- Book information
- The Other Side of Sadness by George Bonanno
- Published by: Basic Books
- Price: $25.95
WHAT is the best way of coping with the death of a loved one? Why do some people grieve more intensely than others? Such questions are traditionally left to counsellors and self-help gurus, but George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University in New York, is on a mission to answer them empirically. He has done a good job, interviewing thousands of bereaved people over decades and monitoring how they get through their troubled times.
Yet Bonanno's bottom line - that people are often much more resilient than we're led to believe - is rather unremarkable. Studies of Londoners during the Blitz and New Yorkers after 9/11 showed that few people suffer serious reactions to traumatic events.
A more intriguing question is why some people are more resilient than others. However, there's no real answer. As with most behavioural traits, it is impossible to predict individual differences from personality and background. Some people may have resilience written in their genes, but evidence for that is thin. Bonanno found several interesting patterns - for example, widows who laugh a lot in the months after their spouse's death tend to cope best. But does laughter aid recovery or is it a sign of a strong coping mechanism?
This is a valuable book for Bonanno's application of the scientific method to a field that badly needs it. He is at his most compelling, however, in an area where science is of limited help: how culture influences the way people connect with the dead, and why he decided to engage in Chinese bereavement rituals to help him mourn his own father.
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Have your say
Well, it does seem like resilience is a no brainer, so why did it take like a hundred years for researchers to find it? I read the book and the book says that people were caught up in Freud's ideas that brought about grief work (crying about a loss) and those stages. Those ideas weren't based on research. AND more importantly, they blocked people from believing they were resilient. This is why we have grief counselors trouping in all of the time whenever something goes wrong. What's harmful about that, besides the cost, is that this grief counseling causes worse reactions in people. So I'm thinking that it's about time that someone stood up and said that resilience is what we're made of and let's all get a grip.
Give 'em a break; they've got to find other proper work otherwise.
Grief is more complex an emotion than people may realise. It certainly can be felt as a result of losing a loved one. However it can be experienced as a result of being raped , child abused , tortured , and perhaps not just on one occaision either. Complex post trauma - like losing a whole family is something a few people can cover over or partially dissociate from but the results of that can be loss of Self too. That can finally break through into consciousness as though something quite genuinely needs to be mourned all the way through ..Forms of loss of Self or others needs mourning because we are attached primally to being feeling beings and having a sense of attachment - even to our sense of Self.
Some people however have lives of emotional dissociation where "rationality" dominates ... I wonder though if they can actually feel the beauty of a snowflake and be in touch with the empathic feeling side of human nature ..
When a man thinks of objects, attachment for them arises. From attachment arises desire; from desire arises wrath
From wrath arises delusion; from delusion, failure of memory; from failure of memory, loss of conscience; from loss of conscience he is utterly ruined.
64. He attains peace, who, self-controlled, approaches objects with the senses devoid of love and hatred and brought under his own-control.
In peace there is an end of all his miseries; for, the reason of the tranquil-minded soon becomes steady.
There is no wisdom to the unsteady, and no meditation to the unsteady, and to the un-meditative no peace; to the peaceless, how can there be happiness ?
The "objects"
V=IR
W+VI
Where W = Watts, V=Voltage, I = Current in Amps, and R + Resistance.
Have relieved more suffering of man
than all the meditatiion can.
Suffering of the body sure, but Buddhism believes that medicine is a requirement for life, no news there. Mental suffering? All studies suggest that the materialism of our current "powered" society has only increased mental angst.
This comment breached our terms of use and has been removed.
I'm not so comfortable with some Hindu doctrine Krishna, but I do appreciate your sincere desire to spread happiness.
If one is able to see and feel a friend's (cold) corpse, one then experiences only a single episode of bereavement because from then on one thinks of "Dead John", and one does not think of "John", "O, but he is dead!" every time he comes into your thoughts.
Burying closed boxes (coffins) is such an unnatural "civilized" ritual.
We have evolved to cope adequately with death providing it is "upfront".
That is possibly one of the dumbest statements I have ever read on this site. Human psychology, interpersonal relationships, and dealing with the concept of death are far more complex than thinking of "Dead John".
I have personnally watched loved ones die, visited the open casket, and still do not think of them as "dead friend", "dead mother", etc. Nor do I think of the family members whose funerals I wasn't able to attend as any "less dead".
Based on your premise, we'd be no less adequately evolved to deal with never seeing a body, as plenty of family, explorers, hunters, gatherers, etc simply vanished into the jaws of predators or rivers or off cliffs and such, never to be seen again. Human emotion and coping is far more complex unless you are severely mentally handicapped, and even then, I don't believe it is "simple and obvious".
First of all no need to be insulting. If this was a face to face discussion, would you just lash out and say: this is the dumbest thing... etc etc. Probably not. As to the statement itself: I disagree. It's not one of the dumbest statements at all.
When I was a child, we lived near quite a busy road and sadly we had quite a few dogs wander off and get hit (and die). Up to this day I still remember coming home, and my dog not being there. he was hit by a car, and died. I wasn't allowed to see him, I had been allowed to see previous dead dogs and cats from our household so I don't really know why not then. In any case, it took me years to get over the loss of that dog, and it's the only dog I ever had where it took so long to get over it.
Overall in my childhood we had about 4 dogs die in about a 4 year period. The only one that haunted me was the one I never saw dead.
For me, as a child, it was very hard to accept something is really dead when I hadn't seen it.
As an adult? I don't know but it might well be for some people.
Uh, I was with my husband when he died, and it took years to be able to picture him as anything but that "(cold) corpse."
I'm grateful I was able to be with him, but it certainly didn't ease my bereavement.
Same with various other family and friends. If you can do that, you're blessed, cursed, or resilient in a way I will never be.
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