• Question: when someone we love dies, do we emotionally greive or is it something that our brain like makes up for us? and are there really stages to greiving? if so what are they?

    Asked by doggies to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Hmm, that’s an interesting question, and I don’t think I can really answer it. Our grief is definitely real – when we are attached to someone, and we lose them, then we consciously miss them and grieve for them, so I wouldn’t say it is made up by the brain. Although I suppose the brain does control how we feel, so the emotion is caused by certain reactions and connections within the brain and the way that we think and feel our emotions.
      As for stages in grief – I don’t know too much about what has been scientifically proven, but it seems reasonable that people would go through stages as they try to recover from the trauma of losing someone they loved. It;s making me sad just thinking about it 🙁

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 15 Mar 2013:

      I think that all the things that we feel come from our brain, all our emotions, including grief. So grief is real, but it does come from our brain. Stages of grieving is one theory that some scientists came up with, there are other theories too, and lots of people don’t think that the stages theory is a good one. With theories about the mind, often they will be correct in some ways but it will be slightly different for different people, not everyone will go through all the stages, and each stage would be different for each person.

      This issue is one that scientists haven’t decided yet so it is argued about quite a lot, and there are lots of different ideas about how it works. Maybe you could do some research online to find out about what different scientists think and then decide who you think is right. To get you started the main scientist who thought up the idea about stages of grief was called Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

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