Episode 3 - The Grieving Brain by Mary-Francis O'Connor

Join us as we discuss Mary-Frances O'Connor's ground-breaking work, explained in the book The Grieving Brain.

The Grieving Brain has been game-changing for us at Elephants in Rooms, and for the many people we have trained. Mary-Francis's work will literally light up your brain and help you understand the processes that happen as someone grieves.

Watch The Grieving Brain video here.

Transcript

Welcome to grief in the room. In this podcast, we do a deep dive into all things grief so that when those themes of grief and loss show up in your client story, you're prepared with the insight tools, and most importantly, confidence to give them the kind of support they need grief in the room is presented by Martin Roddis and Trudie Bamford grief trainers and advocates and good friends.

We bring warmth. Humanity and humor to the subject. And we're so glad you're joining our conversation today. Please do subscribe to and say hello to us in the comments.

 So today we are going to be talking about the grieving brain and that's based upon the research of Mary Frances O'Connor, who is one of the world's leading griefy, Is that a word?

Neuroscientists, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress, which is the Glass Lab. If you're listening to this pod in 2024, then you can be officially excited because Mary Francis is relocating to London in January of 2025 for a year. And has promised to deliver training and lectures.

So if what we offer you today, and that's all we're going to do, we're going to offer you our insights and how we're relating to it in our training experience and our supporting experience of the bereaved. If you get excited about it, firstly, by the book, uh, published by Harper one and the full title of the book, the grieving brain, the surprising, Science of how we learn from love and loss.

That's what we're going to unpack today. Please do buy the book. And I have to be honest with you. When I teach a course over three weeks, in week one, I introduced the grieving brain, the concept. In week two, people say I bought the book and in week three, they've read it and it's amazing. And we're going to talk about why it's going to be amazing.

And that's for the bereaved and for the people that are learning about grief as well. 

 Mary Frances is conducting pioneering studies so we can all better understand the grief process, both psychologically and and physiologically. She's the leader in her field, and she's one of the most personable people I have ever had the joy of meeting.

Um, she can translate neuroscience into pooh bear brain science, because I've got a pooh bear brain. Trudy hasn't. She's a brain on legs. But I have 

 The good thing about the book is that Mary Frances literally relates her personal, she weaves her personal story of grief, and loss throughout the book.

And that's what brings it to life, for me, anyway. I don't know about you, Trudy, but that's what, that's what really brought it to life. She made it incredibly relatable. I think that's one of the beautiful things about her book is that it is really relatable, really accessible, and yet still academically sound.

Really hard balance to get that, but it's, yeah, I recommend it to everybody. And, and that's, again, that's another one of the themes of this pod, all the work that we're doing with grief. We're trying to bring it back to the giants of grief, the science and, and, and that's what we're doing on our, on our therapy journey, aren't we?

Yeah. Very much so. Right. So where shall we start? 



Let's talk about attachment bonds. Let's talk about, you know, we are hugely interdependent. On our own, we can only achieve so much. And often we fail when we're connected, when we're together, we're unstoppable. So bonds, we form attachment bonds. That's what our brains do.

So that's the logical place to start, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And she puts it beautifully when she, she uses the phrase here, now, close. That is what our attachment bonds are for us. And we start forming them immediately as babies. 

 the brain.

is hardwired to form connections. It favours connections. It favours those bonds that, as we're young, are our survival mechanism. We can't survive without that. And that's, that's, that's primitive brain as well, because, you know,  the sheep on the outside of the flock, they were the most vulnerable.

The ones that got lost and got separated from the community. They were the most vulnerable. They're the ones that, you know, got ill or got eaten. So, you know, we're still running with that programming in our brain. That's what our brains do. Yeah. And you're right. Yeah. Yeah. And we wouldn't be able to function if we didn't have that implicit knowledge that our loved ones would remain here now and close.

We wouldn't be able to, you know, send our kids off to school in the morning and get through our day. If we didn't believe that they were going to come home or, you know, kiss our partner goodbye to go to work, we wouldn't be able to form attachment bonds in the first place if we didn't have that implicit belief.

That they would remain here, now, and close. Yeah. So it's not surprising then that when we, when we suffer loss, it's going to be very, very difficult for our brains to understand that concept, that the person that we believed would always be here, now, and close is not here, now, and close. 

literally what happens, the proteins in our brain are folded differently when we form those attachment bonds, and how do we form those attachment bonds in intense and loving relationships? moments. And we know this because of the work that Zoe Donaldson did, that Mary Francis refers to, utilizing her study of prairie voles.

Prairie voles, like us, are only three to five percent of the mammal species that mate for life. Now the life of a prairie vole is about a year, sadly, but when they bond in those intense, physical, intimate, moments, what they've studied Is that their brain, I mean, it's the same amount of neurochemicals, you know, the vasopressin, the dopamine, the serotonin, that all get mixed up, that form, but there's got to be sight, sense, smell, touch, intimacy, that forms them.

 And they become a we. The meadow voles. Sleep around they'd knock the same and what they've realized is that the structures in their brain the receptors for these chemicals Are different in the prairie voles.

They're different and they can correlate that very similar to what happens in a human So can we get addicted to love kind of yes Um, and that work along with the functional mri scanning 

 That Information helps us understand how we form the different structures in our brain, form these attachment bonds that don't simply disappear when someone dies.

Yeah, and we understand that, we understand that intense attachment to somebody, um, but then we expect people to get over grief? I heard on another podcast where Mary Frances was being interviewed, she said a question I like to ask people is, when did you get over your wedding day? Well, that question makes no sense.

So how can you say you're going to get over your husband's death? You're going to get over it again. It makes no sense. Framing it like that is just, you know, it puts it into, because there's a lot of societal pressure, isn't it? To get over it, you know, move on. And we hear that all the time.

We hear that all the time. Yeah. Attachment bonds. 

 We've got that deeply encoded in our brains. We've got that deeply, deeply encoded. in our neural pathways in our brains. So, you know, every time we see the person that we love, we get that  little reward, don't we?

Dopamine. Those neurons are still going to fire, expecting, expecting at 5. 30 your partner to walk in through the door. It's still going to keep going like that. So, so then we kind of moving into the other concept that she speaks about, which is trying to understand. That somebody who you expected to be there forever is not, they're gone, but everlasting.



After a bereavement or any kind of significant loss, we've got two  streams of information, haven't we?

We've got our conscious mind, That knows that maybe sat by the hospital bed for a month that went to the funeral that knows that they are no longer in existence, but we've got this virtual reality running in our head. And that. that implicit knowledge, that virtual reality map, that is not going to update quickly.

It will only update when

 the absence of the person becomes more likely So to begin with, they may have come home from work at the same time for the last 20 years. Your brain, of course, is going to predict that. It's going to take a lot of 5 p. m. s for your brain to realize, Oh, actually, it's more likely now that they're not going to come back.



I need to update these neural pathways. So this is, you know, this is one of the incredibly powerful things that, that Mary Frances work has, has confirmed. Is that this is a lengthy time consuming process that we really don't have a huge amount of control about.

We can't just rush this process. There is physical rewiring going on. She describes it as a mechanical process. And that takes time. It takes time. And, and someone, one of, one of my, bereaved clients 

 said to me, she took such comfort from this model from understanding the grieving brain, because she said, I know that the intense acute grief I'm feeling right now, timeframed, it's bounded.

When, when, when I rewire and update my neural maps, I've got my grandchildren, my children, I've got a full life. And she said, I know this intensity is going to go now. You know, I'm never going to forget. I'm never going to move on, but. The intensity of it is going to change and that gave her great comfort, 

so this is why, you know, especially in the acute stages of grief, it's so agonizing. You wake up every morning and before your conscious mind is kicked in, your implicit mind, your implicit knowledge is telling you that they will be in the bed next to you.

And then you're reminded. It's all over again, you're reminded that they're gone all over again. 

 And this goes some way to explain why 70 percent of us experienced an SED, a sensory experience of the deceased.



For some people that's really comforting, but for others that's a really distressing and scary experience.

I've had so many clients who have come, um, after a traumatic loss and sometimes it will take them a few sessions to work up the courage to say to me, I keep hearing my mum say my name. They're scared to say it because they think that they're going to sound like they're crazy because it feels to them like they're going crazy.

And the relief when they understand why that is happening, that as far as a part of your brain is concerned, The person is still there. So of course you're going to see them, see their back in the distance in a crowd or you know, you're going to smell them or you're going to hear them, of course, because as far as a part of your brain is concerned, they do still exist.

So it's going to keep conjuring them up. To know that that is a, That is actually a normal part of grieving is hugely reassuring to a lot of people. 

Often what those grief visitations can trigger is that deep intense yearning, which is a normal part of grieving, but it can be just so painful and so difficult that that intense urge to seek out. That person, and then just keep bumping up against the knowledge that it doesn't matter how hard you look, you're not going to find them.

And yearning, grief is not pathological. It can become pathological, but grief is not pathological. But then you say that yearning, Mary Francis describes it as like thirst. It's a natural process. And let's face it, your brain, because that person was so important to you, so important to you, it uses all its neurochemical arsenal to.

Go find them. Cause they're not close anymore. Here, now. Close. Right. Well, find them. 

 

  A really good example of that mismatch between what our conscious mind understands and what our implicit understanding is, is somebody who has had a limb amputated and experiences phantom limb pain or itching or burning sensations.

Very, very common. With somebody who's had something amputated. And this is because from birth, the brain knew it had an arm, a leg. It's not going to immediately update it's implicit knowledge or it's, it's understanding. So it's still sending out messages. You, you've obviously got an itch in that hand cause you know, it's still there.

The conscious mind knows it isn't there, but that, that mismatch between the two, it, it can be absolute torture for people, can't it? 

We're holding an absence of something, which is just strange. 

I was thinking about this this morning, you know, if I, um, rearrange my kitchen cupboards for the next couple of days, I'm going to be going to the wrong cupboard for cups, but my brain updates that information quickly.

But it's not going to update something unless it has to. 

The brain needs a lot of proof. So it's not going to update that prediction model, until the absence has been significant.

It's not like updating, uh, information that doesn't really matter. It'll update that fast, but it's not going to update fast without attachment. And this is why people living overseas, separated from their families, like I did for many, many years, prisoners, because the brain doesn't get the proof that someone's died.

Because some of the proof, some of the memory making, you know, we've got this attachment structure in the brain, but we've got this hippocampus, this memory making structure in the brain as well. When we go to a funeral, when we go to a chapel of rest, when we're by that hospital bed, when we're holding the hand of someone's dying, we're building memories.

That we recall.  Those memories, those neural pathways can help counteract and rewire that mechanical rewiring process that says they're everlasting. If we can't draw upon any of those memories, so the prisoner who is not allowed to go to the funeral, Then you're right. It doesn't get proof.

This is why ambiguous grief is so difficult for people where there's no body, for example. 

question we often get asked, and Mary Frances often gets asked, is how does it have an impact on anticipatory grief? The simple truth is, and the simple answer that Mary Frances gives, is that 

knowing something and experiencing something are two very different things.



so again, the conscious knowledge, yes, they have died now and the implicit everlasting knowledge will still clash.

So with anticipatory grief, it's not like a soft buffer, not really. 



 I was, taking a workshop 

and, one of the attendees there, their partner had been terminally ill for a very, very, very long time and they, they thought they were fully prepared for the death.

In fact, they were. They wanted that death, because it was such a difficult caring situation. They thought that there would be nothing but relief after the death. Nine weeks later, 

 they're dealing with tremendous amounts of grief that has come as such a shock, because they thought that they had done all their grieving and all their processing.

So, you know, looking at the grieving brain and that, that adaptation, you can't escape that process. You might think that you're already adapted to the concept 



but you can't until it actually physically happens and then your brain starts this process.

Yeah. 

 Mary Frances makes some very interesting points about rumination. What would you like to say about rumination and the grieving brain? Okay. Well, first of all, it is very much linked up to yearning, which is an inescapable part of grieving. And it is very much linked up to that.

So that rumination can be it can be one response to that yearning. So we can find ourselves maybe playing the what if game. We, we love as humans, if that, then this, we like that because it makes life nice and predictable for us. It gives us a sense of control. So that rumination may come in the form of playing the what if game.

What if I'd made them go to the doctor earlier? What if I'd been the one driving the car? What if I'd called them that night? And It can, rumination can be healthy, it can be a healthy part of the grieving process, 



or it can be a form of distracting us from the pain, a form of displacement. 





 that counterfactual thinking that we call it, um, in, in counselling psychology language. If only I had taken them to the hospital, fed them better, done more exercise with them, recognised their pains in the arms. The second part of that sentence always ends up with, They would still be alive today.





And what can happen is, and again, this is actually a normal part of grieving, people can get peppered by grief. with intrusive thoughts and that can be so distressing and then those intrusive thoughts can become like a broken record, you know, a record with scratch on it where it just keeps going round and round and round and you get stuck.

If we think about it though, Intrusive thoughts. They feel abnormal when they're painful thoughts, but they are actually normal. We experience intrusive thoughts all the time. We just don't label them as that. So you're at work and the thought pops into your head. I'll text my partner to see what they want for dinner today or how their day's going.

That is an intrusive thought. It's just not a troubling one. So then after they die, When that thought pops into your head, now that feels like a really bad intrusive thought, you know, why? And again, that goes back to people feeling like they're going crazy, doesn't it? But again, that is all part of the brain updating itself.





What about the impact of neurodiversions and the grieving brain? Yeah, this is, This is a really interesting area that has not really been well explored. 

 and I think there is definitely room for, for researchers to kind of understand this a little bit more because the grieving brain work has revealed to us that those, all those neural connections, that neural map has to be redrawn and that takes time, that the brain, it takes time for the prediction model to be updated and trying to make sense of this gone but everlasting, again, all takes time.

But when you consider how the neurodivergent brain works. It processes information differently. It processes emotion differently. It processes adaptation differently. So adapting to changes can be tremendously more difficult and more time consuming for a neurodivergent brain than a neurotypical brain.

And also trying to grasp a metaphorical idea like gone but everlasting. If your brain sees things very literally, that can feel, it's incredibly confusing and impossible to grasp. So, you know, looking at the grieving brain model and the lessons it teaches us through the lens of neurodivergence, First of all, it says to me that more work needs to be done in this area.

But secondly, you know, if you are working with a neurodivergent client, or you're neurodivergent yourself and you experience grief. You may well need to show even more patience and even more compassion because that massive rewiring process that everybody goes through is going to be probably a harder and lengthier and more up and down process for the neurodivergent brain than for the neurotypical brain.

And as a result of that, it's going to take more bandwidth. Than usual, it's going to suck up more of your executive functioning than usual, which then is going to impact so much 

you know, we're going to go into this at a later date in depth





yeah. Good. 

So the five stages, the five stages of grief, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, pioneer, amazing, lovely, you know, a great description. And we'll probably do a pod on Elizabeth Kubler Ross because I do find her absolutely fascinating.

Total hero 

and it is a great description.  They're just not a prescription. I think I took that quote off Mary Frances as well, to be honest with you. Um, why do you think that got so much traction? 



 We love the concept of the hero's journey. You know, when it comes to, if you think about your favorite book or your TV show, film, we like that narrative arc, don't we?

The hero, he hits some kind of problems, he overcomes all these obstacles, he, he wins in the end. We love that arc. We're taught it in, from young children in fairy stories. So we are looking for that lovely, neat progression. This happens, we deal with this. We come out the other end. Yeah. We go into grief. We come out with acceptance.

So we love that 

linear model. Of course we do. 

of course it appeals to us. And I think that is why this stages model has hung on so much over these decades and still is the one model that everybody seems to know. And then they. Suffer a bereavement and realize, Oh no, it's not, it's not like that at all.

It's not straightforward. Like, and yet people will still be quoting it at them. Oh, you're, you know, you're stuck in the anger stage. You need to, you need to move on. You need to get to acceptance, but it doesn't work like that. You can cycle in and out and back and forth and have them all at the same time or not experience some of them.

Brilliant. So for me, I'd say this, this has been a huge tipping point. The grieving brain has been a huge tipping point. It's changed the way I, I, I perceive it's changed the way I communicate and teach grief. Um, it's been a huge, huge reframing for me on so many different levels. It's a unifying theory.



Do you have a, 

if we're going to wrap this 

what would be a takeaway that you want to conclude with?

I think two, um, first of all, that it gives us actual physical proof of why the grieving process takes a long time.

And I feel like that really does give people permission. To grieve and to be more patient with themselves to be more compassionate or if it's somebody we're supporting to, you know, really expect it is an adaptation process. Luckily, our brains are amazing adaptation, but it can't be rushed. So I think that's one of the big takeaways for me.

And the other one is, you know, And literally looking at that footage, it shows you just how much of the brain is involved when we experience moments of grief. It's not like there's this one little tiny pea sized area that's impacted. There is so much going on there. So of course it's going to impact people when it comes to their behavior.

To how they're feeling physically, to how they're able to interact with other people, of course it does. It's a huge, huge process. So those are my two big takeaways. What about you? 

Can I talk about the massive reframe that she's given me that I use every single time now if we frame grief as a learning experience That was so powerful to me.

That was my that was one of my major light bulb moments Because, and as she says, 

not a two plus two equals four learning experience, but an interplanetary travel experience, trying to live on a planet with an atmosphere, trying to kill us that type of learning.

And we do have to learn, if we frame grief as a learning experience, we are learning how to reintegrate who we are, because everything has changed. The landscape has changed that we're living in, how we relate to the world we're living in. It's all changed. And the beautiful gift that that gives us as well is that we've got a huge tool to help us learn that we've been using since the day we were born, our brain.



 if we all thought about grief as a learning experience. Nobody would say, I thought you'd be over it by now. Or, you know, it's been six months, or it's been 12 months, or it's been 10 years. Because the truth is we learn every day. So that was one of my huge takeaways. Grief is a learning experience.

And it's so, so true. 

 One of the other podcasts I listened to where she was being interviewed, you know, how, how can we know if we're grieving in a healthy, normal way, or if we have got a problem, you know, if we are really stuck and, and that's what she encouraged was, It's not about how much you're grieving.

It's not about how frequent the waves of grief are or how big they are. It's about noticing whether there is any form of change at all. And even if that change is only small, that means that there is a grieving process going on and that is normal grieving. 



And it just gives people permission to grieve 



 📍 Thank you for joining our conversation today. 

 Please do click on the link in the pod description so you can watch the six minute video that we created based upon the book by Mary Frances O'Connor from The Grieving Brain, published by HarperOne. Please do go out and buy a copy because that would be absolutely incredible for Mary Frances and also you get a real personal insight into her journey and understanding of The Grieving Brain.

 This episode of Grief in the Room was presented by Martin Roddis and Trudie Bamford. Join us next time when we'll be talking about

 We're going to talk about the language of loss, which is a really important part of all of the grief education work that we do is putting, putting words to the different kinds of grief that may come up that clients may present with. And this is a really important episode because it's a grief education foundation, knowing the kinds of grief that people will be going through.

Cause grief is a very generic term, isn't it? But There are many different ways that people experience grief.