Healing From Grief & Loss | Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor

My guest is Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona and a world expert on the science of grief and loss. We discuss what happens in the brain and body when we grieve, the role of dopamine and yearning in the grieving process, the health risks of getting stuck at particular stages of grief and how to move through loss while also deeply honoring the person, animal or thing that is no longer with us. Dr. O’Connor explains that grief involves cycling back and forth between protest and despair (often guilt and anger too) and explains science-supported ways to move through that process in the healthiest possible way. Everyone experiences grief and loss at some point. Dr. O’Connor provides valuable knowledge and tools to help you navigate grief under any circumstance.

Articles

• The Relationship of Prolonged Grief Disorder Symptoms With Hemodynamic Response to Grief Recall Among Bereaved Adults (Psychosomatic Medicine)
• Craving love? Enduring grief activates brain’s reward center (NeuroImage)
• Maternal caretaking behavior towards a dead juvenile in a wild, multi-level primate society (Scientific Reports)
• Low-Dose Aspirin for Prevention of Cardiovascular Risk in Bereavement: Results from a Feasibility Study (Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics)
• A controlled trial of two mind-body interventions for grief in widows and widowers (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology)
• Associations of religious and existential variables with psychosocial factors and biomarkers of cardiovascular risk in bereavement (Aging Cell)
• Gene switches make prairie voles fall in love (Nature)
• Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC): A Study of Spousal Bereavement in the Detroit Area, 1987–1993 (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)

Books

• On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families
• The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing
• The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity
• The Denial of Death

Other Resources

• John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory
• 12-Step Programs
• Huberman Lab NSDR
• Grief resources
• Yearning in Situations of Loss (YSL) Scale
• Ghost
• The Bridge

Huberman Lab Episodes Mentioned

• What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health

People Mentioned

• Anna Lembke: psychiatrist, professor and medical director of addiction medicine, Stanford University
• John Bowlby: British developmental psychologist, known for attachment theory
• Alan Watts: British-American author, speaker
• Carrie Fisher: American actress, writer
• Debbie Reynolds: American actress, writer, producer
• Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Swiss-American psychiatrist, known for five stages of grief
• Roman Palitsky: research psychologist, Emory University School of Medicine
• Hunter S. Thompson: American journalist, author