Arthur C. Brooks explains why grief easing feels like betrayal. The dorsal anterior cerebellar cortex, active during acute grief, naturally quiets over time. Fading sadness isn't disloyalty to the dead, he says, but a sign of healthy processing.
Grief doesn't have to be permanent and you shouldn't grieve the loss of your grief. Now, what a lot of people do is they say, I miss the pinging of the black box in the bottom of the ocean. Something's wrong with me and I don't feel it anymore. And part of the reason is because the last memory that they feel that they have of a person that they lost was the sadness of the loss of that person. And they feel like they're being disloyal almost, or that they're forgetting that person because they're losing the intense grief. It's like the person's fading. They're fading. I don't want it to fade. And I feel guilty because it's fading. But the truth of the matter is that this is supposed to happen. Your dorsal anterior cerebellar cortex shouldn't be lit up like a Christmas tree for the rest of your life. That's not the way it's supposed to work. The person you loved and lost wants you to be happy again. This is normal. You have to let yourself actually become happy again and not hold on to grief through a sense of guilt or a sense of loss of the memory itself. When grief starts to subside, that's a signal that things are working correctly, not that things are working incorrectly. You're not supposed to suffer forever. Allow yourself to recover.
