(soft music)
- There's a wonderful neuroscientist
who died a few years ago, a very mourned untimely death.
His name was Dr. Jaak Panksepp.
And he distinguished a number of brain systems,
emotional systems,
that we share with other mammals actually.
They are more developed in human beings,
but we share them with other mammals.
They include care, and he capitalized these C-A-R-E,
and that's biologically, genetically,
evolutionarily determined impulse
to care for the vulnerable.
It's primary purpose is of course to care of the young,
because none more vulnerable than a newborn and the child.
So there's got to be some system
in the brain of the adult that compels
or calls the parent caregiver to take care of the child,
and that's called the care system,
and it has certain neurochemicals associated with it,
oxytocin and vasopressin, and endorphins and so on.
So care is one system.
We have a system for rage.
You can see how that's necessary
because when somebody is encroaching on your boundaries,
you wanna be able to defend yourself,
so, "No, stay out", that's the rage system.
And the assistance were lost, obviously, system for seeking.
Now one of the systems that he distinguished
was what he calls PANIC GRIEF, PANIC/GRIEF.
Again, capitalized.
This is the response of the young creature
who doesn't get the care that they need.
If you're an infant and your parents are not there with you,
they're meant to be with you 24/7 by the way.
No mother cat leaves their infant.
No mother orangutan puts the infant in a tree
and goes off on a picnic.
So when the parent is not around,
the infant is meant to panic.
Why?
Because the infant panic response
will show itself in crying and distress,
and that will bring the parent running,
because the parent's care system gets activated
by the child's panic.
Grief is when the care is lost, and there's real grief.
And that's the necessary process
to come to terms with the loss.
It's gone, I'm not getting it back, I'm so sad.
Now,
in our evolutionary environment
where we grew up in small band hunter gatherer groups,
the parents may have been lost,
but there were others around to hold the child.
So the child would be held in their grief.
If the child is held in their grief,
they can move through it and move past it
and know that it's okay to grieve,
even liberating to grieve,
just like the liberation that you felt.
But if the child,
if there's nobody around to hold the child in their grief,
then we suppress our capacity to grieve.
And when you talk about the people
that don't know how to grieve,
that's what you're talking about.
They're telling you about their childhood histories.
Their infant histories actually, probably.
So these losses, they don't need to be
overtly catastrophic,
but, I don't know if I mentioned this last time,
but I was reading my mother's diary
that she kept when I was a newborn
and, this is during war time in Budapest
under the Nazis mostly.
And I always thought that my trauma
had to do with those big key events,
but then she talks about harsh.
I'm three weeks old
and she's lying there with me
and it's almost two in the morning,
quarter to two in the morning,
and my poor little, (speaking foreign language).
That's the diminutive for (speaking foreign language).
I feel so bad for you, my heart is breaking,
she writes in her diary,
because you've been crying for the last hour and a half,
one and a quarter, asking to be fed,
but I'd promised the doctor
that I would feed you on schedule.
So you're not due to feed until two o'clock again,
because I fed you at 10 o'clock.
Okay, this time I'm going to give in,
but don't think it's gonna happen again.
Because you're old enough of young gentlemen to realize
that sometimes we have to wait for things, okay?
Now, I was grieving for an hour and a half,
panicking and grieving.
And these little losses
that we think is just normal part of life,
if they subvert or disappoint
the child's natural expectation, they result in panic,
they result in grief.
And if they keep happening, it's unbearable.
So we suppress the grief.
It doesn't mean that it goes away,
but it means that we put it at sort of
a body armor against it.
We tense up against it.
So in that article,
when I talk about when there's tension pay attention to it.
I'd never done anybody how to grieve.
I mean, yeah, there's grieving rituals,
and if you're in a culture or can join one,
like the Irish, they keen don't they.
Their women were just keen for the dead,
and there's the Jewish shiva.
You sit shiva, you visit the family of the deceased one,
and you spend time together, you know,
there's culturally indigenous healing practices.
So if you're in a culture that offers grieving practices,
well, that's great.
But for the most part, this culture does not.
So when somebody asks you, how do I grieve?
There's nothing i can teach them,
there's nothing like do this to grieve.
What I would do, if I was talking to somebody
who believes there's some grief to relieve,
but they don't know how to,
I would just start with where they are at the moment.
I would say, well, what's happening for you right now?
A kind of compassionate inquiry.
And if anybody here, of course I have no idea.
I'm not guaranteeing success,
but I'm just telling you how I would go about it.
I would begin with what is, not with,
we're trying to get somewhere and we're not getting there,
and it's frustrating and we should be getting there.
But I mean, your mindfulness practitioners,
it's a matter of becoming
very actively and compassionately curious
about just actually what's going on.
Not about what's not going on, but what is going on.
So it's an inquiry.
So for me it's not a how to grieve,
but it's a question of let's inquire.
Let's see what's blocking it.
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