GRIEVER's EXCHANGE // Ways of Knowing
Category: Science, Labs, Neurology, and Facts X Grief, Loss, Relationships, and Reality. The GRIEVER’s EXCHANGE series is about referral links to podcasts, movies, books, and more; two of the most popular posts so far have been on grief + friendship and grief + new relationships.
I mostly want to resist the hard science of grief. I’m the one with the company called Soft Data, after all. The notion of known, numerical worlds correlates (for me at least) to so much inhuman greed and patriarchy, that I almost always1 bristle at the thought. Which is why it’s taken me about a year to follow up on a favorite mentor and friend’s suggestion that I share with you a podcast episode from the Western World’s preeminent lifestyle neuroscientist.
“Can’t we leave facts out of this,?” I thought, when she initially brought it up. “Can’t we just let ourselves feel without having to know everything?”
But the fact (ha!) is, it’s often those little tidbits of crystallized insight that help me and maybe you and possibly us trust and truly feel our feelings. So while it sure took me a long time to get around to posting that initial recommendation—along with a few others in similar veins—the research and discourse I’m sharing is offered in the same way all the soft data always is: Take what resonates, what rings true, what affirms your own inner knowledge. And let the rest ride.
And be sure to read to the end if you’re positive, like me, that grief and love are the same thing.
The Huberman Lab Podcast #74: The Science and Process of Healing from Grief
From the guy in charge of stitching science to being, a thorough run-up of what happens neurologically, biologically, and other-logically while sadness, anger, pain, and whatever else rip through our lived experience. I’m linking to the YouTube version because I find that watching Huberman helps me avoid mind-tripping my way into weird thoughts about a hyper-researched, extensively graphed and quantified existence. Like: He’s human; it’s chill, we’re not robots. Yet. On pretty much all platforms, though, his ever-precise team provides excellent time stamps and I’ll recommend the same section my aforementioned friend and mentor did: “Remapping Relationships” at 29:59. Given, especially, that my grief offerings go by the name Griefmapping, this is the part that really got me.New York Times:2 “The Biology of Grief”
It’s the end of the subhead that gets me: “but much remains a mystery.” I like that this piece goes into how and why what we know about grieving is limited; grief is not a disease and it’s not a mental disorder, so in essence, it falls outside of normal budgeting channels that research demands. If you can’t fund a study, you can’t do the study. Why does this feel comforting for me? I suppose because it supports, in some strange way, my deeply held conviction that grief is sacred.New York Times:3 “What We Know About Treating Extreme Grief With Psychedelics”
Using Prince Harry’s memoir and disclosures around healing with psychedelics as a jumping off point (err—as click bait?), this piece centers on what might be called “complicated grieving,” or, with more pathologizing, “persistent complex bereavement disorder,” and is loosely defined as acute grief that lasts longer than a year, precluding one from living their life. Basically: Prince Harry says psychedelics helped him “redefine reality” after his mother’s death; science says … uh, maybe. Which, you know, is about what we’d expect from them. Got some personal evidence that says otherwise? Let us know in the comments.The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O’Connor
Given my reticence to think about a grief as a graph or a data set, I was surprised to find myself checking this book out of the library and actually reading it. But after hearing her on a few podcasts and reading this British Psychology feature with the author, headlined, “You Can’t Really Study Grief Without Studying Love,” I had a strong inkling that it would be worth it. It was. If you don’t feel like taking on O’Connor’s 256 pages, I recommend giving the afore linked interview a read instead.
“It is not half so important to know as to feel.”
Rachel Carson, American Conservationist and Author
Overstatement that I will surely + often contradict. Sometimes I like science. Like ole Walt Whitman, I contradict myself.
Includes a paywall. While I believe in supporting good writing and good journalism (as in, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription), if you’re already subscribing to other publications and you just want to read a little something here and there, with a little Googling you can always find suggestions for bypassing the ticket takers.
See above.