“I Feel Broken.” Why the Sudden Loss of a Loved One Is Incapacitating
No one can tell you how you should feel in grief.
Why is it that when we lose someone we love, be that a person or a beloved pet, we feel broken, lost, incapacitated, even immobile?
When we lose someone we care deeply about, we literally have to learn how to function without them in our lives. To break this down into a metaphor, our lives run most of the time on autopilot thanks to the workings of complicated systems within the subconscious programming of our minds.
All the parts of our brain responsible for different functions (like the amygdala, mammalian, anterior cruciate ligament, prefrontal cortex, etc.) do everything from keeping our heart beating, moving one foot in front of the next, relaying from the stomach muscles and corresponding chemical reactions of digestion that we’ve had enough to eat, to thinking about how we are going to respond to something someone just wrote about our brains.
Various parts of our brain have been programmed over time to run behavioural routines that may show up as responses to patterns, like for example, that joy you feel when you open the door and your dog greets you, or the feeling you get when your partner gently scratches the hair on the back of your head, to the routines of…
