What is grief and what causes it to endure? Part 1: Love
Attachment structures, commitments and motivators
Grief is one of the most representative forms of mental perturbance. An entire multi-chapter part of my Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind book deals with grief. This part of the book begins with a chapter “What is grief and what causes it to endure?” The text on grief draws heavily on prior chapters. (You can get the book to see the context, it is being published serially.)
In a series of articles here on my Substack I am gradually publishing sections of this chapter. So here is a draft of the first two sections of the chapter. Comments are welcome!
Introduction to the chapter
Grief occurs when someone we love has died or is lost. It can also be something we love that is lost. In order to understand grief, we first need to understand the nature of love. Next we do this in integrative design-oriented terms. Following that, we dig more directly into the nature of grief. We then reflect on grief with the aid of several stories, songs and a classical music piece.
Love: attachment structures, commitments, motivators
Love, in its attachment-related forms, can be understood as an emergent mode of organization within a security-regulation subsystem of the mind, embedded in a broader architecture of interacting control processes. This subsystem monitors conditions of vulnerability—threat, uncertainty, separation, dependency—and regulates interpersonal security through the generation and modulation of motivators oriented toward proximity, reassurance, responsiveness, and trust. Love is not a static state or a mere feeling; it is a dynamically sustained pattern of control in which these motivators are selectively activated, prioritized, and integrated with other ongoing processes.
In more developed forms, love is structured not only by transient motivator activation but by enduring commitments in the sense articulated by Michel Aubé and discussed above. A commitment is a relatively stable configuration of motivators and control dispositions that persists across contexts and time. Love typically involves not a single overarching commitment, but a network of interrelated commitments: to support, attend to, protect, understand, cooperate with, and foster the growth of the other. These commitments are often fine-grained and situationally specific, yet coordinated into more stable patterns of interaction. In adult relationships, love characteristically involves an exchange of commitments, in which each person forms, maintains, and revises commitments in relation to the other. Thus love entails a disposition to create derived commitments. That means that commitments operate at different levels of abstraction.
This framework applies across relational forms—romantic partnerships, friendships, parent–child relations, and fraternal or brotherly love—each involving distinct but overlapping configurations of such commitment networks.
Love, thus understood, entails caring for the other in a commitment-grounded way. When the other is perceived to be threatened or in difficulty, the system tends to generate insistent motivators directed toward helping, protecting, or supporting them. These motivators recruit attention, guide action selection, and can temporarily dominate processing, reflecting the priority conferred by underlying commitments. The stability of love depends less on the persistence of affective states than on the robustness, coherence, and mutual alignment of these commitments across changing conditions.
Fromm’s classical characterization of mature love, articulated in The Art of Loving — involving care, responsibility, respect and knowledge — can be reinterpreted within this architectural framework. Care corresponds to the sustained generation of motivators oriented toward the life and growth of the other. Responsibility reflects a standing, commitment-based readiness to respond to the other’s needs. Respect involves being guided by an understanding of the other as an autonomous agent with their own goals and developmental trajectory. It is not merely accurate representation (knowledge), but a constraint on commitment: it limits treating the other as an object of control, projection, or use, and includes a disposition to refrain from overriding their agency even under strong, insistent motivators. Knowledge reflects the ongoing refinement of these models, enabling commitments to be enacted in a context-sensitive and effective manner. These are not merely ethical ideals but functional properties of well-configured commitment structures within an interpersonal regulatory system.
Within an architectural perspective, these processes span multiple layers. At the reactive layer, rapid, affectively charged responses—such as alarm, distress, or comfort—are triggered by cues of threat or availability, supporting immediate proximity-seeking or caregiving actions. At the deliberative layer, internal working models and situational interpretations guide planning, decision-making, and the formation and revision of commitments. At the reflective layer, agents can evaluate their own commitments, regulate their responses, and engage in higher-order processes such as perspective-taking, norm-guided adjustment, and long-term coordination of shared goals. Love, in its mature forms, depends critically on the integration of these layers: reactive processes provide urgency and salience; deliberative processes support flexible coordination; reflective processes enable stability, coherence, and ethical regulation.
Internal working models function as learned predictive structures that shape perception, interpretation, and action selection across these layers. They influence how readily commitments are formed, how they are calibrated, and how they are revised in light of experience. They also bias the generation and interpretation of signals relevant to relational security, thereby affecting both motivator activation and commitment stability.
A key dynamic within this system is the modulation of insistence. Under conditions of uncertainty or threat, commitment-relevant motivators—such as those driving proximity-seeking or helping—can become highly insistent, capturing attention and biasing cognition toward the other. When regulation succeeds, insistence subsides, allowing other processes, such as exploration and task engagement, to proceed. However, when regulation fails, or when commitments are destabilized or in conflict, the system can enter states of sustained high insistence. These states are closely related to mental perturbance: intrusive, repetitive, and difficult-to-regulate patterns of thought and affect that reflect the persistent activation of insistent concerns.
Individual differences in attachment can be understood as differences in how commitment structures and insistence dynamics are calibrated. Anxious patterns involve rapid activation and escalation of insistence, often linked to fragile or unstable commitments. Avoidant patterns involve the attenuation or suppression of commitment-related motivators, often through gating mechanisms at reactive or deliberative levels. Secure patterns reflect a more adaptive configuration in which commitments are stable yet flexible, motivators are appropriately responsive, and insistence is effectively regulated.
Finally, love emerges as a multi-system integration involving attachment, caregiving, erotic, and exploratory subsystems. Commitments play a central coordinating role in this integration, stabilizing interactions over time and aligning multiple processes toward shared ends. The particular configuration of commitments varies across relational forms: parental love involves asymmetrical commitments centered on care and development; friendships involve reciprocal and negotiated commitments; romantic love integrates attachment, caregiving, and erotic processes within a dense web of shared commitments. Across these forms, the quality of love depends on how effectively these commitment-structured processes are configured, integrated, and regulated over time.
From this perspective, a design-oriented theory of love treats love not as a monolithic state or a transient feeling, but as a dynamically regulated, multi-layer, commitment-organized mode of functioning—one that can be analyzed, supported, and, in principle, improved through a deeper understanding of its underlying architecture.
Notes
If you’d like to learn in depth about attachment from this perspective, then read our lengthy 2017 peer-reviewed paper, Attachment Modelling: From Observations to Scenarios to Designs | Springer Nature Link (pp 227–271) part of the book, Computational Neurology and Psychiatry | Springer Nature Link.
In my next post I will publish an integrative design-oriented theory of the nature of grief and why grief endures.