#pregrieving

[mentalisttraceur]

So one thing I've learned recently is that all my growth in pre-grieving, in not becoming overly outcome-attached, in not falling into infatuated love too quickly, and in generally being secure that I will be okay if I don't get or lose someone....

...well, for one thing, it adds up to make me capable of losing relationships by not feeling any urgency to maintain them and attend to them. I'm in a constant state of "it'll be fine if I'll get to it eventually" and "well if this relationship fails because I don't attend to this now, that'll suck but I'll be fine soon enough, and things will work out in the end well enough one way or another".

In fact one of my partners broke up with me in the last couple of weeks, and I think a fair summary is that it happened because I neglected reaching out to them and communicating so much that it basically really hurtfully made them feel unwanted, unloved, and unconnected. Which... was not true on my end at all, but I certainly wasn't showing it, because I had other stuff like thinking and work and my usual mental focus on puzzling out certain things going on, and I am no longer compelled enough to break out of those days or weeks of intense focus by concern and insecurities about losing people or letting people develop the wrong idea about me or whatever.

And like, partly that is a very strong preemptive resilience which is pretty good and healthy, but it did lose me a relationship with someone really exceptional and worthwhile, who I genuinely loved and felt unusually safe and compatible with, so, you know, serious downside!

In other news, another partner is recently seriously considering suicide, and I am dangerously okay with that happening too. No loved one's death can hurt me enough to compel the normal reactions anymore. I pre-grieved it all. I got uncannily good at predicting what thoughts would cause attachments to outcomes that are too specific and not sufficiently within my control and not digging myself into those pain potentials with my cognition.

And now... now I'm this. I was a human thoroughly driven by various fears and concerns and insecurities. Fixing that as much as I have has left me concerningly unmotivated and inert in some ways.

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the hardest - or perhaps just longest and slowest - realizations I've had recently (just now) is that I don't actually need to be able to fit my every choice and action into a thoroughly rigorous rationale.

Somewhere along the way I got too fed up with people making harmful and hurtful choices and actions because of their failure to properly think things throug.

Somewhere along the way I got too rewarded by life working out better for me in the long run as a result of my investments into careful and rigorous cognition that holds up to the tests of general applicability and internal consistency.

Somewhere along the way I got too focused on being able to fit everything I do into ethics that I can fully consciously justify.

All good and correct things, but needing in some sort of balance, because together they culminated in me paralyzing myself constantly over the smallest of things.

The mini-epiphany moment was when I was adding tags to my previous post, when I realized that I didn't need to have a thorough decision algorithm for what tags to make when in my head.

That it was okay for me to just... intuit which of the tags to put in, and not then immediately introspect or prove correct or wrong that intuition and reconcile it with differences with how and why I chose to tag prior posts the way I did.

Maybe it was actually my root insecurity all along somehow, looping back at myself. If people being wrong is a reliable predictor of me being unsafe, then by the mobius-strip style logic that arises as a side effect of empathy and mind interferometry cognition I ought not permit myself to be wrong because others ought not permit themselves to be wrong.

Plus I used to have the typical emotional defense mechanism type of arrogance: a need to grasp onto all evidence suggesting superiority and to maximize emotional reaction to it, because that overrode some bad feelings.

I am no longer influenced as much by either of those two things - both have been deconstructed, and the latter almost entirely healed for a while now.

Perhaps now that their pressure on my mind has eased up, the cogneme(s?) of just letting go of the self-imposed requirement for having a wholistic rigorous system for my actions and choices are finally able to activate again.

But of course it is not just that simple, because for years I have also been developing the skill of trusting in "good enough", of "let's see what happens" and trusting my ability to navigate and handle whatever it is, of trusting the possibilities of going back and reevaluating and changing my decisions later, and of the outcome independence and bad outcome pre-grieving needed to not mind the possibilities of it really ending up badly.

In any case, it was a surprisingly liberating thing to experience.

[mentalisttraceur]

Pre-Grieving

I grieve losses long before they happen, on my own time, distributed in small manageable bursts over months or years.

I don't wait until I see them coming on the horizon, let alone until they actually hit me.

I do this for any hypothetical loss: the deaths of loved and important beings, the ending of relationships, being crippled, job and home loss, my own death, etc.

I think it's a trivially learnable skill but most people don't discover it, because they actively avoid and pull away from their unpleasant emotions.

I pay attention for emotional twinges that tell me that an event or its aftermath would be emotionally painful for me. When I am in a good place and psychologically ready to handle it, I dive in.

I review whatever thoughts, imagined scenarios, or media caused me to feel that way until I re-trigger that emotion strongly and vividly.

I experience it without looking to distract myself, let myself feel what I need to feel, and I process it, explore it. I look for how I can think about it fully, casually, at any moment or for any duration, without uncontrollably slipping into negative emotion wells.

Because the loss hasn't happened yet, I can just focus on that to emotionally "pull out" when I want, then dive back in when I next have the opportunity, whether that be days or months or years later.

I found the cognitive skills to be pretty transferable - once you've internalized how to handle one loss, you can handle similar losses a lot easier.

I try not to get complacent though - each loss has unique details and consequences to it, and as relationships grow the future loss can grow with it, so I try to occasionally look around for any further emotional twinges.

I've found that this also helps me appreciate what I am pre-grieving more. By making myself go over the thoughts, feelings, and what I would be missing in various scenarios after the loss, I notice more fully why it matters to me now.

Remember: when a loss really does happen or becomes imminent, there is no "pulling out", no opportunity to regroup. Whatever mental reactions to the loss you didn't already cope with will be dropped on you without warning.

Pre-grieving lets us pay it forward, in the moments when we're running a mental surplus. Invest in that mental infrastructure enough and you can take losses in stride.

[mentalisttraceur]

Incidental Pre-Grieving

The way I usually explain pre-grieving is as an intentional act. But it often happens as just a side-effect of other things, such as:

You have a well-developed imagination and empathy. You read/hear/watch stories, real or fictional. You swap in yourself, or people you care about, as you relate and process - and bam! suddenly you're faced with a real emotional reaction to the loss of someone or something loved or important.

You figure out, for example as an aspiring actor, that you can cry on cue by imagining something that naturally brings tears.

You are abused, betrayed, let down, and so on, too many times. You grieve not exactly the person themselves, but some trait you thought they had, the person you hoped for or wanted or needed, the person they were only some of the time... by the time they die, there's nothing left to grieve.

[mentalisttraceur]

It's even worse when the slippery nuance epiphany experience happens when asleep, because:

Was the sense of it being epiphanous an artifact of the dream-like pseudo-randomness of sleep cognition?

Can I even get back to the epiphany while awake? Or do I need the more free-form and erratic flow of my mind during sleep?

On the plus side, every time this happens is an opportunity to pregrieve and get comfortable with the idea of possibly slowly losing my mind as I age.

[mentalisttraceur]

Just lost another relative. I am not looking for condolences or sympathy, I just was struck by just how much this moment proves out the value of pre-grieving.

Like. It hurts if I think about it the right ways - but I know exactly which thinking directions lead me into the hurt and which bypass it.

But it's not about avoiding the pain, that's the thing. It's that I don't need to. I can freely touch the pain, but it has no power over me, no lingering hold.

I have all the "answers" ready - the ones I need to give myself in response to each flicker of pain to resolve it, to bounce right back out.

I was at work when I got the news, and I just. Have the freedom to think about it or not, to move on with my day or to comfortably dwell on it to exactly the extent I choose to.

It's... well, it's about as good as the unwanted loss of a dearly loved one who you feel you could've done better by can be.

[mentalisttraceur]

Is your idea of pre-greiving the same as decathect?

My initial reaction was "no, pre-grieving is actually the opposite". That's not exactly right, but this is a good starting point to highlight the key point.

Grief is water. Loss is a force throwing you towards the water. Decathecting - as most people do it - is staying farther from the water than the loss can throw you. Pre-grieving is proactively going into the water and learning to swim.

Careful with that analogy: water is always water and once you can swim in one pool you can swim in them all, but each aspect of grief requires a different "swimming technique", and each loss can have a different amount of each of those aspects.

Sidenote: I didn't know this word until this question, so as I understand it, "to cathect" into something basically means to invest mentally/emotionally into it, and so "to decathect" from something means to detach mentally/emotionally from it.

Great question, by the way, and I think this is a common misinterpretation. The most common interpretation, actually, of pre-grieving.

Pre-grieving at it's core is just the idea that all that stuff that you would go through as part of the grieving process - all those emotional reactions to a loss that you might have?

You can experience them ahead of time. Most people do it occasionally, accidentally, but they turn away. They say "I don't want to think/talk about that". They fall into the kiddie pool, flail to get out in a panic, and try to avoid the pool.

But if we choose to, if we put in the effort to think the thoughts and imagine the situations enough to trigger those feelings, we can go there when we choose. And if we allow ourselves to feel the water and get used to it, we can intimately understand those feelings. We can learn how to navigate them.

When we know how to swim, we can get out of the water faster. We can comfortably live close to deep wells of water, because if we suddenly get thrown in, we know how to swim out, and we'll do it easily.

There is a nuanced question to be asked here: are there even any discrere boundaries between decathecting, Buddhist-style letting-go-of-attachments, and learning how to think with awareness and premeditation of how exactly what we think cascades into various emotions?

Isn't knowing how to swim out just being good at decathecting? Isn't pre-grieving just training yourself to decathect really fast?

I think that's might be a good way to look at it: but the key consequence is that once we're that good, we don't live our life uncathected. We don't decathect prematurely. And if we're not resisting it, we can get equally good at cathecting too, at switching readily between thinking in ways that are cathected and ways that aren't.

Put yet another way, how cathected you are is how much "gravity" that body of "emotional water" exerts on you. How readily your mind flows into it. Pre-grieving, because it is the act of feeling for and moving into those "gravity wells" of feelings, helps with becoming more aware of just how cathected you are. It also makes you better at swimming in that mental space, against the pull or into it, which if you think about it, is functionally equivalent to noticing how the way we think actually constantly changes, moment-to-moment, how much each of those "cognitive gravity wells" pulls us.

TL;DR: Once we've pre-grieved we can continue to cathect as deeply and broadly as is maximally fulfilling, precisely because we can decathect easily whenever we actually need to.

[mentalisttraceur]

Several people have asked me: does pre-grieving cause you to feel less positively towards, or experience less value in, what you’re pre-grieving?

In my experience it does not, and in fact, it sometimes causes a greater appreciation of what I’m pre-grieving. Earlier I added a small addition to the original pre-grieving post to highlight this:

I’ve found that this also helps me appreciate what I am pre-grieving more. By making myself go over the thoughts, feelings, and what I would be missing in various scenarios after the loss, I notice more fully why it matters to me now.

I think the important thing is that pre-grieving is just the same grieving and loss-processing you’d normally do, but ahead-of-time.

Getting to the end of grief doesn’t involve devaluing the thing - you don’t value a dead pet or relative or partner less after you’ve accepted their death, and you don’t value having two arms less after you’ve accepted that one of your arms has been severed - you just figure out a way to think about it freely without it hurting you.

Normal processing of loss often involves the experience of doing a thing, expecting out of habit that what you lost will be there - calling out a greeting when coming home, only to remember that your partner has died and there’s no one to announce your arrival to anymore; being emotionally hurt and your mind starts thinking of talking about it to a specific important person who normally provides great support, only to realize that you can’t anymore - that kind of stuff. Then the realization hits, and with it, certain emotions.

By going over scenarios like that in your imagination enough to trigger the emotional reaction, we become more aware of the positive impacts someone or something has in our lives.

Similarly, just the experience of feeling the loss provides an experiential contrast that draws attention to what’s nice and pleasant right now, like how a warm thing feels warmer to the touch after touching a cold thing.