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Giant Brain Candy: Grief as a Kind of Learning. Grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor describes grieving as a form of learning: for years your brain expected someone to be there, and updating that takes time and lived experience. Source: Grieving as learning.
A working modelThe research
  1. O'Connor, M.-F., & Seeley, S. H. (2022). Grieving as a form of learning: Insights from neuroscience applied to grief and loss. Current Opinion in Psychology, 43, 317–322.
  2. O'Connor, M.-F. (2022). The grieving brain: The surprising science of how we learn from love and loss. HarperOne.

Journey 3 · Grief

Grief as a Kind of Learning

Grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor describes grieving as a form of learning: for years your brain expected someone to be there, and updating that takes time and lived experience.

Source: Grieving as learning · A working model

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Giant Brain Candy: The Stages Began With the Dying. The five stages first described patients facing their own deaths, not people grieving a loss. In 233 bereaved people, acceptance was what they reported most, from the first month on. Source: Testing the five stages.
Giant Brain Candy: Bending Without Breaking. Following people from years before a spouse died to 18 months after, researchers found resilience was the most common pattern: real sorrow, with daily life holding its shape. Source: Resilience after loss.
Giant Brain Candy: A Word Born Heavy. The English word grief comes, through Old French, from the Latin gravare, ‘to make heavy’, which comes from gravis, ‘weighty’. Source: The roots of the word grief.
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