The Silent Why: finding hope in grief and loss

Let's Chat... Grieving brains (with Mary-Frances O'Connor)

January 24, 2023 Claire Sandys, Mary-Frances O'Connor Episode 63
The Silent Why: finding hope in grief and loss
Let's Chat... Grieving brains (with Mary-Frances O'Connor)
Show Notes Transcript

#063. What is actually going on in the brain when we grieve? And how do grief and science work together?

This Let’s Chat episode explores the affect of grief on the brain and whether science can help us understand grief and love, or even prepare for loss.

These Let’s Chat… episodes pop-up every now and then instead our 101 loss episodes, as I (Claire Sandys) chat to a guest who has lived-experience or expertise in a particular area that can help us deal with, or prepare for, loss.

In this Let’s Chat I’m talking to Mary-Frances O'Connor, an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona, and author of the book 'The Grieving Brain: The surprising science of how we learn from love and loss'.

Mary-Frances conducts studies into understanding the grief process from a psychological and physiological point of view. 

Last year, a friend sent me an interview with Mary-Frances for The British Psychological Society and the headline was - 'You can't really study grief without studying love' - I instantly knew I needed to talk to Mary-Frances on the podcast about this, and when I asked her, she said 'yes!' (my favourite answer). 

Interview link: https://www.bps.org.uk/volume-35/may-2022/you-cant-really-study-grief-without-studying-love

Mary-Frances brings a new perspective to loss, the part love plays in grief, why going through love and then loss is still better than not loving at all, and the distinction between grief and grieving, as she chats from from a viewpoint we haven’t really tackled yet on the podcast - science.

For more about Mary-Frances and her book visit:
https://www.maryfrancesoconnor.com/

To buy 'The Grieving Brain' visit: https://amz.run/6gpP (now out in paperback too)

And you can find her on social media at:
https://www.twitter.com/doctormfo
https://www.facebook.com/maryfranceso
https://www.instagram.com/doctormfoconnor
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryfranc

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Thank you for listening.

Claire :

Hello there, and welcome to another episode of Let's Chat... I'm Claire Sandys host and blog writer of The Silent Why podcast. And today we're discussing what a grieving brain looks like with Mary-Frances O'Connor, a renowned grief expert and neuroscientist. In these Let's Chat... episodes, I chat to a guest who has experience or expertise in a particular area that can either help us deal, with prepare for, or is linked with, loss. And through them, I'm building a whole tool shed of equipment to help us face and get through loss and grief. So at the end of every episode, I ask our guest, what sort of tool their subject is, and then I add it to my shed. In February 2022, Mary released a book called 'The Grieving Brain, the surprising science of how we learn from love and loss', where she shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, opening up new areas of understanding around love, loss and learning - all my kinds of subjects! So you can see why I just had to reach out to her. Mary-Frances brings a new perspective to loss, the part love plays in grief, why going through love and then loss is still better than not loving at all, and the distinction between grief and grieving. And she chats from a viewpoint that we haven't really tackled yet on the podcast - science. So grab a cup of coffee, or a herbal smelly tea or whatever your drink of choice is, and chill out with me and Mary-Frances O'Connor as we chat grieving brains.

Mary-Frances:

I'm Mary-Frances O'Connor, and I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. And I direct the Grief, Loss and Social Stress lab - we call it the Glass Lab. And the Glass Lab studies the impact of bereavement of grief and other kinds of losses on the brain and on the body. How does the brain understand what the heck just happened, when a loved one dies? for example. And we've been doing that for about 20 years now.

Claire :

So we talk a lot about feelings and emotions, but we haven't really strayed into science on the podcast much yet. So I'm really interested about this area, but how did you get into that area of grief?

Mary-Frances:

Well, I've been fascinated since the time I was an undergraduate about how is it that the brain you know, which is this motion of grey matter, how on earth does it understand, does it encode relationships that we have in the world? How does that get transformed from this experience that you have with another person loving them and being loved, how on earth does that get translated into the brain in a way that we can remember and imagine and believe and love? So that in and of itself, that sort of physical transformation fascinated me for a long time. But in addition to the sort of scientific curiosity, which is strong for me, I also experienced the death of my mother when I was 26 and she had been sick with breast cancer for about 13 years. And so I think some of it for me was that I just became very comfortable with grief, I'm comfortable with people who are grieving. So I do loads and loads of interviews of grieving people, and, you know, if you cry uncontrollably, it just doesn't bother me. And so I think that somehow that familiarity and willingness to be vulnerable, enabled me to sort of match up the experiences people were telling me about with some of their, their brain scans and their blood tests and their their data in a way that really helped me put it all together.

Claire :

It's fascinating, I totally identify with you on the kind of being comfortable around grieving people. I think I find if there's someone in the room with a story like that, there's a sort of a gravitation towards them. It's like, that will be the interesting person, that's like, that's the conversation I want to have.

Mary-Frances:

That's right.

Claire :

Which is weird. I don't know how that feels as a grieving person to know there are people like us out there! So in the science world? Like, what is grief? You know, is it an emotion? Is it... what is it?

Mary-Frances:

It's a great question. And I think in bereavement science, if you want to call it that, we think of grief as the natural response to loss. It simply is how we react when something very important to us, has been taken away. And that encompasses emotion, certainly those intense feelings, but also all kinds of thoughts and thought patterns, like difficulty concentrating, it involves physical reactions, increased heart rate and blood pressure. And it involves behaviours as well, the things that we do that change after we lose a loved one. So it really encompasses all of that. But I have to admit, I make a very tidy distinction between grief and grieving because I think it helps people to understand what they're going through to make this distinction. So grief on the one hand, I said is this sort of natural response you could think of it as that wave that overtakes you in the moment. It's, it's a noun, right? Grief. Grieving, on the other hand, is the way that grief changes over time. Right? So that grief, you know, the first 100 times you have a wave of grief, when you've lost something so important, you think I'm not even gonna get through this moment, right? So this is just unbearable, and the 101st time, it doesn't feel any better, but it may be familiar, right? So that shift the way that grief changes over time that's grieving, it's a verb, right? It's a process. And so the reason I think that's helpful, is because grief is just a natural reaction to loss. So we're human beings, we're going to feel grief for the rest of our lives, right? It doesn't matter how long it's been, if, in that moment, you know, my, my sister's getting married in the fall, and I know on that day, she and I are going to be overtaken into a puddle of tears at some moment, because our parents aren't there. And that's just grief. And that's natural. And it doesn't mean there's been anything wrong with our grieving. In the years leading up to that moment, there has been change over time, it's a different experience now than it was six years ago, you know. And so I think knowing that you will experience grief, but that it will come less intensely and less frequently over time, even though in the moment it will be intense. I think it'd be helpful for understanding what's happening to you.

Claire :

So can you see on the brain?

Mary-Frances:

Well, when we study grief in the neuro imaging scanner, right, just like you would have a, an MRI on your knee or your heart, we can do it on the brain and look at activity patterns in the neural structures of the brain. What's important to know is we're always doing that at a group level, so we're looking at averages of how a group of people who are bereaved might respond, say to the photograph of the loved one that they brought us who's deceased. How do they respond to that photograph differently than, say, a photograph of a stranger? Right? So in both cases, you're using visual processing, for example, but there are specific regions that are associated with grief. And that we do see, but it doesn't mean that as an individual you can walk in and we would be able to say, 'Ah, this moment, I see from your brain activity that you're experiencing grief', we see general patterns.

Claire :

That might be useful. I think, if you could see, like, Am I really grieving this? Have I dealt with this? Can you just tell me what's on my brain?

Mary-Frances:

Right, right. Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting, because, you know, with some really fancy work, you can sort of determine if the person is thinking about the deceased. Now, this requires the person to sort of help to train the neural imaging scanner. So you do a bunch of scans where the person says, 'Now I'm thinking of them', and 'now I'm not'. And so under those circumstances, we could determine for an individual with some, you know, maybe 60% probability. But you know, grief is such a broad feeling and set of reactions, it really involves a lot of different parts of the brain, parts about memory, parts about emotion, but also emotion regulation. So sort of the salience the painfulness of grief is... shows up. So lots of different brain areas are involved.

Claire :

Does that brain a grieving brain look different in any way from a brain that is not grieving and completely happy? And no, not does it look different - is it functioning differently? I guess, is the question.

Mary-Frances:

I think that's a great way to put it, because it isn't that there's some, you know, hole in the brain or something [laughs]

Claire :

And tears coming out of it!

Mary-Frances:

But the functioning means that we can see different patterns, right? So those patterns, we can we can tell if there's a distinction between the group who is experiencing grief and the group who is not, and to some degree, even distinctions between people who are experiencing really severe or, they're sort of adapting or resiliently. We can see some differences there as well, which is pretty fascinating.

Claire :

Yeah, I bet. I almost wonder if there's ever a point when we're not grieving, because all the losses we're looking at there's so many, and they're so big and small all the time.

Mary-Frances:

Yes.

Claire :

Is there such a thing as a brain that's not?

Mary-Frances:

Right. No, I think that's a great example. So I think that, as I said before, we'll always have grief, right? These sorts of discrete moments, even intense, discrete moments of grief. But there also isn't an end point to grieving just as you describe it. So here's the analogy I sometimes make that I think, sort of light hearted, but I think makes the point. So I'll say to people, when did you get over your wedding day?

Claire :

Yeah.

Mary-Frances:

Because 'that doesn't make any sense, what do you mean?' You know? Well, losing a loved one is the same thing, right? It just changes who you are, it changes what you understand about the world. It changes what you understand about relationships, and to some degree, even what you understand about yourself. And so those changes don't end. It's a matter of how does that knowledge fit into your life now, so sometimes I say, grieving can be thought of as a form of learning, right? And learning never ends. You just continue to understand differently. As your life evolves. To understand what you have lost what you've experienced differently.

Claire :

It's funny how we sort of expect happy things to last.

Mary-Frances:

Yeah.

Claire :

And not the other way round. Yeah, it's an interesting differentiation.

Mary-Frances:

Yeah.

Claire :

So what happens if we don't deal with grief? What happens if we just push it down and carry on? Is, is that detrimental to what's happening in the brain?

Mary-Frances:

It is. So I like to make a distinction. You know, I think you will appreciate this. But I think of us as needing a big, what I call a big toolkit of coping strategies.

Claire :

Perfect.

Mary-Frances:

Yeah. And the reason that I bring that up is that there are perfectly appropriate moments to be in total denial, or just suppress how you're feeling, right? So I give the example, if you're at your daughter's football game, you may just decide, you know what, for the next 45 minutes, I'm going to pretend nothing has happened, everything is fine. I'm just going to cheer for my daughter. And that's all that's happening in my world. And so that is total suppression, potentially. And in that moment, that's okay. Right, that's very appropriate to living the life that you're now living. But what is problematic is if that's the only tool in your toolkit, if every time you feel grief, you think, 'Well, I'm just not going to feel that right now'. The trouble with that is, it doesn't allow us to understand to really learn what has happened. And that means often that then it's, it just keeps coming back, right, it keeps popping up. And in order to process grief to understand the loss that has happened. We also need to, you know, feel that it was painful or is painful, and and to connect with other people for support, for example, or to even just understand what does it mean to be who I am now, like, you know, I use the word daughter to describe myself, right? But that word daughter implies two people, doesn't it? All of our words that we use to describe ourselves, so spouse, right? Yeah. It implies to people. And so how do I? How do I even understand who I am now as a daughter if if my mother has died, right? So all of these learnings, these changings, it helps to have lots of different strategies to learn.

Claire :

So is that sort of a scientific approach them? Because if there is science to this, then does that mean there are definitive answers and help and things we can do to maybe prepare for loss, or deal with it when it comes?

Mary-Frances:

It's an excellent question, and I will say that, it has become very clear that having what we call in, you know, silly scientific terms - Emotion Regulation Flexibility.

Claire :

Oo that's very romantic.

Mary-Frances:

Yeah, right. Which just means a big toolkit. If we have that flexibility, we know that people adapt better. So that you know, that piece of it is a scientific sort of fact, it's a piece of data. But I will say that we don't necessarily understand which strategies in which moment for whom, under what circumstances, right. It's not, it's not worked out that well. And there is even a bit of a debate just at the moment in the scientific literature, which would be very boring, largely, about sort of how much rumination is a problem, you know, these sorts of things. So the important part about that is, scientists are still debating, and studying and learning new information all the time, just as we are about every topic. And at the same time, I think we're able to make some generalisations and also to see sometimes where we've swung too far in one direction in our advice. But I will say this, I may be an expert on grief, but you are the expert on you, you know, you're the expert on your relationships. And so, if I have thoughts and ideas, they are often about responding to grief on average, and you are going to be a much better judge of how to respond to your own grief and what may make sense for you.

Claire :

I've already, you know, thought the amount of people we've spoken to about grief, I said to my husband recently, should I lose him in the near future, I feel like, I know so much about how people have coped, I feel equipped, even though I know that when it happens, it just bowls you over and none of it matters for a while.

Mary-Frances:

That's right.

Claire :

I know coming out the other side of it, I have tools.

Mary-Frances:

That's right.

Claire :

To help me get through. Or people to reach out to you have been through it, where I'm like 'help me! how did you do this?

Mary-Frances:

Yes. Well, I mean, frankly, I think 90% of it is just realising that you're normal, you know, that these intense experiences you're having where you think I'm losing my mind, or I don't recognise myself, why did I do that? Why did I say that? Those are pretty normal. And just the reassurance that what you're experiencing is normal, is huge, in just sort of getting through the acute, you know, the very having-the-rug-ripped-out-from-under-you part of grief.

Claire :

I first came across you because a good friend of mine, she's a Psychologist sent me an article that was interviewing you. And you mentioned in that which was the title of it, 'You can't really study grief without studying love'. And I noticed your your latest book, 'The Grieving Brain', the kind of strapline - 'how we learn from love and loss'. So how does love connect with loss, and what sort of relationship do those two have together?

Mary-Frances:

I think for me, as a person who studies the brain, this is the piece of that that I find most fascinating. So we know some of this from animal research on loss, and then some of it from human research on loss. And, and what what it is, is that when we bond with another person, you know, when we fall in love with our spouse, or when we fall in love with our baby, there is a bond formed because of that love, it is a part of that love. And that bond is actually changing the way the proteins are folded in your brain, right. And we can see particular places in the brain that are changed when this loving bond happens. Just incredible to me. And what that means then is that along with that there is something additionally that happens when that person dies. Because part of what happens is when we form that bond, when those proteins get reorganised, and our neural connections change. Along with that comes this belief. And the belief is, 'I will always be there for you. And you will always be there for me'. Right? We call it the attachment belief. And the reason the attachment belief is so important is that's the thing that enables us to go off to work every day, right? Because we have this intense belief that at the end of the day, we'll all come back together, it's an invisible tether, right, that helps us to know that we will return and they will return and, and you know, evolutionarily, you can imagine that was really important. If you're gonna go off and forage for food, you want to make sure your co parent comes back to the burrow or, or you come back to your pups. So that attachment belief, it doesn't change automatically, that bond doesn't change in your brain automatically, the moment that someone dies. So while in part of your brain, you have this memory, right? You were there at the bedside, perhaps caring for the person or when they passed away, or you were at the funeral or memorial. So you know what the reality is you can refer to the information in your memory. But that attachment belief persists. And it can't both be true, right? It can't both be true, there's somewhere out there for you, and also that they have died. And I think these conflicting streams of information, which the brain has no problem holding on to both of them, which is a bit of a strange thing, but it's true. The fact that they conflict means that over and over and over again, we are coming to recognise 'Oh, this is why you pick up your phone to text them. And then you realise that they've died', right? Or you see something in a store and you think 'Ah that will be perfect for their birthday. Oh, wait, they, they won't have another birthday'. Right? So there are these two parts going on at the same time. And the conflict between them a) causes a lot of emotion, it's very stressful and very painful to realise over and over and over again that they've died. And also I think helps to explain why grieving takes so long. You know, when I have a class of students, I know where they all sit in that you know, in the fall semester and you know who's here and who's there, what their name is, you know, who has a brother, etc. Well, after the class ends, it's not like I expect them all to show up in spring semester. I just learned that automatically. They leave the classroom and I never expect them to show up again. Well, attachment doesn't work that way. You always expect them to show up again. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, so it takes a long time to learn to predict their absence instead of their presence.

Claire :

So there's something in me hearing that that thinks, wouldn't we be better off trying not to attach to anybody?

Mary-Frances:

Yeah. And lots of people use that strategy after they've experienced loss. I'm not actually joking, right?

Claire :

I can see that.

Mary-Frances:

A lot of people really isolate, because it's so painful. And I will tell you two things. One, it creates a very painful life, right? So basically, instead of only having a painful life, once they've died, you get to have a painful life before and after, so to speak, right? That's not so great. But the other thing is, you wouldn't actually survive. We need our attachment figures, as much as we need food and water. You see this in infants, and in the elderly, we call it 'failure to thrive', when they are not connected to another person to a caregiver, to someone who they're attached to, they actually physically cannot thrive. And so we're just not wired that way. It isn't possible for us not to be attached and to be thriving. So I think the reason is that we have this need as human beings to explore, it's important for us at many different levels. And we have this need to be attached. And so our system, fortunately, as painful as it can be, our system is actually remarkably flexible. We can learn, we can fall in love. And we can also experience loss, and understand that as a part of the human experience, and continue to restore a meaningful life, even after great loss.

Claire :

Are there people who, this is probably going way off topic, but I'm just interested, are there people who can't form those attachments, because when you hear about things like psychopaths and sociopaths, sometimes you hear the brain talked about as actually being formed slightly differently (I don't know if that's true, that might just be crime I've been watching on TV). But is it possible to have a brain that can't make those connections? And if they can't make them, does that mean they don't grieve?

Mary-Frances:

That's an excellent question. And I will say a) I'm not an expert in this. I will say there are people who are a host of different reasons who have difficulty with attachment. One is the example you give with psychopathy. There are others who simply have different kinds of attachment, as we often see in something like autism, which doesn't mean that they're not attached, but it does look different. And what's fascinating is a lot of things are contributing to those different patterns. Other people have experienced trauma early on, in their attachment relationships, whether that was the death of a parent, or whether that was abuse. And those things really shape whether we're able to make strong and enduring attachments after. So I would say that there are many contributing factors to the strength and type of bonds that we make. It's part of what makes us all unique. But there are differences that we can even see at the level of the brain that do show differences between different groups of individuals who may have different patterns than others of us.

Claire :

Yeah, fascinating. Are the areas of grief that just baffle science?

Mary-Frances:

Oh, many, many, the study of grief is really at its infancy, honestly, I make it sound, I think very accessible. And like, you know, we have all the answers. And part of that is because I really want to get the information that we do know, into the hands of people who could use it, into your hands, into the hands of your listeners. And one way that scientists have to learn how to do that is to not go into quite as much nuance all those debates that we're having in science, at the end of the day, they're not as important as conveying that we do know a lot. And we can use that information. While simultaneously saying there's a lot we still have to understand there's a lot we still have to learn. For example, in neuro imaging, we have a lot of studies now, which I find it amazing to have said this, I did the first neuro imaging study of grief in 2002, published in 2003, and I don't think I ever thought I would be able to say there are a bunch of studies now of people who are experiencing grief. But we have less than a handful of studies of 'grieving' where we look at the same person more than once and see what's changing across time. So you see, there's an example of where we don't actually know very much at all.

Claire :

It'd be really interesting to just see if maybe if people have raised in a certain way, are they more more predisposed to cope with it better than others and you know, all those kinds of things, that would be a really interesting area. Yeah, I can see now why you got into this.

Mary-Frances:

And why I've stuck with it so long.

Claire :

Yeah. So how does medication interact with that, because obviously a lot of people who are grieving might end up on maybe some form of antidepressant or something else, how does that affect/hinder/partner with the brain?

Mary-Frances:

This is such an important question. And I will say this is one of the, I think this is a great example of where science has really, genuinely helped us. So, there have been some studies of people who have what we might call Prolonged Grief Disorder, so people who are really struggling with disabling grief, those waves of grief haven't changed over time, and they're really preventing people from getting dinner on the table or getting their kids, you know, birthday parties or the sorts of things. So what we know is that there are targeted psycho therapies that can genuinely help people who are very stuck in this type of disabling grief. And that can be true even years after the death has happened. And it isn't that we're taking the grief away. It's that we're getting them back on a trajectory of grieving, right, where there's change over time. And so, in one of those randomised clinical trials, they also included antidepressants to see you know, what was going to be most effective was that when you put them together, where you just have one or just have the other. And we have a really clear answer now that antidepressants do not help with yearning, and yearning is essentially the core of that type of grief, right? Antidepressants did help people who also had depressive symptoms, right? So depressive symptoms, like difficulty eating and sleeping, difficulties with feelings of guilt across many different situations, not just around the death of a loved one. Those other types of symptoms of depression, were helped by the antidepressants, but the experiences of grief, the yearning for that person was not changed. And so we know now, at least, as we stand today, psychotherapy is the frontline treatment. And that there is a difference between grief and depression, even at a sort of neurological level. The other medication that people who are grieving are often prescribed are sleep aids. And I'll say that we have pretty clear evidence now that sleep medication does not help, it doesn't help the grief symptoms themselves. And although it may help the sleep symptoms, temporarily, the issue with grieving is that you suddenly have to learn again, how to fall asleep, and how to wake up without this person in your life. And that is a huge adjustment, and that is going to take a long time to adjust to. But if you add another piece, so you add in a sleep medication, you're still going to have to adjust at some point to that medication not being there. So honestly, it appears from research that it is better to simply learn to adjust. And one of the best ways we can sort of reset our circadian rhythm is by setting the alarm at the same time every morning, sort of resetting ourselves, because you can't force yourself to go to sleep, that you can force yourself to get up, right? And so that's one example of how it really is an adjustment process. And we want to support people, but try not to interfere with that adjustment, even while it is very painful.

Claire :

As I've learned more and more about about grief over the last year or so I'm becoming increasingly aware of how little medical professionals, not all of them, would be aware of the impact of grief. And even I remember about five or six years ago, I was in a workplace and a girl who was in her early 30s, her brother died very suddenly. And she was off with with grief, bereavement kind of leave. And then I remember I was part of the HR department I saw her sick notes coming through from the doctor. And eventually they arrived through and they they've been they've moved from just the bereavement across to depression. I felt like it had been labelled too early and too quickly.

Mary-Frances:

Yeah, I will say that it is possible to have depression after the death of a loved one. Absolutely. But I will also say that it doesn't mean that we can't provide treatment. So it is true that we do not diagnose Prolonged Grief Disorder until a year has passed. But that doesn't mean that we can't provide psychoeducation and skills and support even in that first year. On the other hand, you're absolutely right, so there's been a lot of debate about using a disorder using a label for Prolonged Grief Disorder. And while there's a lot of nuance there, and I think it is part of a larger debate of how we deal with stigma around mental disorders in general. I will say that by creating this label that enables us to see this 1 in 10, who are really disabled by grief. What it means is that suddenly all clinicians have to be trained. I will tell you, as a clinical psychologist, I never received a single lecture on grief in six years of training, not a single lecture on grief. And that is true for psychiatrists. It's true for GPS. And now that there is a diagnostic category, what it means is, they have to be trained in what grief looks like, in general, in order to make a distinction between just that and disabling grief. And so my hope, although there's a lot of nuances, I say, to adopting this, my hope is that because of this increased education, and continuing education for existing clinicians, what it means is that as a society as a whole, we will know so much more than we ever have before, and that that will have very positive impacts as well.

Claire :

Yeah, that sounds really good. We've got something in this country moment, we've got a real surge in people finding out and being educated about menopause, which, you know, a lot of women are standing up about and saying, we didn't know about this, how do we not know?

Mary-Frances:

Absolutely! 'Who didn't tell me about this?!'

Claire :

It's crazy, 50% of the population will definitely go through it, but we don't know much about it. And it's the same with GPS. I think one of them said, 'I got two hours training on it'. And it's like, that's incredible. How is this happening? It's affecting the mental health, physical health of hundreds of women, and it's, it feels like a similar thing, and that one is getting momentum now it's out that everybody heard about it on the news. If we could do the same with grief, that would be a wonderful thing. Because I had no clue going into childlessness, even stuff you've been saying now, I'm like, 'Oh, the attachment thing!' You know, I probably, without even thinking about it, attached to the idea of having a child.

Mary-Frances:

Absolutely.

Claire :

So when it was taken away, I didn't know it was broken.

Mary-Frances:

Exactly.

Claire :

Yeah. And that makes so much sense. And just having those tools help me to know that.

Mary-Frances:

And I think actually, menopause is a fantastic analogy, and here's why. So menopause is physical, it is, you know, you we can pinpoint in time. And it is something that the medical profession can aid. It doesn't mean it's a disease, or a disorder, right?

Claire :

Yeah.

Mary-Frances:

However, there can be diseases and disorders, right, that happen with menopause. And so the important part in my mind, the important analogy here is everyone will experience grief, some more profound than others. It is something that medical professionals can help with, and that and it is physical. But that doesn't mean that it is not a natural state. It simply means that we need to better understand how to support that natural state of grieving just as we need to understand how to support the natural state of menopause.

Claire :

Yeah, we need to get campaigning.

Mary-Frances:

That's right.

Claire :

We're a powerful force, you and me. I've got the podcast, you've got the science.

Mary-Frances:

Yes, we're in!

Claire :

So just on a personal level, you've obviously got all this information on grief scientifically, has it helped you personally, in going through loss yourself? Or do you find it's a bit hard to put into practice yourself?

Mary-Frances:

Well, I can say yes and no, the larger answer being 'yes'. And part of the reason I say that is, you know, as I said at the beginning, my mother passed away when I was 26. And my father passed away about seven years ago. Now, there are lots of things that are different between those two scenarios for my relationship with each of them to my age, I was certainly much older and knew myself a lot better when my father passed away. But a lot of it was because I really had spent almost 20 years, 15 years understanding what grief is like and why and how. And it meant that grief for my father was not less intense, but I was able to react to the intensity differently. And I was able, I think, to incorporate that experience into my ongoing life and sort of retain a meaningful life, despite that loss in a very different way than I did when my mother died and I knew so little about grief. I remember seeing a counsellor about this was actually when my mom was she was terminally ill and I said to her, I said to the counsellor, 'Well, you know, I know she's gonna die. I don't really know what else there is to say about it.' You know, here I am decades later, still talking about it.

Claire :

So simple. Yeah. What more is there? [lauighs]

Mary-Frances:

What more could you say? [laughs] I think the counsellor who completely understood where I was coming from, as a young person, but just sort of, I think thought'oh, well, we have a lot to talk about then'.

Claire :

Were you a scientist back then?

Mary-Frances:

Well, I was I was in graduate school, but at the very, very beginning,

Claire :

Right, okay. That's a scientific brain is it? I can see the facts - she's going to die. Is there anything else I need to know?

Mary-Frances:

Yeah [laughs]. But I would say also, you know, the'know' part, you know, I said, there's a little piece of'know'. And it is that that, you know, when we are in the middle of that natural response, it is still our response, right? It doesn't change the fact that we respond to great loss with grief, it doesn't take the grief away. But it may change how we're able to react to feeling that grief.

Claire :

Is there anything else that you'd want to share about what you've put in your book and who it's for and things like that, that people might want to know about?

Mary-Frances:

I think, you know, the book is, it does describe a lot of science. But what I'm told by readers is that it is it is really meant for everyone, you aren't supposed to have any background in neuroscience or anything in order to understand it. And, and a lot of that is because of all the examples that that I use, but also just, you know, the way I guess I described things.

Claire :

So we were chatting about what's going on in the brain as a useful tool to help people preparing for loss and going through loss. So if I went into the shed, and I picked out a tool that represented the science behind grief in the brain, what kind of tool would it be?

Mary-Frances:

The visual that comes to me, is the set of shears where you're sort of snipping your way out of those vines, you know, all those tangled vines, but you can snip them away, you can step out into the garden, and clear them away. A way to describe that would be not getting stuck in thoughts. And in particular, the 'would have should have could have' thoughts. So these are those thoughts that just go round and round and round in your head. And especially early on, they're very natural, it's, you know, if only I could have gotten them to the hospital sooner or the doctor should have run another test, or if only they would have known the train was going to be late. All of those stories that we tell in our in our brain, our brain is uniquely capable of coming up with an infinite number of these. But the trouble is, if you think about it, each of those stories ends in and then my loved ones lived, and of course, your loved one didn't live. And so to live in the present moment is to be aware of the painful reality that they're not with us. And so to get stuck in those stories means that you're also not fully participating in the present moment with all its pain and suffering, but also with all its love and joy and connection. And so I think not getting stuck in the 'would have should have could have' would be the tool I would I would add to the shed.

Claire :

Well, there you have it, I now have another set of useful shears in my tool shed to help us snip our way out of thoughts that aren't helpful and can entangle us. My shed is filling up nicely. Thank you Mary-Frances for your time and opening up a new area of love and loss that very few people would have heard about or touched on. If you'd like to find out more about Mary-Frances and her book The Grieving Brain, visit www.MaryFrancesOConnor.com or visit the show notes. The paperback of her book actually comes out very soon in early February 2023. And to see a full list of other Let's Chat episodes and topics that you might want to listen to visit www.thesilentwhy.com/Letschat. Thanks for listening to The Silent Why podcast. If you've got a subject you'd like me to chat to an expert on, please get in touch via social media or the website or on our email thesilentwhy@gmail.com And let's chat...

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