It Takes Gas to Power the Engine

Some of these blog posts are going into a book that I'm writing on these early months of grieving.  One of the ways I approach this is through work I have done previously in reading about cognitive neuropsychology.  This has direct relevance to an understanding of grieving.  One of the questions worth asking is, "What is grieving good for?"  What is actually happening to me and why?

I find it critical to remember that most of my grieving process is happening far below any conscious awareness. While I engage in all sorts of activities and behaviors as I consciously grieve, the great majority of the “work” is being done far below any conscious awareness I might have.

Grieving is a cognitive process in the sense that everything I experience is a cognitive process—it happens in and through my brain and associated neurological tissues. This is not to say that grieving is somehow a purely rational or intellectual process. Far from it! But it is to say that my grieving processes are subject to the same realities and limitations as anything else that happens to me in my cognitive systems.

The mind is the great “iceberg” of human experience. Our consciousness is not the process of being conscious, but rather it is the result of such processes. Karl Lashley has pointed out that the content of our conscious experience does not come from the middle of cognition but rather as an end result. Ninety percent (at least metaphorically—I don’t know the real number) of what happens in my brain and mind happens beneath my conscious awareness. And that is certainly true of grieving processes.

That’s why this is such hard physical work, and I as the bereaved don’t really know why. My mind is working overtime to process some measure of recovery and then to produce some sort of helpful and healing results. Joseph LeDoux notes, “subjective emotional states, like all other states of consciousness, are best viewed as the end result of information processing occurring unconsciously” (The Emotional Brain, page 37). To use another image, moving my car forward is the outcome of internal combustion, not internal combustion itself.

The engine in my car, however, requires huge amounts of energy to produce that forward motion. So it is with grieving. That activity under the surface is absorbing huge amounts of energy, attention and processing power. It’s like three-quarters of my brain is engaged in solving differential calculus problems while the other quarter is just trying to balance the checkbook. It’s no wonder I had so many mistakes in my checkbook in those first days.

This is, of course, the good news. If I had to devote all my conscious attention to the work of grieving in those first days, I wouldn’t even be able to focus enough to go and relieve myself. Grieving is that underlying process of healing and recovery that goes on while I try to stay alive and functioning long enough for it to happen. The best things I can do to help that underlying process are to get enough to eat and drink, to try to sleep as well as I can, to exercise regularly, and to surround myself with loving people who will do what they can to help me.