Sorrow and grief

For any parents, this event is worse than the worst nightmare. Imagine that your son suddenly left home for no apparent reason. After a few months, you will learn that the police uncovered a gang of homosexual murderers who deceived, tortured and killed the boys. Then you are informed that the body of your son was found at the mass grave of the victims of this gang, and then identified. The police showed this place to seventeen-year-old Elmer Wave Henley. He was arrested for the murder of his thirty-three-year-old friend Dean Korla, committed after a nightly orgy, accompanied by drug taking. Henley said that he was a member of the gang of murderers who supplied the boys for Dean Korla. When Korl announced that Henley would be his next victim, Henley shot him dead. While in prison for killing Korl, Henley told the police about killing boys, calling his testimony "a service he would like to provide to their parents." According to him, once he felt that parents had to find out what happened to their sons. As a result, the bodies of twenty-seven boys were found at the burial site.
Betty Shirley - the mother of one of the victims of this gang. Her grief knows no bounds, her sufferings are so strong that everyone who sees the expression on her face understands the feelings of this woman. It may even seem to someone that he hears her sobs. Messages transmitted by face and voice repeat each other when attempts are not made to regulate expressions of emotion.

The death of a child is a universal cause of sadness and grief of parents. [94] Perhaps there is no other event capable of causing such a strong and prolonged feeling of grief. When I conducted research in Papua – New Guinea in 1967, I asked people from the Faure tribe to show me what their facial expressions would be if they were told that their child had died. Videotapes of their efforts make it possible to see the same expression as Betty Shirley’s, although a little less intense, since they only depicted, and did not survive the loss.
Grief can cause different types of loss and loss: the loss of a friend or lover; loss of self-esteem due to the inability to achieve a career goal; the loss of a part of the body or the loss of a certain function due to an accident or illness, and for some people - the loss of a valuable object. There are many words to describe a person in a state of sadness: “disappointed”, “sad”, “sad”, “depressed”, “discouraged”, “distressed”, “unhappy”, “grieving”, etc.
None of these words seems to be appropriate for describing the emotion reflected on Betty Shirley’s face. Wally Friesen and I suggested that this emotion has two components: sorrow and grief. [95] In a state of grief, protest; in a state of sadness, there is more submissiveness and hopelessness. Grief involves attempts to actively influence the source of the loss. Sadness is more passive. Often, grief appears to have no specific purpose — when nothing can be done to return what has been lost. We can not tell by the expression of the face shown in this photo, whether Betty feels sadness or grief. It would be more understandable if we could see the expression on her face for a few seconds, hear her words and watch her gestures. Indeed, it would be very difficult to hear Betty's moans expressing her despair or heartache. We can look away from the face, but we can not hear the voice expressions of emotion. We teach our children to suppress unpleasant sounds associated with certain emotions, especially sobs expressing despair or grief.
Sadness is one of the longest lasting emotions. After a period of protesting grief, usually there is a period of humble sadness, during which a person feels completely helpless, and then a protesting grief reappears, trying to regain the loss, then sadness turns again, and so on. last only a few seconds, can persist for several minutes, until another emotion arises (or the total absence of emotions does not occur). The strong emotion felt by Betty Shirley, can manifest itself in waves, again and again, and not persist continuously at the level of maximum intensity. In the case of such bereavement, a background sad mood always arises, which persists for some time and then, at the end of the period of mourning, begins to gradually subside.
Even with such deep sadness at other times, other emotions can be felt. Sometimes a grieved person may be angry at his life, at God, at people or objects that caused his bereavement, at a deceased person, because he died, especially if the deceased consciously put himself at some risk. A person may be angry with himself: for not taking any action, for not expressing an important feeling, for not being able to prevent death. Even if the person with his mind realizes that this death was inevitable, he still feels guilty and angry because he could not do the impossible.
Betty Shirley was almost certainly angry with the two men who killed her son, but the photographer captured her at another time: when she was sad and grief. We feel anger towards the person who caused the loss, and at the same time we feel sadness and grief over the loss itself. A person may experience only one anger if the loss does not occur forever, as in the case of death, but for a while. But even in such a situation, sadness can arise with the sensation of a loss that has occurred. There are no hard and fast rules here, as quite often a grieving person, who feels abandoned, experiences anger towards the deceased at some moments.
From time to time, the grieving person feels fear of how he will live on, and fear because he can never recover from his ordeal. Such fear is often interspersed with a feeling of inability to continue to live after such a personal catastrophe. If the loss of a loved one has not yet occurred, then fear, not sadness or grief, can be the predominant emotion.
From time to time, even positive emotions may be briefly experienced during a period of intense sadness. There are moments of joy arising from the memories of happy periods of life with the deceased. Sometimes at a funeral or a wake, friends and relatives of the deceased share memories of such pleasant moments, causing a low laugh to those present. For short moments, there can be positive emotions at the sight of a close family friend, who has come to express his condolences to the family of the deceased.
When I worked in the hard-to-reach areas of New Guinea, I became acquainted with another manifestation of grief. Once I went from the village where we lived and went on foot to the Australian hospital located in the district center to take a shower there and recharge the batteries of my movie camera. The woman, who lived in a nearby village, also went to the hospital with a seriously ill child, who, unfortunately, soon died. The Australian doctor was about to send the woman with her dead child back to the village and invited me to go with them. The woman sat quietly in the Land Rover and silently held the dead child in her arms throughout our long journey. But when we came to her village and she saw her relatives and friends, she began to cry, demonstrating her deep grief.
The doctor decided that she behaved insincerely and used the ritual expression of sad emotions to impress her neighbors in the village. He believed that if she were really in despair, she would manifest him during the trip with us.
But the doctor did not understand that grief can truly be experienced only in the presence of other people who share the bitterness of loss. We know what happened, but the significance of this event becomes deeper for us when we tell others about it or see their reaction to our loss. [96] This was an extreme case of this phenomenon, since this woman belonged to the culture of the Stone Age, which was not known for any matches, or water supply, or mirrors, or any clothes other than grass skirts. The context in which the death of her child occurred was devoid of any meaning for her. The modern hospital with all its equipment made the experience gained by this woman unreal - as if she flew to Mars and then returned to Earth. Another possibility was that she held her grief to herself in the presence of two foreigners - the doctor and me. It is also possible that she was in a state of shock and had to pass some time before she came out of it and was able to feel and manifest her grief. If more time had passed, then her grief would manifest irrespective of the place in which it was located. There was a period when mental health specialists believed that those close to the deceased, who did not show much grief, did not realize the fact of loss and, therefore, were vulnerable to serious psychiatric problems. Recent studies suggest that this is not always the case, especially when the deceased died slowly and everyone had enough time to get used to the idea of ​​his imminent death. In such cases, the relatives of the deceased did not experience great grief, but only experienced grief when death did occur. If the relationship with the deceased was not simple and was accompanied by numerous quarrels and manifestations of discontent, then his death may cause relief, rather than despair.
If the death of a loved one is sudden and unexpected, not giving time to prepare for it, then the relatives often think that the deceased is still alive. Dr. Ted Reinerson, who studied how people react to the sudden death of a loved one, found that the relatives of the deceased often continued to talk to him, because they believed that he could hear and answer them. [97] When death occurs as a result of an accident, murder, or suicide, such conversations with the deceased can last for years and his loved ones take a long time to fully come to terms with his death.
A strong expression of grief, similar to that seen in Betty Shirley, can appear even when a person who is anticipating a quick bereavement suddenly gets the news that his lover is alive and well. At the first moment of relief experienced, the grief inside is bursting out. The grief that was expected, but restrained, manifests itself openly. At such a moment, a person experiences both grief and relief. Deferred emotions, restrained for one reason or another, break out when it becomes perfectly safe to experience them, even if these emotions are no longer relevant to the current situation.
There is one more possible, but insufficiently researched, explanation of why signs of grief are sometimes observed, supplemented by tears when a person hears good news. Perhaps in such cases, strong joy overwhelms the emotional system and an exceptionally strong emotion causes short-term grief. Anger can serve as a defense against grief, a substitute for grief, and sometimes a cure for it. When a rejected lover experiences anger at the memory of the refusal received, his despair subsides. In moments of oppressive loneliness, sadness returns, and then again gives way to anger. For some people, anger is constantly “in reserve”, ready to flare up at the slightest sign of loss, to prevent the emergence of feelings of grief.
Some psychotherapists argue that lasting sadness and grief, arising as a reaction to loss, is a consequence of anger turning inward. If a suffering person could direct his anger out, to the deceased for his death, to a heartless lover, at his spouse, teacher or boss, then sorrow and grief would be "healed." Although this may indeed occur, I doubt that such a reaction is typical. It is not unusual to feel anger towards a person who has passed away, but anger is by no means the only feeling, and its expression cannot be an indispensable or reliable cure for experiencing sadness or grief.

Nowadays, people often take medications designed to alleviate the strong manifestations of sadness and grief, to alleviate the pain experienced. I have no objection to the use of drugs to alleviate depression - an emotional disorder, which we will discuss in this section. But I’m much less sure that it’s more beneficial for people not to feel sadness or grief over the natural losses that we face in our life, unless a person’s depression is of a clinical nature. Sadness and grief can help heal the wound caused by bereavement, and without them the suffering caused by such a loss could last longer.
When taking appropriate medications, a person will not look suffering, and this can be very bad. Sadness and grief, reflected on the face and voice, appeal to other people for help. Such social support in the form of care from friends and relatives has a healing effect. A person taking medication in order not to show sorrow and grief can receive less of such useful attention. I do not intend to offer expressions of sadness and anger on my face and voice in order to get help from other people. These expressions are involuntary, not intentional, but one of their evolutionary functions is to make those who see these expressions take part and care.
Another function of expressions of sadness and grief is to enrich the perception of what the loss suffered. We know very well what we feel when weeping, we know about the suffering felt on our face after repeated expressions of grief and sadness. We would hardly have known what loss meant to us if there was no expression of emotion on the face; Of course, we would have known this, but we would not have felt the loss in full if the medications weakened our manifestation of despair. Another function of sadness is to allow a person to recover his resources and save his energy. Of course, this cannot happen when sadness is replaced by grief, which drains resources.
I would like to warn the reader. There is no reliable information about how people who take medicines show sadness and grief reactions when they are grieving for the deceased or when they suffer from the loss of another kind. We do not know what can be advised here, and I can only offer readers to study these issues themselves. Again, I emphasize that I have not considered any pathological reactions to the loss, nor cases of clinical depression (at the end of this section I will explain how clinical depression differs from sadness and grief).
The following story took place in the summer of 1995 in a Bosnian refugee camp in Tuzla. During the war in the Balkans, Europeans and Americans declared some zones protected by NATO troops. But the Serbs ignored this statement and entered one of these zones near the city of Srebrenica. There, the Serbs brutally murdered many male locals. The refugees, moving towards Tuzla, saw along the road the bodies of civilians and the ruins of smoking houses, burned by the Serbs along with the people there.
The people shown in this photo are Bosnian Muslims in the camp near Tuzla, another supposedly safe area. They just read a list of those who survived, and many of them learned that they would never again see their fathers, brothers and husbands.

It is hard not to want to comfort a child experiencing such grief. Such an impulse to “support one’s neighbor” and provide help is fundamental to any sense of community. It is caused, at least in part, by the suffering we experience when we see the suffering of another person, especially the suffering of a helpless and unhappy child. This is one of the functions or tasks of this expression: to call for help, to make one person feel the suffering of many other people in order to get help from them. And the help given to another person, the relief of his position, his deliverance from unhappiness, allows the one who gives this help to feel positive feelings.
The same feelings — the desire to help and comfort — may arise at the sight of Betty Shirley's facial expressions, but perhaps not as strong. Most of us find it easier to try to comfort a child than an adult person, even if his sufferings manifest themselves so clearly. Sociologist Erwin Hoffman noted that there are few factors that can contain our desire to touch an unfamiliar child, to console him in misfortune or in some way cheer. (He wrote about this in the 1960s, when the problem of pedophilia was not so acute.)
I myself am too sensitive to the suffering of others. TV reports, even if they are devoted to extraordinary events, the consequences of which were successfully coped with, instantly cause me to tears and heartache. The most primitive TV commercials telling about someone's failure can make me cry! But so I was not always. I am confident that my current sensitivity is the result of an exceptionally painful experience that I had thirty years ago during a surgical operation. Because of the mistakes of the doctors, I did not receive the necessary painkillers and for five days I was forced to suffer so much that at times I thought about suicide. These terrible pains have misaligned my sadness / suffering system of emotions. Now I have become like a shell-shocked soldier, exaggeratedly sharply reacting to any sound that resembles the sound of a gunfire. A very intense and dense (repeating again and again) emotional experience can be the starting point for any emotion in me.
It should be noted that not everyone wants help when he feels sadness or grief. Someone prefers to retire, so as not to show others his state. Such people can be ashamed of their weakness and helplessness, ashamed of their dependence on another person, their attachment to him. All this causes them to experience sadness and grief when they lose this person forever. There are people who are proud of the fact that they never show their negative emotions, but only show a “tense upper lip”. But the mere fact that someone does not want to express their feelings does not mean that this person will fully succeed in his intention; nor does it mean that he does not experience emotions because he suppresses (as much as he can) their expressions. As explained on the previous page, expressions of emotion are involuntary; they begin to manifest even when we do not want it. We can suppress them only partially and never completely. If we could completely eliminate the expressions of emotions - so that there were no traces of them on the face, in the voice and body movements - then we would have to consider these expressions as unreliable as the words we utter.
(I deliberately used masculine pronouns in the previous paragraph, since this behavior is more often observed in men, although I am not going to say that it cannot be observed in women or that it is characteristic of all men. Traditions of culture and education in a particular culture, as well as possibly character plays an important role in shaping attitudes that determine how a person will experience and manifest sadness and grief.)
Each expression propagates a set of related messages. Messages of sorrow and grief convey the following information: “I suffer; comfort me and help me. " When we see these expressions, our reaction is not detached or speculative, even when we see these expressions in the photographs in the book. We are designed to respond with emotion to emotion; we usually feel the message being sent to us. But this does not always mean that we feel the very emotion that is being sent to us.
Not everyone feels the suffering of others; not everyone has the desire to support and comfort the unfortunate person. Some people show anger at the sight of others suffering. They may feel that an undesirable, unreasonable demand for help is being sent to them: “Why can't he take care of himself? What is whining? ”Sylvan Tomkins believed that the fundamental difference between people was how they react to the suffering of others. Do we feel that we ourselves are suffering and want to help them, or do we blame the suffering person for having found himself in this position and is now making us some demands?
Sometimes a person or group of people — such as Bosnian Muslims, Jews, American Indians, African slaves, or Roma — may not be considered at all as human beings like us. They can be equated to animals, to show how little value they represent. Although the sufferings of animals are taken to heart by many people, yet they do not concern everyone, as not everyone worries and the sufferings of those whom he considers inferior human beings. Their sufferings can be viewed as deserved or at least as incapable of disturbing the person who sees them. There are also people who enjoy the suffering of others. They gladly hurt, physical or mental, to other people, because they are pleased to exercise their power and watch the torment of others. An expression similar to that which one of these boys has can only whet their appetite and encourage them to cause more, even more, suffering to their victims. (I will tell about such people at the end of the section.)
On the suffering face of a boy from Tuzla you can see traces of tears. In Western culture, it is allowed to shed tears in children and adult women, but until recently, tears of sadness and grief in adult men were seen as manifestations of weakness. The tears that appeared on the face of presidential candidate Edmund Muskie at the time when he described his reaction to the slanderous statements of the newsmen against his wife, by all accounts, cost him victory in the primary elections in 1972. Today, apparently, the situation is somewhat has changed. Both Bob Dole and Bill Clinton did not hide their tears during the election campaign of 1996, and no one criticized them for it. Mass media and many teachers pay attention to the admissibility of men's emotions in general, and sadness and suffering in particular. I doubt that such an opinion is shared by all segments of American society, but we do not have baseline data to compare the current situation with the situation thirty years ago.
Tears are not only characteristic of sadness or grief. They can also appear with strong joy and during bouts of laughter, although a recent analysis of scientific literature has revealed many descriptions of how adults cry from feeling helpless. [98] People report that they begin to feel better after crying, and although crying can be caused by different reasons (for example, attempts to control facial expressions), it seems to be a universal expression of emotion. Some people claim that crying is characteristic only for people, but there is a lot of documentary evidence that primates can also cry in some tragic situations.
Most emotions play a key role in shaping our character traits and the emergence of specific emotional disorders. Considering the duration of each phenomenon is the simplest way to distinguish between emotions (which can last several seconds or many minutes), moods (which can last several hours or even one or two days), personality traits (which can color whole periods of human life, such as adolescence, adolescence, and sometimes all my life). [99] Although emotional disorders may be episodic, last for several weeks or months or continue for years and decades, not their duration, but how they affect our ability to live a normal life distinguishes them from our emotional personality traits. When a disorder occurs, emotions go out of our control and can affect our ability to live with other people, work, eat and sleep.
Being in a sad mood, we may experience sadness for many hours; melancholic easily gives in to sadness or despondency; Depression is a mental disorder in which sadness and grief are central. Of course, people often use these words as equivalent, saying, for example, that someone was depressed because of the low score they received on the exam. But mental disorders have their own distinctive features that take them beyond the limits of normal emotional reactions.
First of all, they last much longer. The “depression” caused by a low score will quickly pass if any other important events occur. A real depression lasts for days, months, and sometimes even years. In the case of emotional disorder, certain emotions begin to predominate in a person’s life, occupying a monopoly position in it, as a result of which he can only occasionally experience some other emotions. These dominant emotions are regularly tested in acute form. They are out of control, and man cannot regulate or restrain them. They affect a person’s ability to perform many of the things that are crucial to his normal life: eat, sleep, maintain family relationships, and work. Figuratively speaking, emotions flood his whole life.
If sadness dominates in the depressed state, then we are talking about a prolonged depression; if grief turns out to be more noticeable, then we are talking about agitated depression. People experiencing depression, not only feel the inability to change their lives, they experience a sense of hopelessness. They do not believe that their life will ever be better. In addition to sadness and grief, they have a strong feeling of guilt and shame, as they feel their uselessness. Depression can be a reaction to some kind of life event, to an over-response, or even to occur without cause and reason, when no event can be considered a starting impulse for it. Sadness and grief are not the only emotions experienced during depression; anger inward or outward and fear are often also manifested. If there are repeated transitions from depression to elevated mood and arousal and back, then this depression is called bipolar or, using the old terminology, manic-depressive psychosis. Few people doubt the influence of genetic factors on our susceptibility to depression and the possibility of drug treatment of this disorder. Psychotherapy alone or with medication can also be beneficial, although there are continuing debates in the scientific literature about whether using psychotherapy alone can be as effective as the use of medication only in cases of severe depression.
In our survey of people suffering from depression, we did not find any specific facial expressions, nothing that could not be seen in healthy people experiencing sadness or grief. Any thirty-second observation period could only show that the person was unhappy, and not that he was experiencing clinical depression. It was the repeatability and strength of emotions that manifested itself again and again within an hour that made the reflection on the face obvious, namely depression, and not just sadness or grief caused by bereavement.
The depth of the sadness depended on the diagnosis given to the patient. Less sadness was shown by those who suffered from the so-called mild depression, and more - those who suffered from severe depression. In addition to several expressions of sadness, patients suffering from manic disorder showed many kinds of smiles, but they were not smiles of pleasure. (Differences between smiles of pleasure and other types of smiles are explained further in the corresponding section.)
When examining patients at our clinic, we found that the differences in the types of emotions that were manifested while patients were being admitted to the clinic allowed us to predict how well they would react to subsequent treatment, i.e., what improvements would be achieved in three of the month. [100]