating-the-thing-that-needs-admitting, in the space of all the possible things you might need to admit

True! Perhaps orientation should be that part in an orient-admit-grieve trifecta. It's certainly the longer part, anyway.

I mostly do orientation by asking what it is I least want to admit, most wish were not true, and/or am most afraid is true. Then admitting those things are true or at least that they might be or that I'm afraid they are or wish they weren't.

Also, per Curse of the Counterfactual, anything I think is a "should" is a good candidate for admitting the opposite, and the Work of Byron Katie (aka MBSR in current psych research lingo I think?) a good tool for doing so.

comment by Raemon · 2022-08-21T22:01:40.575Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems important to note as a followup: When I started conceptualizing this post, I had dealt with ~3 medium-sized grievings in a row (each of which was ~a week of dedicated effortful work to process, and move on to the next grieving). 

I had also started the process of ~2-3 major grievings (depending on how you count things).

Medium grieving rough summaries:

  • giving up on a friendship that had been important to me
  • giving up my investment in the Coordination Frontier framework (I'm still a bit confused about this

There were also some grieving-adjaecent things I'd consider more like "processing trauma" than like grieving, which also took ~ a week.

Major grieving examples:

  • leaving a major relationship
  • changing my relational stance [LW · GW] to my local community, and shifting to focus more on x-risk.
  • changing my conception of what kinds of "community" made sense in the first place
  • considering whether to work a lot harder on x-risk than I felt comfortable with

I thought I had a handle on minor/medium grievings, and developed a flow that processed it efficiently. My previous experience with friends dying and relationship breakups also hadn't been that rough for me, so I expected the upcoming major things to take a few month, and for my existing framework to mostly translate to them.

Instead, it's been over year, and I'm only just recently feeling "okay", and processed everything to a point where I feel like I've returned to (close to) my original baseline.

When I went to write this post a few months ago, I started off with a mindset of "this is a straightforward framework that works for me, which applies at multiple scales." As I wrote the post, I realized the major grievings were still ongoing and I hadn't actually fixed them. I rewrote the post a bunch to try and incorporate that. I think in the end I avoided saying anything false... but I think the post still has a bit of a vibe of "grieving is difficult but this Orient/Catharsis framework still feels like a solid core loop underlying it."

And now my belief is more like "geeze, major grievings are just big fucking deals, I don't even really know what to do with them really. You can work your way through them somewhat deliberately but holy christ they're messy and don't follow much of a schedule. Good luck, idk.

I'm not sure how to rewrite the post to get the Vibe of that right, but wanted to leave this comment to make it more clear.

comment by Raemon · 2024-01-06T21:24:47.405Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Not the most important update on this, but, I'm delighted that this improv comedy sketch managed to be a surprisingly good synopsis:

comment by Harlan · 2022-06-07T23:29:14.041Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is an important discussion to have and I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say in the rest of the series.

One concept that I wish more people knew about, and might be particularly relevant to this community, is disenfranchised grief, which is grief that is not understood or accepted by society or the people around you. If a relative dies, it is easy to receive support and understanding, even from complete strangers. If you are grieving about something that's e.g. difficult to explain, taboo, a secret, or unrelatable to most people, then you might end up processing your grief alone, which can suck. 

Replies from: Raemon
↑ comment by Raemon · 2022-08-21T22:14:58.491Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah I think the concept of disenfranchised or inexplicable seems really important.

comment by Raemon · 2022-05-31T06:11:19.302Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Sometime I might make another post, but will note here for now as a sort of appendix: I think one way grieving is useful is as a focus-tool. (See Focusing for Skeptics [LW · GW], or Hammertime Focusing [LW · GW], or the tag [? · GW])

Focusing is about trying to figure out something that feels wrong, or off, that you have some unconscious S1 information about but can't easily explain. When you eventually find the thing-that-is-wrong, it often comes with a felt shift, and relaxing.

This sort of maps onto the orientation and catharsis step of grieving, as I define it here. The orientation step can be trying on different focus-handles, and when you eventually fully see the situation, the catharsis is a kind of felt-shift.

I'm often not very good at focusing, but I've found the question "what is it that I maybe have to grieve, and let go of?" to be illuminating, and helpful for figuring out something that is bothering me.

comment by ambigram · 2024-01-06T16:29:00.061Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I used to deal with disappointment by minimizing it (e.g. it's not that important) or consoling myself (e.g. we'll do better next time). After reading this piece, I think to myself "disappointment is baby grief". 

Loss is a part of life, whether that is loss of something concrete/"real" or something that we imagined or hoped for. Disappointment is an opportunity to practice dealing with loss, so that I will be ready for the inevitable major losses in the future. I am sad because I did not get what I'd wanted or hoped for, and that is okay.

comment by Raemon · 2024-01-13T01:30:45.460Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think this post has the highest number of people who have reached out privately to me, thanking me for it. (I think 4-5 people). So seems like it's been at least pretty useful to some people.

I previously wrote an addendum a few months after publishing [LW(p) · GW(p)], mostly saying that while I stood by the technical words of the post, I felt like the narrative vibe of the post somewhat oversold my particular approach. Major grievings still seem to take a long time.

One update is that, the following December after writing this, I did a second "Private Dark Solstice" ritual, which felt like it dislodged more stuck-feeling and got me most of the way to feeling whole. And notably, now another year later, I still feel mostly fine. This winter I didn't feel the need to do any kind of grieving ritual. So, I think I didn't just get addicted to emotional grieving rituals, they actually seem to help. Hurray.

Other things that have felt helpful have been talking to individual people about things-I-needed-to-grieve, who were somehow familiar with the situation. It was helpful both from a practical "help me orient" kind of way. And there was something powerful about "witnessing" it with me, which was almost like a little mini-ritual.

So I guess my own personal update from the past 2 years is "lean even harder into grieving rituals." 

...

Followup work: I still want to write a followup post on "Pre Grieving in the face of uncertainty."

comment by tcheasdfjkl · 2022-05-31T03:33:56.127Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This reminds me strongly of the concept of Radical Acceptance, which comes from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and which I agree is often a necessary part of seeing and engaging with reality as it is. (Perhaps, more specifically, grieving as described here is an example of a way to achieve radical acceptance?)

Replies from: Raemon, H.Leslie
↑ comment by Raemon · 2022-05-31T03:47:28.797Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah, does seem related. I've come to find that grieving is sort of a particular flavor of approach to accomplish a bunch of other rationality techniques.

↑ comment by H.Leslie · 2022-08-20T14:06:15.778Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In a related way, it reminds me of IFS parts therapy and healing (which still seems kind of like magic to me).

comment by jungofthewon · 2022-08-20T16:32:08.669Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I found this post beautiful and somber in a sacred way.  Thank you.