Living on the Iceberg's Tip

In the midst of catastrophe and tragedy nothing is nailed down.  Everything is up for grabs.  This is what trauma does to a person.  Mark Umbreit offers a helpful description of this as he discusses the trauma which crime victims experience.  We tend to live in a state of normal, safe, predictable equilibrium.  We may drift to the edges of that equilibrium and even fall completely out of whack under stress.  Then we return to our more familiar and balanced state of being.  You might recall this in psychological terms in a previous post as our "set point." 

Trauma attacks that equilibrium at its roots and unhinges our safe existence.  Umbreit notes, “Trauma throws people so far out of that range [of the normal equilibrium] that it is difficult for them to restore a sense of balance in life” (Victim Sensitive Victim offender Mediation Training Manual, page 43).  Healing must include some kind of fundamental re-orientation, the kind of thing I have heard called over and over again “the new normal.”  This is another take on the notion that traumatic loss, unlike other human experiences, may in fact change an individual's "set point" over the long term.

I find it critical to remember that most of my grieving process is happening far below any conscious awareness.  While I engage in all sorts of activities and behaviors as I consciously grieve, the great majority of the “work” is being done far below any conscious awareness I might have.  

Grieving is a cognitive process in the sense that everything I experience is a cognitive process—it happens in and through my brain and associated neurological tissues.  This is not to say that grieving is somehow a purely rational or intellectual process.  Far from it!  But it is to say that my grieving processes are subject to the same realities and limitations as anything else that happens to me in my cognitive systems.

The mind is the great “iceberg” of human experience.  Our consciousness is not the process of being conscious.  Karl Lashley has pointed out that the content of our conscious experience does not come from the middle of cognition but rather as an end result.  Ninety percent (at least metaphorically—I don’t know the real number) of what happens in my brain and mind happens beneath my conscious awareness.  

That is clearly true of grieving processes.  That’s why this is such hard physical work, and I as the bereaved don’t really know why it is so tiring at the moment.  Here's why.  My mind is working overtime to process some measure of recovery and then to produce some sort of helpful and healing results.  Joseph LeDoux notes, “subjective emotional states, like all other states of consciousness, are best viewed as the end result of information processing occurring unconsciously” (The Emotional Brain, page 37).  

To use another image, moving my car forward is the outcome of internal combustion, not internal combustion itself.  The engine in my car, however, requires huge amounts of energy to produce that forward motion.  So it is with grieving.  That activity under the surface is absorbing huge amounts of energy, attention and processing power.  It’s like three-quarters of my brain is engaged in solving differential calculus problems while the other quarter is just trying to balance the checkbook.  It’s no wonder I had so many mistakes in my checkbook in those first days.  

This is, of course, the good news.  If I had to devote all my conscious attention to the work of grieving in those first days, I wouldn’t even be able to focus enough to go and relieve myself.  Grieving is that underlying process of healing and recovery that goes on while I try to stay alive and functioning long enough for it to happen.  The best things I can do to help that underlying process are to get enough to eat and drink, to try to sleep as well as I can, to exercise regularly, and to surround myself with loving people who will do what they can to help me.

I can, however, do more than that.  I can think about and come to a deeper understanding of grieving processes as things that are happening in me and to me.  One of the great contributions cognitive neuropsychology has made to our lives is the insight that thinking about thinking can help us feel better and function more effectively.  

As opposed to Freudian psychology which assumes that I can’t really understand all the dark things that motivate me, the newer mind sciences have demonstrated that accurate information about my internal processes will help me to heal more quickly, live with greater personal peace, and respond to life with calm assurance.

That has been my experience.  The more I can understand my own processes, the better I can cope.  The more mindful I am about those processes, the more able I am to make choices about how I respond to life moment by moment.