Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Leaving someone feels like being left
Leaving feels like being left
Any separation or ending activates a primary feeling of being left, including unintentional ones like a death or a parent's depression. Unconsciously, it does not matter who does the leaving. People who decide to break up with someone feel, deep inside, that they are the ones who were left.
Endings in therapy
Every session of therapy ends with a small version of this: a separation, and for some people a rejection or an injury. The final ending of a treatment goes further, because it gives two people a chance to grieve together. Hardly anywhere else in life offers that, not in breakups and definitely not in death.
Mourning on many levels
Mourning works on several levels at once. It reopens everything already lost, and it grieves losses still to come, the way people at a funeral cry for those who will die later and probably for themselves. Accepting loss includes accepting aging, mortality, and every limit life has.
Why does being left hurt like physical pain?
In 2003, Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman, and Kipling Williams published a brain imaging study in Science. Volunteers lay in a scanner while playing Cyberball, a virtual ball-tossing game in which the other players eventually stopped throwing to them. Being shut out activated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region also involved in the distress of physical pain. Later work has debated how far the overlap goes.
How did Freud describe the work of mourning?
Freud set out his view in the 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia. He argued that a mourner has to test reality again and again, since every memory of the lost person must be faced and let go of one by one. He saw this as slow because the mind is reluctant to give up an attachment. In the essay he contrasted this with melancholia, in which the loss is not fully conscious.
More from 10% Happier with Dan Harris
