Remapping the Grieving Brain

Remapping the Grieving Brain: Written by Jourdan Tymkow

As I was preparing myself to begin my internship at the Grief and Trauma Healing Centre this September, my dog suddenly passed away from an aneurysm in July. It felt like a cosmic joke that I had to endure such shocking, deep grief right before stepping into a space serving others through their grief, as I had already recovered from much of the previous grief-ridden events of my life. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel his passing was a gift of mourning and learning for me, one I needed to walk through and share with others as I connected neurological findings I had recently learned to my personal practice of grieving. 

Gleaning primarily Mary Frances O’Connor, a neuroscientist who studies grief at the University of Arizona, she suggests that grief is a state of motivation, not just to have the loss return, but the brain’s craving for the familiarity of our usual experiences with our loss. O’Connor found through fMRI scans that the brain regions associated with motivation, craving, and pursuit are activated in grief, which are also all areas associated with physical pain. In grief, we don’t just yearn or feel sad, we feel literally pained at the loss experienced. 

While deep in mourning, I couldn’t bear being at home – there were too many reminders of the daily life I shared with my pup, which I came to realize only after his passing were ordinary yet profound moments of joy in my day. I yearned not just for my dog to come back to me, but for our routine that once seemed so mundane. In this way, I had a kind of mental map I was referencing, a set of expectations that were no longer accurate throughout my day, which caused me great heartache and longing. 

O’Connor references this mental map as a fundamental part of the grief process, but to understand this, we have to consider that attachment to our loss – whether that be a person, pet, place, job, or any other of the multitudes of things we humans can become attached to – results across three dimensions: space (proximity to you), time (changes in space), and closeness (emotional distance). Grief is the process of reorienting attachment across the space-time-closeness continuum where mental maps need to be reordered to accommodate the new form and state of attachment to the loss.

The hippocampus, the part of the brain largely responsible for memories, activates the “coordination” system of the brain (otherwise known as the entorhinal cortex) which expects something to be there through “place cells”, and when it is not found “trace cells” activate, causing incredible discomfort, confusion, and disorientation. In other words, grief is a disorienting event for the brain that tries to predict events based on memories of the attachment and how close we were to the attachment, causing a painful discrepancy between what was and what now is. 

So how can we work with the grieving brain and to shift mental maps to new topographies of love for our loss?

O’Connor suggests a dedicated time period to feel the loss deeply while creating a new representation of the loss to remap the brain’s relationship to it in the present. This can vary according to personal beliefs and interests but can be broadly defined as a “grief ritual”. In this context, a grief ritual refers to structured and specific actions that are distinct from the rest of the day that can help to make the grief tangible and contained. Grief rituals can be imaginative, bodily, communal, or symbolic, but regardless of what it may look like, they are meant to be expressive of the grief experienced and connective to the loss. This can help the brain consolidate memories and release expectations that what once was won’t happen again, yet simultaneously creates new memories and comfort of how to relate to the loss in the present, ultimately easing the grieving process without detaching from the love we feel. 

Grief rituals can be described in three types: honouring rituals, letting go rituals, and self-transformation rituals. Grief rituals can look like cultural funeral rites, visiting gravesites, lighting a candle for the loss, meditating on the loss, listening to special music, or doing intentional dance or movement.

Another popular and potent grief ritual is letter writing, which can be a great support for remapping the grieving brain. In another study of O’Connor’s, one group of participants wrote either about their loss or wrote directly to their loss, while the other group wrote about their day without any reference to their grief or loss. They found that those who connected to their grief and loss were better able to regulate their breathing, their bodily state, and emotions when they were followed up with two months later. These findings suggest the brain and body are better able to recover from grief when we allow ourselves to feel it, connect to it, and create new ways of relating to it. 

After surrendering to the impossible waves of grief that tossed me about this summer and creating a dedicated shelf for my puppy’s ashes and my love letters to him, I began to feel the the warmth of sunlight once more. That is, I began to remerge to the world carrying not only pain, but incredible love and gratitude for the time I had with my boy and the gifts he gave me. And so, carrying the duality of heavy grief and the lightness of joy, I paid this love forward to my new rescue pup, Rumi, named after the Sufi poet who so accurately wrote, “you have to keep breaking your heart until it opens”.

References

James, J. W., & Friedman, R. (2017). The grief recovery handbook. HarperCollins Publishers.

Neimeyer, R. A. (2022). New techniques of grief therapy: Bereavement and beyond. Routledge.

O’Connor, M. F. (2023). The grieving brain: The surprising science of how we learn from love and loss. Harper One.

O'Connor, M. F., Allen, J. J., & Kaszniak, A. W. (2005). Emotional disclosure for whom? A study of vagal tone in bereavement. Biological psychology, 68(2), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2004.04.003

O'Connor, M. F., Wellisch, D. K., Stanton, A. L., Eisenberger, N. I., Irwin, M. R., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008). Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain's reward center. NeuroImage, 42(2), 969–972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.04.256

Wojtkowiak, J., Lind, J., & Smid, G. E. (2021). Ritual in therapy for prolonged grief: A scoping review of ritual elements in evidence-informed grief interventions. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.623835

YouTube. (2022). The Science & Process of Healing from Grief. Andrew Huberman. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzOvi0Aa2EA

Blog Written By Jourdan Tymkow

Jourdan Tymkow is a Master of Counselling Clinical Intern on our team.

Grief has been a close companion throughout much of my life – losses through human and animal deaths, relational partings, significant identity and worldview shifts, and heartache prompted by legacies of colonialism and climate change lived heavily within me for many years. These sticky feelings and perspectives diminished my sense of vitality, belonging, and openness, which were compounded by traumatic experiences that made me want to protect myself from the world at all costs. It wasn’t until I started my own therapeutic journey that I began to metabolize my grief and trauma safely and be able to live my life with a sense of expansion, peacefulness, play, and open-heartedness. This has led me to my passion and purpose - holding space for others in their shifting of grief and trauma. - Jourdan

To learn more about Jourdan or to book a session with them, click here.