What is Grief and What Causes It to Endure? Part 2
Mental perturbance while dismantling attachment structures
This article is an excerpt from my book,Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind’s chapter on grief. As grief cannot be understood without understanding love, this section refers back to my previous article on love and attachment.
The chapter takes an integrative design-oriented perspective.
Credit: image generated by AI using ChatGPT
What is Grief and What Causes It to Endure?
Grief has often been defined in broad, descriptive terms—as the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral response to the loss of a significant person. Such definitions capture something important about the phenomenology of grief: its sadness, its yearning, its disruption of everyday life. Yet they remain largely pre-theoretical. They tell us what grief feels like and how it appears, but not how it is generated, sustained, or resolved within the architecture of the mind.
More cognitively oriented accounts move a step further. They emphasize the intrusive and repetitive nature of thought during grieving: memories that return unbidden, counterfactual reflections (“if only…”), persistent attention to the lost person and the circumstances of the loss. These approaches identify a key feature of grief—its tendency to capture and redirect attention—but they still lack a principled explanation of why such thoughts are so difficult to regulate.
A more explanatory approach emerges when we adopt a design-oriented perspective on the mind. In this framework, grief is not treated as a single mechanism or module, but as a systemic phenomenon arising from the interaction of multiple information-processing processes within an autonomous agent. As analyzed in our earlier work[^griefPapers], grieving involves a partial loss of effective control over thought processes: memories, desires, and evaluations related to the deceased repeatedly intrude, often displacing other goals and concerns. This is not simply dysfunction. It reflects the operation of mechanisms that are essential for intelligent agency—mechanisms for generating motives, prioritizing them, and allocating limited executive resources—operating under conditions where their normal targets are no longer attainable.
Central to this account is the notion of an attachment structure. As described above, through repeated interaction with another person, the mind develops a highly distributed and deeply embedded set of control states: preferences, expectations, plans, evaluative dispositions, and motive generators that concern that individual. These structures are woven throughout the architecture, influencing both reactive and deliberative processes. When such an attachment is disrupted by death or loss, the resulting disturbance propagates widely through the system.
The concept of mental perturbance provides a general framework for understanding this disturbance. Perturbance refers to a condition in which insistent motivators—structures that dispose the agent toward certain states of affairs—repeatedly influence or disrupt executive processes, even when the agent attempts to suppress them. Grief is a paradigmatic instance. The mourner is subject to the continual reactivation of commitment-grounded motivators: desires to reconnect, counterfactual simulations of how things might have unfolded differently, evaluations of the loss, and attempts to make sense of its implications. These motivators tend to retain high insistence, penetrating attentional filters and consuming limited executive resources.
Grief endures because the mind continues to generate highly insistent, commitment-grounded motivators toward a person who is no longer available, and because reorganizing the distributed structures that support those motivators is a slow, resource-limited process.
From this perspective, grief is not simply an emotional state but an extended process of mental reorganization. It involves the gradual restructuring of a complex attachment system in light of the fact that its central object is no longer available. This reorganization is neither immediate nor straightforward. The attachment structure is deeply entrenched, distributed across multiple layers of control, and integrated with many other aspects of cognition and behavior.
Several factors contribute to the endurance of grief.
One is the sheer complexity of the attachment structure itself. Because it is distributed and multi-layered, it cannot be simply “turned off.” The process is more akin to relearning a deeply ingrained skill than updating a belief. One might compare it to adapting to driving on the opposite side of the road after years of habituation when moving to a new country: declarative knowledge of the new rule is insufficient. What must change are numerous interconnected control processes—perceptual habits, expectations, attentional priorities, and action tendencies. Similarly, in grief, the system must reorganize a vast network of dispositions that were built around the presence of the other person.
A second factor is the limited control that executive processes have over the mechanisms that generate and prioritize motivators. The assignment of insistence to motives is automatic and only partially accessible to reflective control. Even assignment of importance, intensity and urgency are not fully controlled by executive functions. As a result, even when one resolves to redirect attention or “move on,” commitment-linked motivators continue to arise and capture processing resources. This reflects a fundamental discontinuity between knowledge and control: one may fully know that the person is gone, yet the system continues to operate, in important respects, as if reconnection were still possible.
A third factor concerns the role of counterfactual and simulation processes. The mind generates alternative scenarios—what might have been done differently, how events could have unfolded otherwise—driven by commitment structures that encode concern for the other. These simulations function as error-signaling and evaluation mechanisms, but in grief they can become persistently activated, contributing to repetitive thought and sustained insistence.
Evolutionary considerations may also play a role. The mechanisms that generate persistent, insistent motives toward a lost individual may have evolved under conditions in which separation was often temporary and recovery possible. From this perspective, the mind continues to act as though reconnection might still be achieved. At the same time, the enduring pain of grief may function as a powerful learning signal, encoding the significance of attachment and the cost of its disruption. This helps explain why grief is often accompanied by guilt: counterfactual evaluation of one’s actions in relation to commitment structures can generate motives oriented toward repair, even when repair is no longer possible.
Attachment structures should also be understood as commitment structures: long-term configurations of motives, plans, and expectations that bind the agent to others. Grief reflects the breakdown of such commitments and the difficulty of withdrawing, revising, or redistributing them. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that reorganizing entrenched control structures is inherently slow, especially when they are reinforced across multiple layers of the architecture.
Finally, grief has a social dimension. Persistent grieving can function as a signal to others of the depth and endurance of one’s commitments. In some cases, the most effective way to signal such commitment is to experience it genuinely—to be, in a sense, convinced by one’s own grief. This signaling function does not reduce grief to communication, but it highlights an additional layer at which commitment structures may operate and be displayed. (Compare the earlier discussion of social signaling.)
Taken together, these considerations suggest that grief is best understood not as a unitary emotion but as a prolonged, system-level phenomenon. It involves the interaction of insistent motivators, limited executive resources, and deeply embedded attachment structures undergoing reorganization. What appears, from the inside, as an overwhelming and persistent emotional experience is, from an architectural perspective, the unfolding of a complex and necessary process: the gradual transformation of a mind that had been organized around the presence of another.
Let us know
Please let us know in the comments ↓ whether this text helps you make sense of grief you have experienced.
Our papers on grief as mental perturbance
Next up
In part 3, we will examine works of art, in multiple genres, that can help one understand and alleviate grief.
What stayed with me here is the distinction between knowing someone is gone and the mind still being organized, in countless small ways, around their continued presence. That feels psychologically true in a way many simpler models of grief do not.
The phrase “discontinuity between knowledge and control” especially struck me because it captures something clinicians see often and still struggle to describe well: the painful coexistence of recognition and persistence. Understanding a loss intellectually while the deeper architecture of expectation, attention, habit, simulation, even bodily anticipation, continues behaving as though reunion still belongs to the future.
I also appreciated that the piece resists reducing grief to either pathology or pure sentiment. The idea of grief as prolonged reorganization, slow, distributed, resource-limited, feels closer to lived experience than the language of “closure” ever did.