As a psychotherapist, I sometimes talk to people about how grief and trauma may appear in their lives. Most of the time therapists speak of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote about the five stages of grief, but this is not something I feel the need to explore today. In part because people may feel lost trying to figure out where they are. You may ask yourself “Am I in denial, anger, bargaining, depression?” and “When will I get to acceptance and what does that even feel like?”
I want to talk more simply about an observation I have about grief.
I like to simplify the grieving process for clients. I find myself drawing for them a straight horizontal line on a piece of paper, and I explain… this is your baseline.
I remember when drawing it how I didn’t know that I was living below that baseline at a time in my life, and how I dropped beneath it and had a hard time surfacing again.
“That line represents your basic day,” I tell them, “It isn’t really good or bad, it’s neutral.”
What I draw next is a wave like a sinewave.
I continue as I draw, “The sinewave starts off pretty evenly, we go above our baseline on good days when we feel happy, or joy. We dip below the line on other days or even the same day when we experience disappointment, loss, or stress of some kind.”
In my own life I had lived beneath that baseline after my dad died when I was only 18. This is when things felt very dark. Driven by a wish to escape poverty I quickly returned to college to get back to work building a life, despite feeling like my senses were dulled. At that time people may have experienced me as not present, and depressed – but I didn’t feel I had the luxury of taking time off, having come from poverty and not having any resources to fall back on – it didn’t even occur to me.
My sense is that for many people living near poverty – this is the case.
Returning to college was like experiencing life without full color, everything was dull – and it coincided with autumn which seemed to mirror my mood. It was windy, wet, and raining that autumn. It had rained so hard the day my dad died the trees were stripped of leaves.
My return to college coincided with Halloween and I found myself being invited to attend a Halloween movie night in my dorm, just at the end of the hall in the common room. It was impossible to avoid really, so honestly invite may be an exaggeration, I don’t remember the series of events that found me at this movie night.
Perhaps I had nothing else to do and simply gravitated to people.
What I didn’t realize is that this meant watching horror movies that involved Freddy Krueger and Jason murdering people. My nervous system could not process what unfolded before me. It felt ghoulish and insensitive. It felt like a delight in death and mayhem.
I could not experience horror movies above my baseline.
No one noticed as I left, they were squealing in delightful dread at the carnage. My last view as I tapped out – and I haven’t gotten back to watch this film to double-check this memory – was a young woman being bloodily dragged across a ceiling by an invisible force.
This was far too complex for me to understand in my state. I couldn’t really experience much of anything above my baseline at that time and I moved through my days in a fog.
I think of this now as living beneath the baseline.
When you live beneath your baseline that curve looks more like this, the trough stays below your baseline longer and you don’t come up for air too much.
LIVING BENEATH THE BASELINE
When you live beneath the baseline you experience life a bit differently. You may feel as though you have had your blinders taken off, you experience life for its fragile aspects. You live in the loss, the grief, and sometimes the trauma.
Now, in our daily lives, many of us believe we are safe, and that life is not dangerous.
I am speaking from a privileged American experience right now.
When you live beneath the baseline you see things from the filter of grief, or even stress and trauma. Everything feels a bit darker, and it may affect you more emotionally.
In the early days of grief, you are not getting to your neutral baseline at all, although typically even during a funeral wake, we tend to laugh as we remember someone sharing stories with friends and family. We have these momentary spikes just above our baseline even while we are living beneath the baseline. We seem to naturally make room for a wake, where people may connect and share stories about someone who has passed. We keep that experience separate from the more serious funeral where we pay our final respects.
Together in a group, we seem to amplify our sinewave, and together we can surface above the baseline. This to me says something about the power of community around loss, tragedy, and trauma.
In other words, we seem to shoulder the weight of loss together.
Living beneath the baseline shadows everything we do in life for a time. The things that we enjoyed doing, such as watching a film, going to the gym, or even eating our favorite meal, don’t have the same effect on us.
Time itself may not register in the same way, with moments seeming to drag out interminably long at times.
Living beneath the baseline feels as though much of our mind and spirit is going toward processing the loss or trauma that we find ourselves up against.
DOPAMINE BASELINE
If I had to put this in scientific terms – we could say that the baseline is equivalent to our baseline dopamine level.
This video by Complex Care on Addiction Neuroscience – gives a good breakdown of the need for dopamine, how much dopamine we get from opiates, and why humans struggle so much with these drugs.
This video mirrors what I am saying about living beneath our baseline, but we can think of that as also being a dopamine baseline.
When we are grieving, our dopamine level may be too low, and this accounts for why we may experience life through this filter.
According to the video, we need to be at 50 nanograms per deciliter of brain mass just to be motivated to get out of bed. When our dopamine levels are at 40 nanograms, then we are simply not functioning well, it’s the day we call in sick to work. On our best day, we reach 100 nanograms, but even sex only gets us to around 92 nanograms, while eating chocolate may get us to 80 nanograms.
We essentially operate in the range of 40 -100 nanograms per deciliter of brain mass and our brain gets really hijacked when we use opiates that get us much higher than the 100 nanograms which is normal functioning. Fentanyl for example gets us to 1300 nanograms per deciliter, far above normal.
When the drugs leave our system, our dopamine drops below 40, so far below we can’t function.
So, living beneath our baseline may equate to having very low dopamine levels probably in the 40 nanogram range or lower.
I’m not saying that we all experience loss the same but when we do feel that heavy loss we may feel unmotivated, we may not feel pleasure associated with normal life activity, and we will have trouble filtering out bad or unpleasant things. This is what happens when our dopamine level drops below 40.
Most of the time we don’t realize that we do get joy or pleasure from normal life activity, but we do. We receive pleasure from greeting our partner and kids. We get pleasure from our favorite meal, or that first sip of morning coffee. We get pleasure from the morning drive, the time at the gym, and seeing the morning sun gleam off the mountains.
When we are grieving though it’s like having the volume of the world that used to bring us pleasure, dialed all the way down. The song may be playing, but we aren’t hearing it, and we aren’t feeling it. The sun may be gleaming on the mountains, but we aren’t seeing it. The coffee may be fresh and as rich as every other day, but we aren’t registering it.
RISING ABOVE THE BASELINE
There are moments as time passes, that we start to go above our baseline again. That’s when we feel the pleasure begin to come back. The color begins to come back into the world.
At this point, we begin to integrate this new life experience, living with the absence of someone we love deeply, and grappling with how the world looks with them gone.
This can be a slow process, and it will be different for everyone.
With time as we heal, we go a little higher again when we come up above our baseline, and we may spend progressively less time beneath the baseline.
This is in no way to say we are over our loss or forget the person we love.
For me when I began to recover at this stage I felt intense guilt, as if to feel any joy or pleasure, was a betrayal of my father’s death.
There is no timeline for when someone begins to come above their baseline, and it is not a linear line of recovery that looks like hitting all the stages of grief as we may expect or hope for.
Additionally, this process will be different for everyone because everyone has a different level of attachment to the person that has passed. Your friend may not understand your grief at a father or grandparent dying, because they didn’t have the same connection to their father or grandparent, perhaps they have that attachment connection elsewhere.
INTEGRATION NOT ACCEPTANCE
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross may emphasize our recovery equating to acceptance, but I tend to see this differently, and I’m just offering up a different word that may resonate with some people more. That word is integration, rather than acceptance.
We integrate the loss into our lives and find a way to intertwine these people in our lives in ways after they are gone.
I don’t know that we ever fully accept it when we lose someone we love deeply. We learn to cope with it better, we learn to live with the loss, the absence.
We have days above our baseline, and we have times when we dip down again, and the loss may feel fresh. Our dopamine levels rise again, and we begin to function better in the world, and some days we wake, and we feel a fresh wave of grief upon us.
As a final thought I will point people to an article I wrote about a similar topic where I offer a new word, Proemnesis, which I define as: The experience of recalling something from a projected future emotional mental state.
Perhaps Proemnesis is one side of a human experience, that is a non-linear way of experiencing life.
And maybe there is another word that encapsulates the experience of having those we love with us in a non-linear way where we can integrate that past in our present and future – but that will be a topic I explore in another article.
Follow Your Myth 