The death of Diego Maradona, arguably the best soccer player in the history of soccer, put the whole of Argentina and many others around the world in a state of mourning. It seems logical then to address this topic in psychology now to help you cope with the pain of loss. At any rate, knowing how to cope with loss is an essential psychological skill we all need to develop in our lives—and this grief experience can be a catalyzer for many.
Grief and loss
Grief and loss are normal psychological processes in the life of any individual. To mourn is an inherent part of what it means to be human. As the Buddha taught us 2600 hundred years ago, nobody is spared the pain of losses in his or her life. That is why the First Noble Truth in Buddhism is “Life is suffering.” This Buddhist teaching coincides with the Biblical teachings about the importance of suffering and of dealing with it with resignation in our lives.
As a result of the recognition of this truth, everybody at some point in their lives, will have to deal with mourning. Because of these facts of life, it is vital to understand what we experience when we lose a loved one. And learning about mourning will help you–not only to understand the process if you are grieving a loved one–but will also save you the harmful effects of avoiding grieving altogether. Or, what is even worse, of getting into a process of grief that never ends.
This post is the first of a series on the subject of grief and loss. The subject is too extense to address it all here. So, in this post, I will start by describing loss—which is the cause of grief. Then I will look into its effects on our psyche and into the frustration we experience with losses in life. In future posts, I will describe the behaviors we need to avoid in order to grieve properly, rather than going into denial of loss or into a never-ending process of pathological grief.
Loss: A definition
What is loss? Where does it come from? Why is it such a painful experience?
We can say that loss is a painful feeling that results from any person, circumstance, or event that affects us emotionally now by having been there before and disappearing from our lives. Loss is then the result of the reality of permanent change in life. Things come, things go. People show up in our existence–and things and people pass away. As George Harrison reminded us in one of his songs “All Things Must Pass.”
A person or object was there before as part of our past and it had therefore become an important part of our lives. His/her presence gave us pleasure. As a result, this person or situation had become a part of our own selves, of our Egos so to speak. And it/he/she gave us enough pleasure with their presence that they will be missed if they are no longer there.
Anything or anyone then who was a valued part of our existence and is no longer there will elicit in us feelings of grief and loss. When we lose them, we are losing a part of ourselves. This is what makes it so painful.
The source of our grief does not have to be necessarily be the loss of a person, however. The loss can be of anything that we treasure and that is no longer there. Examples of non-personal losses are: the loss of a job, a position, our youth, our health, our athletic prowess, our ability to have children, our freedom during the COVID19 pandemic… you name it.
We can describe Life as “a constant process of loss.“
When we are in our mothers’ wombs we are protected and cozy. When we are born, we come into this world that is full of noises, lights, sounds, and all of that stimulation makes the world stressful for our fragile beings. The first big loss–the one that eventually will become the archetype of all others–is the peace of being in our mother’s womb. Being in her womb is a problem-free state that we all long for later on in life. This longing is expressed in adulthood as the fantasy of “the return to our mother’s womb.”
Sleep is our “mini deaths”
Throughout our lives we will reproduce this withdrawal from the world every night when we go to sleep. So, a whole third of our existences happen in a state of withdrawal from the realities of life out there. This goes to show how taxing reality can be on our minds. In a way, every night we need to “die” a little; and we come back to life the next morning with renewed energy to deal with the challenges of life. Every day in our lives is then a new beginning. Keep that always in mind.
And this wish to return to the peace experienced in our intra-uterine life is the source for “the longing for death” present in our unconscious. Freud called this pull to go back to non-existence—or to reach the state of Nirvana–the “Death Wish.” He found that this instinctual desire for the peace of death is present–to a certain extent–in all of us.
The Life and Death Drives
The “Death Wish” is countered by the Life Drive (or Eros),. The latter includes our survival and reproductive instincts. The manifestation of “the life drive” is what he called the “libido.” This “libido” is the life force that drives EROS (LOVE). Its effects on creates the feelings of love, sexuality–and our attachments to people and external objects. It is this “Life Drive” that makes us want to exist and procreate. So, instinctively, we place our libido on the objects of love, our parental figures, our children, and our significant others. When they disappear due to separation or death, this “unapplied libido” has nowhere to go and it returns to us with a vengeance.
Unapplied libido then becomes anxiety as it confronts us with the void we all have inside. In our lives, this “void” is only veiled by the people we love as long as we have them. These attachments work as an antidote against the background of existential anxiety.
The Life and Death Drives struggle
These two biological forces are always at odds with each other: Life and Death. This is true in others as well as in ourselves. Biologically we are “living and dying all at the same time” throughout our lives. Our entire bodily cells–with the exception of some brain neurons–are changed every 7 years. So, you have a “new body” every 7 years having “lost” the one you used to have by leaving it behind.
The ubiquitous presence of frustration in life
The other unescapable element present in anybody’s life is Frustration. I would define “Life” as a never-ending process of frustration from the moment you are born until the moment you die. The proof of this fact is the reality that nobody laughs when they are born. We are all born crying; and nobody dies singing.
Why we cry when we lose someone
Crying is essential to survival as it is necessary to start our process of breathing at birth. In fact, if a newborn does not cry, the attending doctor will have to spank the baby lightly to get him/her crying. So, crying is the way to hang on to life and deal with asphyxiation (feelings of air hunger) and it will eventually become the model of all anxiety later on in life. This phenomenon was described by psychoanalyst Otto Rank as “the Trauma of Birth.” (Remember that when we experience anxiety one of the cardinal symptoms of this state is the inability to “catch our breath”).
Crying is then the natural way the body finds to decrease the emotional tension caused by the loss when we lose a loved one. Suppressing crying is therefore the ultimate mistake made by those that are trying to mourn properly.
A source of constant frustration in life is our life circumstances
We are born at a certain historical time, into families at random, in places or countries that were not of our choice. Those that preceded us in life made all the important decisions about our lives for many years before we acquired a degree of independence. Humans are the animals that have the longest dependency period before they can reach adulthood. We are the only living beings that have to go through a long period of education before we can “fly for ourselves.” These very facts of life are frustrating to all of us but they are essential for survival as we cannot survive on our own terms in our childhood years.
Frustration: A definition
Frustration is “a feeling of resentment when things and people do not behave the way we would like them to.” Frustration is the typical situation in which the round peg does not fit into the square hole. It is the result of the fact that this world is not made for our own pleasure or satisfaction. It is important to understand that the Universe has not been made to make humans happy. And that is a pill that is very hard to swallow for everyone. That ultimate reality of life is even harder to accept for those of us in American culture who cut our teeth watching Disney movies.
Frustration is dealing with “what IS” while repudiating it at the same time. We have our own desires and wants. We want the world and people to be and behave in a certain way–and the world and people are always letting us down. Thus, we get frustrated, which is a form of anger at the facts of the world. And the harsh reality we need to accept is that–for the most part–they do not respond to our expectations. And worst of it all, “frustration,” just as much as losses, is an unavoidable fact of life.
The biggest frustration in life is Loss: And the epitome of irreversible loss is Death
As long as we are alive, Death is something that “happens to someone else.” Death is never our own death, which we cannot conceive. We are the only ones not attending our wake and funeral. This is the final truth we all want to dodge. Although, we all know that one day, we will have to deal with it. And yet, we are the only living thing on this planet that knows that he/she is “made for death.”
We know life has a beginning and an end. And we know one day We are going to die too, but we don’t believe it. This thought is too unbearable to hold in mind for more than a few minutes without going crazy. So, most of us live pushing it back and living like if death did not exist.
This denial of the reality of Death makes our lives much more tolerable. And yet, when someone we love around us passes away, we can no longer push it back. The sheer reality of Death is there and there is no way to avoid it. So, when someone we love dies–not only do we mourn the person we have lost–but we also receive “a wake-up call” to our own mortality, which we have pushed out of our consciousness for so long.
How I got in touch with this reality early on in my life
This is a reality I personally had to confront early on in my own life. I lost my father to an unexpected brain bleed when I was eleven years old. He was a physician and he was on call at the hospital on a nice sunny Sunday. We even had had lunch with him that day. I saw him drive away in his rambler ambassador as he dropped me over at a friend’s. I would be the last member of my family to ever see him alive and well again. The next morning, I would have to see him in a coffin at his wake before his funeral. This was the first time in my life I had to deal with death, and see and touch a dead body. I will never forget the cold of his forehead on my lips when I kissed him a final good bye that cold Monday in June 1974.
But this tragic event would have enormous consequences on the rest of my life. This episode of loss shaped my entire life. My life from that time on became different as a result of my early life contact with the realities of death, grief, and loss. So, I can write about this today–not because I studied it in books, or because of the hundreds of patients I treated in mourning–but because I experienced grief myself with full force very early on in my own life. And this experience of grief taught me a lot about life. It would also mark me indelibly—and the way I see life–for the rest of my life in every imaginable way.
The “Four Noble Truths of the Buddha” and Why we should be acquainted with them
The story goes that Siddhartha Gautama was a prince living in a kingdom in what today would be the border of Nepal and India. You could say that he was a man who “had it all in life.” He was good looking, wealthy, powerful– and he had a wife and child at 28. But Siddhartha wanted to see how life “really was” outside the protected walls of his palace. So, he wandered off into the “real world out there “to find out what life was like for his subjects. And he found poverty, disease, death–and loss–everywhere he went. He then came to the realization of the sheer reality of human misery. So, he left his privileged life behind to go into the world and find “the truth” about existence. From that time on, his long-term goal became finding the formula to decrease suffering in life: This he called “Enlightenment.”
Siddhartha tried everything for over three decades without success. Until one day, determined to find “Enlightenment,” he sat down to meditate under a Bodhi Tree. He was intent on not coming out of his meditation until he found illumination. “The Awakening,” from his perspective, was the realization of the formula to the right way of living while decreasing suffering in life.
The legend goes that after hours of meditation under the tree he came out and finally reached Enlightment. His “Enlightment” was synthesized in a simple formula. This formula to decrease pain in life is now known as “the Four Noble Truths,” which are the foundation of Buddhism. And here they are, from the Buddha through me to you, “the Four Noble Truths” to decrease suffering in life:
1-Life is Suffering.
2-Everything and everyone in life is transient. Nothing–or no one–stays the same forever.
3-The source of our suffering is our Attachments. We suffer because we become attached to things and people that are transitory and that one day won’t be there anymore.
4 The “Fourth Noble Truth” is the Buddha’s legacy, his prescription for Humanity. He said, “In order to decrease suffering in life, practice detachment.”
This four-line formula is extremely useful when we have to deal with grief and loss in our lives. It is the only advice that has a chance of working. It prepares us to face the unavoidable realities we have to deal with in life. These truths–and your realization of them–becomes a method of prevention of excessive suffering.
These truths are not to be construed as you “should not love anyone to avoid pain.” The Four Noble Truths do not mean that we should not love or get attached at all; but that we should always maintain an independence of mind, a measure of detachment from people and things. We should learn to live without those we love if the situation calls for it. At the same time, the other take home message of this realization is that we should enjoy their presence in our lives as much as possible while they are still there.
In my next post I will examine Grief and Loss more in depth. I will explain its mechanisms and will start making suggestions to deal with mourning more effectively. However, in this first post I wanted to present the matter as an unavoidable fact of life. Given that no one leaves this planet alive–and that no matter who you are–at some point you will experience loss, it is essential that you learn how to deal with it effectively. This is tantamount to say that–knowing that are some point you will experience flooding–it is vital that you learn how to swim if you do not want to perish in the flood. I am here to help you learn how to swim in the ocean of grief and pain.
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And have a peaceful holiday season
Dr T