Grief Isn't Something to Get Over

The loss of a loved one can be overwhelming. How do we endure grief? Can we simply forget, or “get over it?” This book explains the science behind bereavement, from emotion to the persistence of memory, and shows readers how to understand and adapt to death as a part of life.

Responses to loss are typically associated with negative emotions, traumatic memories, or separation distress, but we grieve because we care. This book demonstrates how negative emotional responses experienced in grief often follow experiences with positive emotional memories. Dr. Lamia emphasizes an understanding and acceptance of post-loss emotions.

This book aims to expand our understanding of bereavement, placing it in alignment with how emotions work. Using numerous case examples and personal vignettes, this book helps readers recognize the ways in which emotions are connected to memories and influence our experiences of loss.

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Why We Remember
• Chapter 3: Loss, Identity, and Our Sense of Self
• Chapter 4: Feeling Our Memories
• Chapter 5: Grief Thoughts
• Chapter 6: Sensory and Physiological Reminders
• Chapter 7: Adapting to Loss
• Chapter 8: Losing and Rediscovering Ourselves

References

Mary Lamia, PhD is a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley and maintains a private practice in Marin County, California, where she works with adults, adolescents, preteens, and couples. She has provided commentary for numerous television, radio, and print media interviews and discussions, and for nearly a decade, hosted a weekly call-in talk show, KidTalk with Dr. Mary, on Radio Disney stations.

Dr. Lamia is on the editorial advisory board of the children’s book division (Magination Press Children’s Books) in APA, and is a member of The Tompkins Institute: Applied Studies in Motivation, Emotion, and Cognition. She is on the advisory board of America's Angel-Raising the Bar on Raising America, and is a board member of the Italian-American Psychological Society.

She is also a member of APA, California State Psychological Association, and Association for Psychological Science.

This invaluable book is an essential addition to the field. Steeped in research, it offers the reader profound psychological insight into the subtle and nuanced relationship between grief and memories. Each chapter closes with thoughtful reflective questions reminding the reader that we don’t ever get over grief but that we can learn to live alongside it in healing, hopeful, and creative ways.
—Claire B. Willis, LICSW, MA, Clinical Social Worker, and co-author of Opening to Grief: Finding Your Way From Loss to Peace

Dr. Lamia, a gifted psychologist and educator, has written a deeply personal and empathic book, which pulls together the scientific literature on grief. Readers of this book will ‑find solace and help with integrating their own experiences of personal loss.
—Mardi Horowitz, MD Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco CA, and author of Grieving as Well as Possible: An Insightful Guide to Encourage Grief's Flow, Navigate Difficult Moments, and Put Your Life or a Friend's Life Back Together

Dr. Lamia explains why grief is an ongoing and necessary force in the human mind, and how it is connected to emotion, identity, thoughts, and physiological responses. With a perceptive, humane perspective on the subtleties of life and death, she uses examples from her own life, professional work, and the research literature to address major questions about the role of grief in determining who we are and who we become. Lamia shows how over time and with work, in our grieving moments, we can learn to adapt to major loss, and live with loss. We don’t get over major loss. We can and must live with it.
—John H. Harvey, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, and founding and continuing editor, Journal of Loss and Trauma

Joan Didion let us know grief makes us crazy. Dr. Lamia’s book makes sense of the crazy. We expect grief but are reminded we are never prepared. For clinicians and those grieving, reading Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over clarifies a way to understand and reassemble the fragments of time, emotion, and memory through Dr. Lamia’s case narratives, and most profoundly through her own intimate and poignant story.
—Joan Driscoll, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, Kentfield, CA

There is so much confusion about grief in what I call our “grief-impaired culture,” and thankfully, Mary Lamia’s clear-eyed approach clears up that confusion and helps us reduce unnecessary suffering. In this lyrical book that melds stories of grief (including her own) with the most recent research, she helps us see how crucial memory is to grief, and how the idea of stages of grief, or “getting over” grief is not only wrong, but impossible. Instead, she helps us see that our work in grief is to adapt to loss rather than try to avoid or redeem it, and to bring memories of our dearly departed into a new future made possible by their lives, our loss, and our love.
— Karla McLaren, MED, Author of The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You and Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion

In Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over, Mary Lamia tells a very personal story and offers a very professional study on how we deal with the loss of those we love. Coding in us about dealing as a child with the death of her mother, as an adolescent with the death of her father, and as an adult with the death of her husband, we learn through research and personal experience that the pain and grief sometimes last a lifetime. “Moving on” from grief may be a wish, but it is not a reality. Dr. Lamia details the ways we may cope and perhaps benefit from dealing with the pain and loss we suffer from the death of someone who has been close to us.
—Lawrence B. Lurie, MD, DFAPA, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco CA

Dr. Lamia deftly interweaves grief theories and research with her own past and, sadly, recent experience with loss. The result is a book both highly informative and emotionally moving. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to provide help to others or themselves coping with the loss of a loved one.
—Marilyn J. Krieger, PhD, co-author of The White Knight Syndrome: Rescuing Yourself From Your Need to Rescue Others

This scholarly meditation on heartbreak belongs in the libraries of therapists, counselors, coaches, clergy, teachers, students, and mourners trying to understand their own grief. In accessible writing replete with personal stories, Mary Lamia explores the emotional, cognitive, and sensory aspects of excruciating loss and shows why well-intentioned pressures to “get over it,” “move on,” or “find closure” both misunderstand the nature of grief and impede creative adaptations to it. A brilliant and moving book.
—Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, Visiting Full Professor, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Piscataway, NJ

With her characteristic keen intellect and extraordinary empathy, Dr. Mary Lamia brings new understanding and light to a topic too long verboten and shrouded in notions of how those who grieve are supposed to overcome or vanquish emotions of bereavement. This is a clear-sighted and important book by one of our nation’s leading psychologists, who makes us see fully how such emotions are not easily dispensed with or compartmentalized and what can be done to allay the pain of grief.
—Michael Krasny, PhD, Professor Emeritus of English, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, and retired host of KQED’S Forum

Mary Lamia is a wise and deeply compassionate guide through the mysteries of loss, memory, and grief. Combining scientific expertise, therapeutic skill, and her own life experience, she has written an invaluable book that will serve as a vital resource for individuals confronting lingering memories of their loved ones and for the professionals who seek to support them through their grief.
—Jefferson A. Singer, PhD, Faulk Foundation Professor of Psychology, Connecticut College, New London, CT

In this warmly readable book, Dr. Lamia radically overturns the notion that grief is something you simply process and get over, but rather, she asserts, we use memory, in all its many manifestations, to come to terms with and live with it. Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over is rich with deep knowledge and poignant detail from Lamia’s work as a therapist, her own very personal encounters with loss and grief, her delightful common sense, and her thorough analysis of current professional and scientific thinking on the subject. A must-read and a great comfort for anyone who has suffered personal loss, which is, really, all of us.
—Miriam Real, PhD, Educator, Oral Historian, Mill Valley, CA

With warmth, empathy, and intelligence, Mary Lamia looks at memory in the grief process from a unique perspective. Generously sharing her own experiences with significant loss, as well as examples from patients and friends, she guides us to make sense of the painful process of mourning after a loved one dies. Lamia creates a wonderful metaphor of ‑finding a home for memories of a loved one—which coexist with hope and new meaning from relationships, beauty, and the energy of life.
—Deborah Costello, BA, Writer, Educational Technology Consultant, Burlington, VT