____________________ GRIEF AS A TOOLKIT Dylan Holmes ____________________ 2022/Mar/12 What is the problem that grief is solving? Too often, we view grief as a meaningless intrusion: we're sick with it for as long as we can't bear a certain truth, and we get back to normal once we accept that truth. I think this view misses what is purposeful and intelligent and transformative about the grieving process. Take the Kuebler-Ross stages of grief, for example [1]. Should we understand them as an emotional tailspin, a person bizarrely lashing out against an unsolvable problem? 1. Denial --- You can't solve the problem, so you pretend it doesn't exist. 2. Anger ---- You're frustrated and wounded, so you vent explosively about minor, unrelated issues. 3. Bargaining --- You make outlandish attempts to negotiate with fate, a kind of magical thinking. 4. Depression --- You give up and wallow instead of making the best of what you have. 5. Acceptance --- You finally accept the painful truth and return to rational life. Now you can begin dealing with things. On the contrary, I think these stages are a rational collection of problem-solving processes. We'd recognize them as part of everyday life if we weren't so busy pathologizing them. So let's suppose you, a rational person, have just gotten some serious and disturbing news. How do you handle the situation? You might start with: 1. Denial. Question the source. Look for a mistake in understanding. After all, the more dire the news, the more important you understand whether it is true, how you know it is true, and what you can do about it. If it is indeed a serious problem, you need to adopt an overall problem-solving mindset. Roughly put, there are two complementary regimes: 2. Anger. Solve problems explosively, neglecting constraints and reflection. In an emergency, you must act now---survival depends on letting go of your ordinary carefulness and control. Anger is for urgency. 3. Bargaining. Solve problems deliberatively. Search meticulously for possible solutions and new information. If your initial ideas don't work, progressively widen your search to be more imaginative---close-mindedness could be fatal. Most people will switch between these two regimes---and indeed all of these stages---as the situation evolves. Indeed, successful problem-solving depends on the ability to switch flexibly between different approaches. Emotions are our changeover points: an emotional cascade marks a synchronized commitment to strategy. As you sustain your problem-solving efforts, you might end up solving the problem. In the meantime, your mental processes need to do some bookkeeping to keep track of what works and what doesn't. This leads us to the fourth stage: 4. Depression. Keep an up-to-date record of what works and what doesn't. Dismantle options, strategies, connections, and mindsets that are unworkable in light of your findings. If necessary, update your picture of yourself and the kinds of problems you are capable of solving. You'd expect that as your main focus shifts from beating the problem to overhauling and adapting your mental pictures, you'll tend to act less. There is less to do and try. But outward slumps may disguise a tremendous amount of important internal reworking that even the grieving person might not notice. We pour all our energy into this invisible work. The reckoning process---activating and dismantling whole forests of outdated connections---is, in my view, the soul of grief. Everything else is ordinary problem-solving. 5. Acceptance. Integrate new knowledge as it comes. Through extensive striving, reckoning, and internal reworking, you begin to assemble a new picture of yourself, your capabilities, your life, and your world. This so-called Acceptance process isn't a joyful finish line---you aren't back to "normal" at the end, and you might not be at peace. Instead, it is an ongoing process of rebuilding yourself and your problem-solving apparatus for a new world. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ So there is grief: the rational labor of wrestling with catastrophe. It seems hard to watch. In the culture I've grown up in, we don't like being spectators of grief. I've known well-wishers who think their job is to wipe grief away---as if grief were an obsessive tailspin, rather than a necessary rebuilding. To be sure, I don't blame them for wanting to see something else. Some doctors in particular seem to despise grief, possibly because it looks like their main enemy, powerlessness. So grief becomes a disease with stages, and the cure consists of becoming calm. But calmness solves the spectator's problem, not the griever's. I have tried to show how the stages of grief represent phases of a sensible, meaningful problem-solving process which deserves our concerted effort [2] Instead, well-wishers too often pull us away from this work or negate it. We might even do it to ourselves. Sometimes it's due to toxic positivity, that relentless social pressure to exude a cheerful attitude. Sometimes it's that variant I call "toxic indifference", where every attachment and emotion---grief included---is a storm without a purpose, blowing us far afield from our rational, stable selves and making us weak and subhuman. Despite the social pressure to appear cheerful or indifferent, grievers often have more important work to do. Grief grounds us in a self-making project. The alternative seems very dull to me: what would it mean to encounter a genuine existential disaster and not do or think anything about it? How can you live among important new facts of life without the work of understanding them? I regard emotions as a sign of care and mental engagement, and grief as a sign that the process is underway. Grief isn't trying to solve an impossible problem. It is the project of updating your understanding, your approach, and your own self in the presence of profound crisis. What could be more lucid, or more worthwhile? Footnotes _________ [1] While there are many questions about whether the Kuebler-Ross stages actually occur, whether they occur in sequence, and whether they are referring to what I mean by grief, these questions aren't important here. What matters is how our folk understanding of these stages reveals how we think about grief. [2] Actually, it's more that I've defended the architectural role of emotions in the problem-solving process, with these pop-culture "grief stages" as a specific example. There is much more to say about the cognitive structure of grief specifically. On this subject, I highly recommend /The Architectural Basis for Grief/ (1995).