Pathological-Or Logical Pathways?

What Comes First, The Chicken or the Neurotransmitter—And Do Grievers Really Care?

That question begs another question as to whether or not the depth and intensity of a painful reaction to a new loss is pathological. In the main, we think not. In an article of ours published in Skeptic Magazine, we asked and answered as follows: "Are grievers clinically depressed? With very few exceptions, the answer is ‘no,' and in those few cases only if they were clinically depressed before the death that affected them."

There are about 2.5 million deaths in the US each year, so the issue of brain chemistry, as it relates to grief, is important to the 12½ million primary grievers who are affected by those deaths. It's equally important for them as it relates to recovery from or completion of the inevitable unresolved or unfinished emotional business that accrues in all relationships.

But those grievers are not thinking about brain chemistry-in fact they may have a hard time thinking at all in the emotional aftermath of the death of someone important to them, when concentration and focus are limited. So, since most grieving people are not into the science of it all, we're not going to write a scientific piece.

Raw Grief-Unresolved Grief-Misinformation About Dealing With Grief

There are three major components for grieving people:

• First, and obviously paramount for the griever is the death of someone important to them, and dealing with the raw grief they feel and how to function day-to-day after the death.

• Second, is the unresolved grief regarding what the death has left incomplete. If the relationship was at a difficult point, the death ends the hope of repair, adding a dimension to the grief. And when the death is untimely or unnatural, more difficulty is added to dealing with and adapting to the loss.

• Third, is the question of the information-or misinformation-most of us have stored in our brains about dealing with the grief that affects our lives. When a loss occurs, we automatically go back to our oldest, stored information about dealing with the grief we feel. While the impact of the death itself is clearly a primary issue, incorrect ideas about dealing with grief can make it very difficult to recover from loss.

In April of 2003, we published an article that primarily addressed the relationship between brain chemistry and the information-misinformation that affects how we deal with losses. As we re-read it prior to including it in this post, we were struck by how relevant it remains, six years after we first wrote it.

Here's that original article with a few modifications for clarity:

Emotional Muscle Memory

The bio-chemistry of the human brain has been deciphered and can be explained in scientific terms. There's a fund of knowledge about neurotransmitters, dendrites, and axons, which explains how it all works. There still may be more to discover, but the foundational knowledge is pretty solid.

Simply put: Our brains encode and memorize pathways which go from stimulus to response at nearly unperceivable speeds. The difficult or dangerous aspect of that is that once the electro-chemical coding takes root, it is very hard to dislodge.

For ease of understanding, we coined the phrase, Emotional Muscle Memory, to explain how our brain takes us from stimulus to response at warp speed. And often against our conscious will, as when our "buttons get pushed" over and over by a parent, a sibling, a spouse or others.

It's pretty simple-"What you practice is what you get good at"-even ending sentences with prepositions.

Most people are familiar with the term "muscle memory" as it relates to physical actions, and that it can be either negative or positive. On the negative side, almost anyone who ever studied the piano or guitar probably had the experience of learning and memorizing incorrect fingering, and later trying to un-learn it and re-learn it correctly. It's not impossible, but it's very difficult-maybe eight or nine on a scale of ten.

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On the positive side, if what our muscles memorize is correct, that positive habit can last a lifetime. To illustrate: One of the world's most incredible phenoms, Tiger Woods, is an example of the positive side of physical muscle memory. Most people know that Tiger started playing golf at the ripe old age of one and a half, with excellent instruction, and became, far and away, the best golfer in the world.

Like we said, "What you practice is what you get good at."

Applying those parallels from the physical worlds of music and sports, makes it easy to understand that the behaviors that were encoded when we were young -whether positive or negative-become the default settings, or Emotional Muscle Memory for what we do throughout our lives. And, like the problem with correcting fingering patterns for music, they are very hard to change.

That said, we must acknowledge that some of what we learned to survive our childhoods, was brilliant, and may have saved our lives, both physically and emotionally. But the problem is those memorized behaviors, tracking on long-established pathways, may be sabotaging us now.

Many years ago we coined this phrase: "In a crisis we return to old beliefs and the behaviors that accompany them," which is just another way of saying Emotional Muscle Memory.

Grief, by any reasonable definition is a crisis. Whether the grief is caused by the death of someone important to us, or a divorce, or any other life changing event, it creates a crisis.

Confronted with the crisis of loss, our brain scavenges through its stored beliefs, looking for anything that will help us deal with our grief. But most of what is in our Emotional Muscle Memory storage bins is outmoded and inaccurate, at least as it relates to dealing with loss. And worse, even if the ideas and behaviors we recall are not helpful, we try to apply them, because they are all we have.

We have identified six major myths that are almost universal and which can keep each of us and succeeding generations tied to those obsolete ideas. They are chronicled in our books, The Grief Recovery Handbook, When Children Grieve, and Moving On. We strongly recommend that everyone read one or all of those books with an eye to seeing if what you think or believe about dealing with loss is correct and helpful for you.

There are two tasks that confront anyone who wants to deal more effectively with the losses that limit their lives. First is to identify those incorrect ideas and myths that crop up reflexively in our response to a crisis of loss, and to recognize and dismiss those that are not helpful. Second is to replace them with the ideas and actions identified in our books that lead to completion of the unfinished business that is the hallmark of all significant emotional losses.

Oh yeah, there is a third thing, and we're sure Tiger would endorse this idea; practice, practice, practice—so you can develop a new Emotional Muscle Memory system about dealing with grief that will hold up in a crisis.

Relationship To The Pain Of A Profound New Loss Can Happen Very Quickly

The article above relates primarily to the stored information and learned behaviors we have about dealing with loss, and most people carry a great deal of misinformation about dealing with loss. But it must be said that people who are not carrying mountains of misinformation, and who are not saddled with tons of emotional baggage of unresolved grief about prior losses, can develop a relationship to and identity with the pain of a new, major loss very quickly.

Logical pathways, whether developed early in life and carried forward, or developed almost instantly in response to a profound current loss, aren't necessarily pathological. Every attempt should be made to deal with grief-related emotions as normal and natural reactions to loss-as opposed to presuming a pathology that might not exist, and treating it with psycho-pharmaceuticals that limit access to the very emotions that can help re-develop or restore the pathways that existed prior to the loss.