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Grief.
Suffering is part of human existence. This is fact. Every person in the world has lost something of significance and gone into a process of grieving. Grief takes on different forms for different people. Some numb pain; some deny through avoidance, and some lean into the pain. Loss is unavoidable. Grief comes after loss, and psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross believed that there are 5 stages of grief. They are: Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance There has been criticisms of this grief theory among social scientists. I don’t love it or hate it. I do think grief is a process, but I don’t necessarily think there is a structure (that we grieve in this consecutive order). Grief affects…
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Loneliness – Part 2
It’s been 4 months since I wrote this post on loneliness, and 6 months since this pandemic dramatically altered our lives. I think most of us would agree, we did not expect it to be so impactful and last. this. long. If you’ve been following along here for a while, you may have noticed that I love learning about how our emotions develop through chemical reactions in our brains. Here are a few things I’ve learned in my reading of Together by Dr. Vivek Murthy: Our brain has two networks: one for social processing and one for non-social processing. When we are done performing a task (non-social processing), our brain immediately switches back to social thinking. So even when we’re…