Review of “The Other Side of Sadness.”

On an otherwise ordinary afternoon, college student Julia Martinez heard her mother answer the phone and then cry out in distress: Julia's father had been hit by a car. The two women rushed to the hospital, but Julia's father died within minutes of their arrival. It was a shocking, untimely death, and, as Julia told George Bonanno, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, the following weeks were full of sadness, anxiety, and just "crying a lot." Eventually, she returned to college. She had bad days, but she tried not to think too much about her father's death. Over the summer, she got an exciting newspaper internship and felt herself looking forward to the future. Julia’s upbeat attitude made her mother really anxious. Was Julia grieving enough? Would it hit her at some point in the future? Had Julia forgotten her father?

The idea that grief is work that we must do began with Freud. He believed that if you didn't labor at it, you would never recover the psychic energy you had invested in a person who was no longer there. Over time, psychologists developed ways to describe the various stages of this “work.” Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages are the most familiar: Stage 1, denial—“This cannot be!” Stage 2, anger, followed by bargaining, then depression, then acceptance. The stages have great intuitive appeal, but, according to Bonanno, both Freud and Kübler-Ross were wrong. The way that grief unfolds for most people is almost nothing like the old model says it should. It is not work, and it doesn't occur in stages. It can be short-lived for some people and never-ending for others. Like breathing and consciousness and almost everything else about us, grief fluctuates. Our biggest mistake when describing grief, Bonanno writes in his deep and intelligent book, The Other Side of Sadness, is that we underestimate the resilience of the bereaved.

Modern scientists have by now thoroughly picked apart Freud and his idiosyncracies, but Bonanno says that Freud's pronouncements about grief were particularly incomplete. The father of psychoanalysis never really explained how “work” turned “grief” into “recovery.” His statements were brief and preliminary, and he himself qualified them as pretty speculative. Kubler-Ross' stages of grief have been similarly accepted without any rigorous testing. It’s also crucial to note that Kubler-Ross came up with her stages after observing people's reactions to the news that they themselves were going to die—not to the news that someone else had. Only later did she and colleagues apply “the five steps” to grief resulting from another person's death or to some other great disappointment.

Bonanno’s innovation is to apply more rigorous scientific methods/tools to understanding grief. For more than 15 years, he has given thousands of mourning people standard psychological tests in order to better understand how they feel. As Bonanno interviewed the grief-stricken, he counted the number of times they referenced their loss. He recorded their facial expressions and monitored the activity of their autonomic nervous system (which controls things like heart rate, digestion, breathing, sweating), and crucially, he submitted his results for peer review.

Bonanno and his colleagues found that there are at least three common patterns of grief. Some people find the experience deeply distressing and disorienting but then slowly heal. Some become completely dominated by their sadness, perhaps never to recover. This type is extremely rare. Then there are people who experience some initial shock and distress but who pretty quickly bounce back into the competent execution of their daily lives. Most people, says Bonanno, fit into the third category.

Tags: George Bonanno, grieving, mourning, the other side of sadness

Christine Kenneally has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and New Scientist. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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The Long Goodbye: What Is It Like To Recover From Grief?

Part VIII in a series on grief and grieving.

Meghan O'Rourke
|
April 21, 2009

Deployment Diary: Don't Ask Me To Imagine My Husband's Death

Civilians don't get it.

Alison Buckholtz
|
October 2, 2009

Empty Nest: My Mom Died Six Days Before Sam Started College

That’s too many goodbyes in one week.

Mimi Swartz
|
October 19, 2009

Life

There Are No Seven Stages of Grief

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