A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Practical exercises

9 : There are almost always layers of grief

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Humans are story-telling animals, and there is a tendency to make up a story – to expect that there is a story – around every emotion.

But emotions are a summary of your organic body’s status, and are not necessarily related to external situations or even to any recognisable past event. Instead they can be your animal body’s story, with an animal organic meaning that knows nothing of cognitive-level stories, and may not make any sense to your rational mind. So fear, terror, apprehension, anxiety, helplessness, powerlessness, persecution, foreboding or a sense of impending doom may relate to something real I the external world, happening now – in which case the cause may be quite obvious. However, a useful question to always ask (when you remember) is "to what extent is this emotion proportional to this situation?" If there is any sense of disproportion in which the feeling seems smaller than the actual thing itself, then either you are simply maintaining some calmness in the storm, or you are slightly dissociated (or both). Dissociation comes with a numbness that is usually discernable.

If the feeling seems to be bigger than the actual situation warrants, then again we have three clear options – one being to check that maybe there is something else that your conscious mind has not yet picked up on. But for most people living in a typical Western culture it would be very unusual for there to be immediate hidden danger (immediate because your somatic alarm system is only interested in the immediate environment). So the two remaining options are either this is a memory of a fearful event that you may or may not know about, or your body is going through some kind of physiological emergency (and the emotion is a biological existential fear). If there are also physical symptoms – sweating, palpitations, shaking, nausea – then either the remembered emotion is a big one, or something is happening with your metabolism.

In this gathering-back-together, grief almost always arises when the body recognises that its is safe – and if allowed to take its biological course does not last long at all – because it is an emotion of re-integration. Grief also arises because the body has a strong feeling of loss because "it/we could have been like this all the time" – a feeling/state closely connected to the "gathering back together what remains". Which results in mild grief when we are extremely happy or awe-struck or become aware of some deep connection that we were previously oblivious to. This grief-of-reconnection itself may be overwhelming. So re- connection (from fragmented parts back to being loosely and adaptively coupled) is not a trivial thing, and has to be marinated in for some time before it can become a normalised state.

Consequently, in restorative work and healing of trauma – there is almost always grief. It is particularly important to recognise that biological grief usually needs no particular story to be told, often arises without an obvious narrative of its own, and – provided that it is not locked in by being attributed to a story – goes almost as quickly as it came, because it has completed its biological task.