What is grief FOR?

What is grief for? What survival value does it have?

It is eay to see what anger, fear and love are for. Anger prompts us to fight to defend our family. Fear prompts us to run away from fights we can't win. Love prompts us to look after each other. But what does grief do that is any use?

Perhaps it allows us to survive loss and to (a bit indirectly) deal with the fact that we are all mortal/temporary, to be 'lost' in time...
I was taught not to grieve---and so loss becomes a long, ambiguous process and I want to just cry and grieve and wail in a "normal" way, get it OUT,
but ... depression moves in after I go about dealing with everything as if I am 'fine'...

When we grieve we process the loss and come to terms with it. Whether it's grief for a loved one, a lost job or different part of your life, it needs to be expressed so that the loss can be integrated into one's life experience. Otherwise the energy associated with the loss stays inside and makes you ill and you don't move forward. When you really grieve and don't hold it back, you are stronger for it. This is what I have found.

From this article about grief (that animals experience) Is there a reason for grief? | Scienceline

Ooh. I've got this one. You see -- you've answered your own question:

"Love" refers to a bond between two people (e.g. romantic) or among many people (e.g. familial, tribal). It's an emotion which, along with others, compels social harmony. It's what encourages us to work together, and this is what benefits our survival.

"Grief" is the flipside of that. It's the consequence of the bond being severed. Which I suppose could further compel you to protect that bond, to fight for the survival of not only yourself, but also of your mate and your tribe. But mostly it's the consequence to losing a loved one. When a bond is severed, it's a bit jarring (in theory). It takes some time to process and recover, and that's where the "grieving process" comes in.

Grief is a process we go through to adapt to significant change/loss. Change requires adjustment. Significant loss is a major change; thus, it requires a longer, more gradual adjustment. When we don't allow for that gradual adjustment, when we try to rush it, ignore it, fight it, then the loss can become traumatic (complicated grief).

Great topic of discussion. I’ve often wondered why grief is so intense. I suppose evolutionarily it does serve a purpose but it makes life harder the older you get and the more loss you suffer.

Grief has major survival value. People can literally die from broken hearts.

If you don't emotionally process the traumatic event in your life through the vehicle of grief (and go through all of the stages of grief), you can experience very significant psychological and behavioral side effects. People who refuse to process aka "grieve" their loss, easily develop addictive behavior (sex, drugs, alcohol, shopping, gambling, etc.). So you really need to respect grief as a necessary, built-in, psychological process and allow your brain to activate it. Denying the significance of the loss in your life, is detrimental to your well-being both short term and long term.

Six Signs of Incomplete Grief | Psychology Today

Let's cut to the chase.

If your spouse dies, the rational course is to marry again as soon as possible. And yet most people in this situation would be out of circulation for months (because of grief), and not just because that's what society expects.

Grief slows you down and makes it more difficult to replace the loss. And that to me makes no sense at all. What's the point?

CantExplain is that what you'd do once your spouse dies? My mom never remarried after my dad died from cancer b/c he was her soul mate. Grief doesn't slow down remarrying anyone, and does not make it more difficult to replace the person. Do you know why people divorce their 2nd or 3rd spouses? Because they didn't grieve and process through their first marriage, however that marriage ended. Read the research.

Sounds like you dislike grief and view it as a waste of your time. What do you think is the best way to deal with traumatic life events? Ignore them? Pretend they didn't happen?

CE, you crack me up sometimes.

Maybe it was the way we were brought up. Adult children of mothers with non-performing hair.

I agree with this.

thanks for posting

Great question, great discussion.

I don't "do" grief. It's complicated. Maybe It's complicated grief, though I was never diagnosed or treated for that. Mostly I think I turned that emotion off, like others, when I was a kid and it got me punished. Kind of like the swat and the saying, "Stop that or I'll give you something to cry about!" Ironically, the swat stopped the whole thing. Go figure.

So anyway, when my soul mate late husband died, I didn't move on. I knew I "should", I knew it was the thing to do, I tried but I didn't want to at some core level and I couldn't overcome that so I have stayed stuck, just ever so slowly deteriorating. Yuck. Knew 18 years ago it would have been better for me and everybody still engaged in the world for me to but "they say" it would be bad for the ones I left to do that, so I didn't. I'm not at all sure that what "they say" is right in this case but my daughter would have glommed onto that as another thing to blame and deprecate me for, so I didn't. That wasn't so much for me and my ego, though it may sound like it, as because I didn't think that feeling and thinking of her mother as "all bad" or "one down" would serve her well in the long run. So, yeah, I didn't want to be a bad mother. But having this walking corpse still around? I'm not at all sure that's done her much good either. But can't know that for sure either.

Maybe I don't attach exactly either. Did with my late husband but that's about it. Dug around in the swamp with therapists for years trying to find the core of the trauma and "recover" or "change" from that but It's apparently not just not available any more. Last therapist terminated me after 6 years because she "didn't have the emotional resources" to continue.

So, no grief, no connecting with anyone else again, just years and years of walking misery, "doing my best" as that gets worse and worse as I slowly, physically deteriorate.

I think "they" should reconsider what "they say" and allow a walk-in clinic at the funeral home. What's the point in continuing the torture if you're stuck and can't move on? But still, I don't want to "hurt" my kids and can't know for sure that I won't, so. . .

My friend just lost her elderly mother a month ago, to dementia. Like you, she shut off her grief valve (for lack of a better term) and distracts herself with her work and travel instead of dealing with the loss. She also doesn't 'connect' emotionally with other people although she has a ton of friends, so that part I don't understand. She's just not emotionally available. Ever. But she's a nice person. Her father was an abusive alcoholic and her mother waited until her husband beat my friend to a pulp before she finally left him. Maybe that is why she is emotionally unavailable to everyone, including her husband and friends. Who knows.

Maybe grief isn't possible for some people? Maybe your therapists are not the right resource for you to use, to try to access your grief. When my dad died, I had to go to a grief counselor at college and I saw a spiritual counselor. The spiritual counselor didn't help b/c I'm an Atheist and I don't believe in a deity or deities. But the grief counselor really helped b/c he was trained in the grief process whereas most run-of-the-mill therapists don't have a clue how to help a grieving person other than tell them to take a ton of antidepressants.

If you are artistically inclined you could try to access your loss through a class with some form of art. Talk therapy can only do so much.