Episode 1: THE GRIEVING BRAIN: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss an Interview with Mary-Frances O'Connor

09/03/2023 31 min
Episode 1: THE GRIEVING BRAIN: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss an Interview with Mary-Frances O'Connor

Listen "Episode 1: THE GRIEVING BRAIN: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss an Interview with Mary-Frances O'Connor"

Episode Synopsis

00:00:00.000] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Hi there. I am so super excited to be able to visit with you, Mary Frances. I just can't even tell you how excited I am. And so I just want to share with the people that are listening a little bit about you. So I'm going to read your bio, and then we're just going to jump in and we're going to talk all things grief.

[00:00:26.730] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Perfect.

[00:00:27.260] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Fantastic topic, right?

[00:00:29.640] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Yes.

[00:00:30.030] - Pat Sheveland, Host
All right. Okay. Mary Frances O'Connor is an Associate Professor of Psychology. She's pretty smart at the University of Arizona, where she directs the grief, loss, and social stress, which they call the glass lab, which investigates the effects of grief on the brain and the body. She earned a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2004 and completed a fellowship at UCLA. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychological Science. So she really knows her stuff. And she's been featured in Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She grew up in Montana. She now lives in Tucson, Arizona. And in the show notes, I'll have all of her contact information. She is the author. You can see it behind her. Probably one of my all-time favorite books. And so that's why to reach out to her so that we can really talk about the grieving brain and the impact grief has on our neurobiology and that type of thing. So Mary Frances, thank you so much for being a part of this show.

[00:02:00.800] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Pat, it's really lovely to be here. That's wonderful. I love the work that you're doing bringing this to people.

[00:02:08.800] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Yes. You published this last year. I was turned on to it by I actually teach coaches to be grief coaches because oftentimes we don't talk a lot about grief. I know that there are so many people in the helping professions, therapists, coaches, all different venues coming to me and just saying, I'm just not quite sure, but I've had a lived experience, or I'm passionate about this. And so one of my students actually turned me on to this book, and I started going into it. I'm like, Oh, my gosh. She's speaking my language. She's speaking so much of what I've learned over the decades of working with especially grieving moms. I would like to hear from you, what started you on this journey to be so interested in grief?

[00:03:07.320] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Well, I think when you think about your own motivations and you're a psychologist, you realize there's probably many motivations, right? And some of it certainly is just I've been very passionate about science, about how the brain understands things. The brain is a fascinating place. And to think about how our bonds form and how our relationships endure, and then what happens, why do we experience such intense grief when a loved one dies? These have certainly all been passionate questions for me. But there's also, of course, a more personal side to many people and what they study or what they do. And for me, it's that my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer when I was in eighth grade. And it was stage 4, so they knew that it had already traveled to other parts of her body. What I didn't know because I was still a kid was that she wasn't supposed to survive the year. But I definitely knew that grief came to our household. And my mother miraculously lived another 13 years, which was such a reprieve from the universe, I like to say, for my sister and I. But it meant that I got very familiar with grief.

[00:04:40.880] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
And I think what that meant then was that when I was in graduate school studying to become a psychologist at 26 when she died, I was just very comfortable with people who were grieving. And so interviewing people who were having this intense experience and who might cry uncontrollably in our interview, that all just seemed normal to me. And I thought I really tried to listen very hard to what they were saying, what they were experiencing and thinking, and then tried to map that on to the brain images that I was seeing from the Neuroimaging Scanner that they were also willing to participate in. And so perhaps it put me in a unique position to try and see the relationship between the brain and the mind in this experience of grief.

[00:05:35.740] - Pat Sheveland, Host
And that's just so amazing. And going through your book and just to be able to share, I know with clients, there's so many clients that almost everybody will come and say, am I crazy? I feel like I'm going crazy. Absolutely. And just because maybe people have said something or it's taking me too long, oh, my gosh, it's the second year. I feel worse than I did on the first year, all of those type of things. And you helped to bring science, actual science, which I've used with clients saying, you're not crazy. This is going on in your brain. So can you maybe help us understand one of the things I was thinking about as I was thinking about meeting with you is grief is not necessarily a diagnosis. It could be it could be, right? But could you just help us understand a little bit for those who are listening, because it's going to be professionals. It's going to be helping professionals, but it's also going to be those who are just I'm in this experience right now. And tell us a little bit about the difference of what you consider would be.

[00:06:53.380] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Typical.

[00:06:55.970] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Typical breathing versus what might be the signs where people are struggling. It's a little deeper and they're struggling more deeply and may need more additional and targeted help for that.

[00:07:13.750] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Yeah. Well, I think that in talking about this, I think it's helpful to make this distinction between grief and grieving, which in regular conversation, we don't really distinguish between those words, but I think it's helpful here because grief is that feeling, those thoughts that we have in the moment. We often describe it as a wave of grief, right? And that's just the natural reaction that we have when a loved one is gone, right? When someone so important in our life is gone, our natural reaction is grief. And that is going to be true. We are likely to have a wave of grief whenever we become aware in the moment of being so bereft for that person. That is just a natural human emotion. That is going to happen for the rest of our lives. If we have a moment where we're suddenly thinking about the person and feeling missing them, we're going to have grief. That isn't necessarily a problem. That can be true for years and years and years, for your entire life. That isn't necessarily a problem. That is, unfortunately, part of being human. But the distinction then that I make is between that grief, that moment, and what I think of as grieving.

[00:08:39.280] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
And so grieving is this process. It's a change over time. It's a verb, right? It's not the noun, it's a verb. And grieving means that over time, our experience of those waves of grief is going to change. So that it may be for most of us, waves of grief become less intense, or they become less frequent. Or even if they're just as intense, they become more familiar. So we come to understand grieving as a form of learning, I am now a person who has grief. And so the first hundred times you have that wave of grief, you may think, This is unbearable. I'm not going to get through this moment. And the hundred and first time, it's going to feel awful. But if it's more familiar, you do know that you're going to get through it. And so that's a change. It doesn't mean grief goes away, but it does mean that it changes over time. And we know from large studies now, following hundreds and hundreds of people over time, that for most of us, that change over time happens naturally. It is painful. It's not linear. Some days you feel better and some days you feel worse.

[00:10:04.120] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
But overall, there tends to be this trajectory toward more acceptance and less yearning over time without going away completely. But there is a very small group of people for whom there is no change over time, that we can look at their data and we see 12 months, 18 months after the death, that they look just like they did, that their grief experience is the same as it was right after the death.

[00:10:34.560] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
And so that's not typical. In fact, it's a very small proportion of people, maybe one in 10 bereaved people have this experience. And we can't tell in that first year, even in the data, we can't tell what trajectory you're on, what flavor of grief grieving you're experiencing because everyone's having a hard time, right? Everyone's grief is severe and you know elevated and even if not severe, it's just we're all over the map. After that first year, those lines start to separate so that we can see people who are on this trajectory of more typical resilient adaptation, and then this small group of people who just aren't showing change. And it's that group that as clinicians, we are concerned about because there is a way through targeted psychotherapy to intervene with this group of people, not to take their grief away. We just said that's not a thing. That's not going to happen. But to get them back on a trajectory that looks more typical of showing change over time, of learning new skills, of having support, of feeling more normal, but specifically of learning how to deal with the thoughts and emotions that come, how to jump into the puddle of grief and then out of it again, how to engage in activities that you may be have started avoiding.

[00:12:04.420] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Those kinds of targeted psychotherapy can really help us change the flavor of grieving we're experiencing. And that's the reason I think to really be able to identify who that group is.

[00:12:17.890] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Yeah. And I've seen just in my grief coaching practice in the decade that I've been really targeted on that is people will generally reach out to me. It's right around that ear point. But they're making a conscious choice, like, you know what? This is just not working for me anymore. Are there some tools? But there are that small % where they'll reach out but you can tell that they just definitely need the intervention that you talked about where I will say, I'd really like you to consider, let's see if you can find a therapist that really can get really in there and help you get that movement so that you can feel like you're on that. And then there's always some people that I actually coined it failed grief, that fors some. They weren't able to give it the time and the attention, the air to be able to truly experience it because for whatever reason in their family, in their community, in their culture even, that it was tapped down. We don't want to talk about this. We don't want to explore it. And that's where I have felt where I see that smaller %, a lot of them because they haven't been able to give it the air that it needs to. And that's amazing.

[00:13:48.220] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
I just wanted to say about that, if we think of grieving as a form of learning, learning takes time and it takes attention. You don't just pick up calculus because it's in the room. And so I think of it as a similar thing. If there hasn't been any way to pay attention to, oh, my gosh, this is how my life has changed, or, oh, my gosh, these are the intense reactions that I'm having or have had, then how we manage those is often not very helpful. Initially, we may just, like you say, just suppress them completely or avoid situations that bring them up in the first place. And it's not that there's anything wrong with choosing to avoid in a particular moment. You know what? Now I can't really deal with grief. I'm dealing with this meeting or this argument that my children are having or something. It's fine to avoid it in that sense. But if that's the only coping strategy we have for months and months and months, then there isn't as much learning about, Okay, so how do I really deal with this when it comes up?

[00:14:57.160] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Absolutely. And I share with a lot of people, my experience really came... I was young, but it wasn't the death of someone directly to me that I knew. It was I was born into a grieving family. And so I had a brother who had died as an infant, six years before my birth. And my mother and my father, no one ever talked about it. I heard about him, but we never mentioned his name. It was like Greg got buried along with his tiny body way back in the '50s. And then it wasn't just something that you really discussed or talked about. And it wasn't until he was going to turn 60, this was in 2012, he would have turned 60. And my mom finally opened up with me about all of it. And once I kind of put on... I'm a registered nurse by background, so I put in my nursing hat, I put on the coaching hat. I just like, let's just talk about this and explore it. And the tsunami of emotions that had been held inside for so long, the abandonment that she felt, and stories that just perpetuated over the years because she was never able to ask the questions or express it with anybody.

[00:16:17.100] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
That's right. It's such a moving story and such a great example. I recently have worked with what we call opportunity youth. Young people who are not connected to work or school for one reason or another. Often they've been in juvenile justice or they've been in foster care for whatever reason. And they have identified that grief was often something that got them off track. It was the death of someone close to them that got them off track, but that they weren't supported in their experience. And so when I think about this, these are people who they never have a chance to talk about it, to ask those questions, to make sense of what has happened and what it means for their life and what it means for the meaning of life in general. And I sometimes think about them, think about the number of philosophers and poets and writers and preachers who have thought deeply about grief and written about it and talked about it, to go through that experience without any connection to how others have perceived this experience, this very human experience, to go through that experience with no connection to anyone else, how on Earth would you understand what's happening to you?

[00:17:42.310] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Absolutely. And it's interesting that you're saying that because I live in Minnesota, and tomorrow I'm jumping into a frozen Lake to raise funds for a nonprofit that I volunteered with. And it started out as children's grief connection, but it's expanded to families where we actually provide weekend long camps for these children and their families. And so often, these kids, grade school age kids, high school kids, and even emerging adults are like, Wow, it feels so good to be able to talk to someone because at school, there is no one I can talk to. No one understands this. But here, I found someone that actually I can relate to them. And it's just it's transformative. And we see that just even in a weekend.

[00:18:32.870] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Yes, it's remarkable. It's remarkable. Human beings need each other in this important way. And if there's something about the grief experience that is isolating them, is isolating you, then it makes it harder. So I think thinking about it from that perspective, grieving is a form of learning. We learn better if we can ask our own, the person sitting next to us, how did you understand this? And this is what I'm experiencing is that am I on the wrong track here?

[00:19:09.240] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Right. Absolutely. It is that I'm so thankful. Even 10 years ago, we weren't talking about it near as much as what we're talking about it now. I agree. And there's just so much education going on in the work that you're doing that it's really studying. Let's really look at some of the science behind it and the psychological impact, the emotional impact, the physical impact that grief can have. You talked a lot about restoration in the book. Can you just share more about this blending of past, the present, and the future, and how powerful that is in really helping us to move forward in grief.

[00:19:58.610] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Yeah. I think it's helpful. For me, it's been helpful to think about this from the perspective of the brain. I know that's not the first way that people think about grief, but the reason is that our brain has particular qualities. It's a wonderful thing, but it also can lead us down some rabbit holes. And so I think that understanding a little bit more about how the brain works, or more importantly, what is it doing when we're grieving, can be useful. So I think the first thing to understand is that you can't really talk about grief without talking about love. So there has to be a bond there first before you're going to experience grief. And so when you fall in love with your baby, or you fall in love with the person who becomes your spouse, or even your best friend, that bonding experience gets stamped into the brain. It literally gets encoded in the proteins and firing patterns of the brain. And those physiological changes mean that now there's this bond. And part of that bond is I will always be there for you, and you will always be there for me. You're my special one, different from all others.

[00:21:20.880] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
And so what that means is that when that person is alive, when you're in a relationship with them, that attachment bond is so powerful and so valuable. It's the thing that allows us to go off to work every day and let our spouse go off to their work and have this deep belief we're all going to do everything we can, everything in our power to come back together again and reunite. And then we have all these neuro chemicals that motivate us to come back together and reward us for being back together. And those are the attachment bonds. It works incredibly well. It evolved for this purpose to keep us together. The problem is when a loved one dies, because it's this enduring belief, the brain doesn't just switch it off. The brain can t continues to say for quite some time, Well, if they're not in my presence, there's a solution to that. Go get them or make such a fuss that they come and get me. And so that solution is something we persist for a while in doing in thinking and feeling. And the brain is a prediction machine. At the end of the day, it uses the 1,000 days of experience to predict what might happen next so that we can deal better with the present moment.

[00:22:46.740] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
It's trying to help us deal with what's coming. Well, if you've woken up next to someone in the morning for thousands of days and you wake up one morning and they're not there next to you, it's actually not a very good prediction that they've died. It's a better prediction than what many people feel. It just seems like they're on a trip or they're going to walk through the door again. I know that sounds crazy, but that's how it feels. And that is the attachment neurobiology doing its job. So it takes time for the brain and experiences for the brain to update that prediction. Thirty times in a month when you don't put socks in your deceased husband's drawer, and you notice that the roses are dying in the backyard because he always watered them. Oh, he's not here. You don't have to buy soy milk at the grocery store because he's lactose intolerant, and I don't have to do that anymore. Those experiences, then, are what change our predictions. And when those predictions change, we recognize he is still deeply in my memory. He is deeply in my imagination. And I'm not expecting to see him again.

[00:24:05.040] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
I'm not yearning for him to be back because the reality, the painful reality is that's not going to happen. So he can continue to be in that part of your brain. He will always be stamped into your brain. But there's a difference between expecting him in the future and restoring a life where your future includes talking to him, asking him for advice, visiting the cemetery and taking care of his grave. Or a woman told me about when she would have conversations with her teenage son, feeling like her deceased husband was giving her the words to say because he should have been having these conversations. We can continue to carry on the values of this person or to take the love that we received and learn how to give it to other people because we learned it from them, from being in a relationship with them. So there's a difference between expecting them in the future, right? Some of the difficulties that come with that as opposed to restoring a life that carries the absence of that person with you but continues to have meaningful activity and the full range of human emotions.

[00:25:26.840] - Pat Sheveland, Host
That is so big. I just get chills because I think of my mother. My mother died in early 2021. She was 96 and a half years old. My dad died 33 years prior. The impact of my grief, of my mother's death, because that had been so cemented in my brain, and she lived with us for eight years, day after day after day, where I didn't have that amount of time with my father. And moving forward in that grief. But what really changed the trajectory, I was surprised because mom and I talked about her death all the time. Okay, we know that this is going.

[00:26:07.940] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
To happen. Here's the reality.

[00:26:09.490] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Spent a lot of time. We knew that it was reality. And then when that actual last breath was taken, it was like.

[00:26:17.160] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Boom.

[00:26:18.380] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Total immersion into the grief that I had been anticipating. But it was a whole different grief. But what helped me to, number one, it took me about two years to get over that constant. Even though I'm pretty studied in this. I understand it, but you know what? It still happens. I'm a human being.

[00:26:40.760] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
You're a human being.

[00:26:41.870] - Pat Sheveland, Host
The love for my mother will always be there. But when I started, you know what? I need to take my grief and really pour it into different avenues. And so that's why I started this grief coaching certification program. It's like, okay, maybe other people are feeling the same way. And if we can take it and move it forward, pay it forward and help others just to find tools and resources. And that it's just like I just see it as a beautiful throwing the pebbles, right? And just having these.

[00:27:18.230] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Ripples

[00:27:19.140] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Ripples just going out and out, which is

[00:27:21.160] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
So beautiful. That's beautiful. Yes.

[00:27:23.370] - Pat Sheveland, Host
I really do love that. So I have a question for you. I think I had heard, or I saw it on LinkedIn, that you're now... Are you writing another book? What's next for you? This is big and I know that this is ongoing and all of that, but what's next?

[00:27:44.320] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
I am writing another book. So unfortunately, I'm probably going to have to stop speaking quite so much so I can find the time to.

[00:27:51.420] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Write again. Right. Got it.

[00:27:54.540] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
But yes, I'm writing a new book. So half of the work that I do in my research lab has to do with the brain, but the other half of the work that I do has to do with the body. And so the new book will be The Grieving Body, and we'll talk about that other half of my research.

[00:28:14.880] - Pat Sheveland, Host
I'm just, oh, this just really excites me. This is going to be just amazing because we know that, yes, absolutely there's such a correlation here between that. And I know that I didn't create it. I took a lot of information from all the people who were my clients and my nursing hat and coaching and all of that. But I took all of this and created what I call the B.R.E.A.T.H.E. Coaching model for grief, because we know grief goes right into the breathing energy system and our lungs. And it's very hard, the deep grief and the crying and all of that. It's like, we have to learn how to breathe again, right? But there's so much about the body. And what are some things that people can do to really help that? So I'm really excited about this because your work, and I shared that with you before, I actually, for people who are listening, this is part of the curriculum. I give this book to every student who goes through here because I think it's so important to understand what's going on in the brain. And now you're going to have one for the boss. You're just going to have to keep creating some curriculum here.

[00:29:36.260] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Something I don't want to leave out, though, Pat, is also that not everyone has an intense experience with grief, and that is totally normal as well. And so it's funny. A woman contacted me about 10 days after the death of her husband. This was some time ago. And she said, I'm just not having a lot of grief, which is not something I'm willing to admit to many people. But is this normal? And we had a long series of interactions, and it was normal. Many of us are able to incorporate that experience into the ongoing chapters of our life without a lot of fuss. And it doesn't mean that we didn't love the person. It doesn't mean we weren't bonded to them. Each of us is going to have a different experience and expression of grief. And you know what? They're all normal.

[00:30:38.240] - Pat Sheveland, Host
And I appreciate that because just recently I was thinking, I don't know why it came up, but I was thinking about my dad. And then it was like, I never really grieved to the depth that I did with my mom because life went on and he had cancer. And we were so I knew that that was the path that he took and the hospice and being able to be with him right to the end. And this is probably not the best way to describe it, but it's the only way to describe it for me is it was easy.

[00:31:13.570] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Yeah, exactly.

[00:31:14.260] - Pat Sheveland, Host
It was an easy transition. And it wasn't, like you said, not a lot of fuss. But my love for him, absolutely just as great as it was as it is for my mom and others who have been close to me. But I went through a little bit of that recently. Did I just not deal with it?

[00:31:38.880] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Right. And I think...

[00:31:41.020] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Go ahead. No, you go. Sorry.

[00:31:43.160] - Pat Sheveland, Host
No, but I'm like, did I not deal with that? Is there something there that might be? And it's like, no. I mean, when I look back through the last 33 years, I lived life. Exactly. And when he showed up in my mind and the memories, it wasn't frequent. No, when it was, it was beautiful. It was wonderful memories.

[00:32:07.580] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Yeah. That's why I like to mention it. If you aren't having a lot of grief, it doesn't mean you're suppressing it, right? For many of us, the word that I used also with my dad was that it felt very clean. So I did cry, but I also was... His passing, I was struck so much with awe as much as with grief. And that just was how it was in that situation. It didn't mean there was something I wasn't doing. I wasn't grieving. I wasn't whatever. That was how that relationship went through bereavement for me. So I just like to make that clear because those intense experiences are one thing that we have to handle. But we don't want to assume that that is going to happen in every situation.

[00:33:00.500] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Absolutely. Thank you for clarifying that and bringing that up. Beautiful. Well, I always like to ask this, if there's one thing that you would like us to walk away with, one thought, anything, what might that be?

[00:33:22.240] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
I think the thing that I come back to often is when we have those thoughts that are rolling around in our head over and over again. I think remembering it isn't about whether the thoughts are true or whether the thoughts are whether we're right. It's really a lot about whether those thoughts are helpful to us. And so if being stuck in these thoughts is not helpful for us, then developing ways to get unstuck, whether that's learning to shift your environment. For me, it was always going for a walk or calling my sister, or whether that's trying to go more deeply into your body. For some people, that's going for a run or doing yoga or something to get out of those round and round and round thoughts because there's no answer to most of those thoughts. But sometimes being in them is not helping us to restore our life.

[00:34:24.940] - Pat Sheveland, Host
Yeah. And I love the term restoration. It's just so beautiful.

[00:34:31.180] - Pat Sheveland, Host
It's just so beautiful. So thank you so much for taking some time to spend with us here. As I said, I just so admire you, your work, what you're bringing out into the world. And I'm looking forward to hearing more and seeing more from you in the future.

[00:34:51.020] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Thank you so much, Pat, and for all the work you're doing bringing this to people.

[00:34:56.140] - Pat Sheveland, Host
We're all a team, right? Yeah. The one big team. Okay, well, thank you so much. And for everybody who's listening, I will have all of her information here in the show notes. And I really encourage if you... I like to geek out on this Neuro stuff. I never was back in the day, but it's like, this is a wonderful, wonderful read. And I think I saw that there's an audiobook. You have an audiobook and an eBook. So whatever form you'd like to ingest information, it's out there. So I'll have that available for you. So thank you so much, everybody, for listening. And we will talk to you soon.

[00:35:31.780] - Mary-Frances O' Connor,  Guest
Thank you.

➡️ ABOUT MARY-FRANCES O'CONNOR
Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, which investigates the effects of grief on the brain and the body. O’Connor earned a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2004 and completed a fellowship at UCLA. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychological Science, and featured in Newsweek, the New York Times, and The Washington Post. Having grown up in Montana, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona. For more information go to https://www.maryfrancesoconnor.com/

➡️ THE GRIEVING BRAIN
The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss
By Mary-Frances O’Connor

Published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
On sale: February 1, 2022 | $28.99 Hardcover | ISBN: 9780062946232
Also Available as an eBook and Audiobook

➡️ CONNECT WITH MARY ON SOCIALS
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Cami Thelander: www.bearfootyogi.com
The Confident Grief Coach School: www.healingfamilygrief.com

More episodes of the podcast The NEW Confident Grief Coach Show: Where Grief Transforms into Peace, Joy, and Purpose