Cognitive Reactions
- Obsessive thinking
- Inability to concentrate
- Fantasizing
- Apathy
- Dreams
- Disorientation and confusion
- Rehearsing and reviewing aspects of the loss
Some call it brain fog. Others call it day dreaming. We can experience it as being at a loss for words. Or we can experiencing it as searching for our lost keys, only to find that we’ve been holding them in our hand during the hunt for the last 45 minutes. And yes, it can all be a reaction to our loss.
We don’t tend to think about the thinking aspects of grief a lot. We don’t think about our need to perserverate on specific details of the bedside, or the last this or that. This can be obsessional thinking, but not OCD. We may find that we cannot attend to details, write down numbers backwards and this is not ADD.
Maybe you just don’t hear the people around you who are talking to you… you only see their mouths move and kind of hear the same noise that Charlie Brown’s teachers make… it just doesn’t sink in.
There are those that would say that this is shock, part of the “Fright, Flight, Freeze, Freak out” response (4Fs). Others would say that it is the first step in the stages of grief. I think it is that we are totally overwhelmed mind/body/spirit and to be cleared headed in that moment (however long that moment lasts) would be more than we could cope with.
I think we have to be honest and remember that our grief is adaptive. It keeps us from being so overloaded that we can’t function at all… functioning at diminished capacity is still more adaptive than not being able to function so it’s in human being’s best interest to have a 4Fs response.
Grief is a time when we often go within. We question what’s real and what’s not. We delve inward to make sense of our world, to cognitively reframe what we are feeling and thinking, what our past has been, what our present is, and what a future could hold.
This is the area, especially in the earliest moments of grief that a practice helped me. I found myself using mantras a lot as they would sometimes stop my thoughts. If I didn’t have my mala on my wrist, I went looking for my mom’s rosary beads (if she wasn’t using them). I held crystals and rocks because it was something tactile that I could cling to when I felt so unanchored.
This was also the time in my meditation that when I was counting four exhales, I would end up at 72 or 49 or worse, I would stay at one because I wasn’t able to stay present more than one breath.
I tried to cope with my cognitive scatter… I wrote lists, only to lose the lists. I tried having a routine but then I would stop mid routine and wonder, “what am I doing? what do I do next?”
This was a time when it was really hard for me to have compassion with myself; I had always prided myself on my intellectual and scholastic abilities. I was blessed to have a loving mentor who kept reminding me that I wasn’t going crazy. Her words would help, in the moment, for a second, or until I drove away. Then I would lose myself in fog again. I didn’t have a lot of faith in the process of grief but I stuck with what I knew would be some saving graces.
With a lot of time, a lot of sharing, retelling my narrative, going deep within to find meaning in my life, taking care of myself, exercising, having a purpose (to go to graduate school), and I finally felt like I had made it to some other shore and had lived to tell about it.
Actually, on that other shore, I simply acknowledged that I had gotten to a place of comfort with my achy heart and I could sit with someone in their achy heart and neither one of us would explode.
- Common Reactions to Grief: Emotional (namasteconsultinginc.com)
- Common Reactions to Grief: Physical (namasteconsultinginc.com)
- Common Reactions to Grief: Behavior (namasteconsultinginc.com)
- Preparing for Grief (everydayhealth.com) — this article is good UNTIL they talk about the stages… see next article in psych today about why the stages are something we want to let go of…
- “Am I Grieving Right?” (psychologytoday.com)
- I would gladly trade my lessons. . . . (namasteconsultinginc.com)
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