Emotion Lotion

When doing research for my last post about models of grief, it became clear that I needed to talk to an expert. Luckily, I knew just the one. In my first podcast episode, I talk with Dr. Saren Seeley about the neuroscience of grief. How does the brain adapt after loss? We discuss the “Gone but Everlasting” theory, how grieving is a learning process, and the surprisingly contentious climate around the study of grief. I so appreciate the humanity she brings to science and hope you’ll enjoy her company too. The lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below.Chrissy Sandman (CS): Hello, Saren! Thank you for talking with me.Saren Seeley (SS): Of course, I'm so happy to do this.CS: Me too! I am so excited to talk with you. In particular, we have several interesting points of connection over the last nine or so years. So I'll go ahead and introduce you and then we can get into it.So, Dr. Saren Seeley is here with me today. She's a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor, where she conducted research on neuroscience of grief and trained as a clinician. She completed her clinical internship at the Pittsburgh VA Medical Center (my hometown!). And before then, she did her undergraduate studies at CUNY Hunter College in New York, which is where we met when I took over her job as a research assistant in the Regulation of Emotion of Anxiety and Depression (READ) lab there. And since then, we have sort of stayed in touch over email, usually when I was bugging you about different fMRI scanning methods and analysis over the years, and you've always been so generous to reply with such helpful and detailed responses. And then more recently, with the grief that I've been going through, I just so happened to pick up the book that was written by your grad school advisor that you are mentioned in the acknowledgement section of and I imagine some of the work you were doing in grad school is woven throughout the book. So I just thought that you would be the perfect person to talk to as I am getting interested in how we understand grief. What are the models that are out there, both in terms of what's empirically supported, and what we know about how people adapt and change after a loss of a loved one, but also what people resonate with and what's useful for people who are going through it themselves, which might be in a clinical setting, or just how people make sense of their experience. And the other aspect of what I wanted to talk with you about today is just how I feel you weave yourself into the work. And in some of the popular science communications I've read of yours, I just really admire how you've brought your own lived experience and perspective into understanding how we are humans studying the things that we go through, which I think - there’s been a shift - but in my experience, there's been a bit of a stigma or taboo about acknowledging that we as humans go through some of the things related to mental health, but we're also studying or are working with us as therapists.SS: Absolutely. And that's one of the things that's been so nice for me by reading your Substack is a seeing how these ideas resonate with, you know, people who are not people in this very specific niche area, people are just coming to these ideas in the midst of having their own experiences of loss and grief. And then also, you know, the way that you can your writing connects your understanding of the science with what you're going through at that moment. That's been really beautiful to read. So I'm glad you're sharing that with the world.CS: Thank you. Yeah, I think in particular, the the book I was referencing by Mary-Frances, as you call her, Dr. O'Connor is the the grieving brain which sort of came out right when I was going through it or, and so I think a lot of the concepts as I was reading the book about just the freshness of the loss, and I guess the befuddlement or like disbelief, or just like sort of confusion about you know that someone's no longer here and yet, there's some process that goes on that was like nothing I had experienced quite in that way before about the searching. And I just couldn't believe that that exact experience was being described in this book about how our brain continues to search for people that are no longer here. And exactly why that is based on different aspects of memory and learning, which I know is is a big part of your research right about about learning and grieving.SS: Yeah, Mary-Frances and I have been working on our "Gone but also Everlasting" theory. That's kind of been our focus. I get to still work with her. Even since I've graduated, we're very close collaborators, which has been wonderful. We're both focusing on a little bit different things, aspects of this model. But really thinking about: Why do we have these weird experiences? Why does it feel like when we lose someone, we're kind of straddling these two worlds, one in which they exist, and one in which they don't? And how does our brain makes sense of that? And, you know, thinking about what do we know about attachment and how our brain encodes those attachments with people who are important to us?   That's one of the questions you'd asked is like, what, what is useful about, you know, this lens of understanding grief through the lens of the brain, and I certainly don't think it's the old way or even the best way. But it happens to be the way that A) I'm interested in and B) I actually have skills to do something about. But I think one of the things that offers is that it can help people understand some of these very weird, disorienting, bewildering experiences that they have. And often feeling like, "Is this happening just to me, is this you know, is this normal? Why am I having this experience, even though the logical part of my brain knows different information?" And I think that can at least hopefully offer some way of, I don't know, having a little bit more of a roadmap and way to orient to the world while you're having this really this experience of upheaval, in so many different ways.CS: Yes. So I believe, like you mentioned, you and Dr. O'Connor put out this theory paper on grieving as a form of learning. So you just mentioned, there's a part of our brain that logically understands and then there's another part that maybe takes time to update. Could you tell us a little bit more about how grieving is learning?SS: Yeah, absolutely. So this theory is really trying to address the big questions like: Why does grieving take so long? Why is it so painful? Why do we continue to yearn for someone who has died even long after we know they're gone, and, you know, our brain may make predictions that they are still here that they're coming back.And, and one of the key aspects of this theory in particular is that adaptation requires a person to reconcile these two conflicting streams of information that I mentioned, like this really firmly entrenched understanding and belief about the person as being alive and existing even when they're not in our immediate presence. And so that means the best prediction about them is when they're not here is that they're just somewhere else. They're coming back, we can go out and find them. But we also have these episodic memories or specific knowledge of the fact of their deaths. So I'm really curious about how do we learn over time to wait, the predictions based on this new model, this new information that we have more heavily than those based on the first model, the old model, given that the left given that that old model has been so strongly reinforced for so long, and that the new information that we have is usually information that we don't want things to be this way. So it can be really hard. It can be a very painful thing to accept the fact that those changes have occurred.And so we're curious about what's happening in the brain when we successfully do manage to reconcile those two streams of information and, you know, integrate grief, which, ultimately allows us to create this meaningful life that honors our relationship with a person who died. But we're no longer stuck in that wanting something we can't have and then continually slamming up against the fact that they're not here. And so yeah, so this idea of greeting is a learning process is that we have to learn at multiple levels. And three of the ones that are important are that, you know, there's a lot of habit learning that has to be overcome. We have to develop the ability to predict the absence of the person who died as opposed to their presence, at least sort of in this physical plane.And also developing ways to get your attachment and social support needs met, particularly when the person who died played a significant role in your life was as someone close to you. And so my interests in the of past couple of years - because I get very focused on details of things - Is like, okay, we're talking about learning, but like, that's like attention. In cognitive neuroscience, there's a million different types of learning. It's not a very specific term. And so what gets in the way of that? And so one of the directions that we're taking this "Gone but also Everlasting" theory that we've been working on is trying to use computational psychiatry or mathematical modeling of brain and behavior to try to use established formal models of learning that we have from cognitive neuroscience that are very well developed, like reinforcement learning. And can we use those to test out some of these ideas about what's happening in grief?CS: Gone but everlasting.SS: Yeah, "Gone but also Everlasting" is the name that - actually Mary-Frances came up with that. All credit goes to her for that one. Yeah, but it speaks to those dual streams of like: they're not here anymore, but their memory l