Everyone has heard of the five stages of grief. It's normally associated with death, but it's really more to do with loss, death just happens to be one of the biggest losses we can experience. The thing about these stages is that they always happen in the same order. How long it takes to get through a stage my vary from person to person, but you will go through it before you can get to the next one. The only way to overcome the feeling of grief is to move through all five stages. An interesting thing about it is that in most cases you're almost powerless to prevent the reaction. You will experience denial followed by anger, even if the transition between the two is within moments of each other. The whole thing brings up a question about pre-configured behavior built into us. If the reaction to loss is a predictable pattern of behavior then could there be others that we don't know about? I've talked about control before. What if we're running through a series of predetermined subroutines?
When I was talking about smell I mentioned the idea that there were possibly built-in reactions to specific scents. Our reaction to them isn't based on personal preference, but rather something physiological at work. If we have a standard response to loss then logic would dictate that there would have to be standard responses to the opposite end of the spectrum. Granted not everyone reacts the exact same way in a given situation, however, maybe there is a mental road map that all people will have to follow in order to get to their destination.
Speaking of which, grief from loss seems to be something that's fairly well mapped out. We know how we will react, even if we'd rather not. It's just a matter of fact that it's going to happen so if you were being rational you could predict what was coming next. Or at least have a good idea of what to expect around the next corner. The thing is while we're in the middle of it one of the last things that we are is rational. It normally takes someone else outside the situation to recognize what's happening. We're typically riding the wave of emotion so our ability to predict anything has probably been compromised. In fact we tend to be fairly bad at predicting how we will react to a situation. Something like the death of a loved one may seem like something we will never get over, but more often than not we do recover. On the flip side we seem to convince ourselves that certain things will make us happy for longer periods than possible. I read an interesting article about the futility of happiness, which essentially says that your brain overestimates the duration of happiness from good things and underestimates its own ability to recover from bad things. Even in that regard though there is a certain amount of predictability in our inability to predict how we're going to react. If that makes any kind of sense.
Some people may not like the whole idea that things are somewhat predestined because that means our sense of control is a lot more limited than we'd probably want. One may try to fight against this behavior in some futile effort to show the universe that they aren't dictated by emotion. I would imagine sometimes they may feel like they're successful, but are they just prolonging the inevitable? It's almost like a child fighting against bed time. The outcome is going to be the same regardless of how much they fight it, still they can't go quietly. Some people never lose that mentality. It doesn't matter if the outcome is a forgone conclusion, they will fight against it until the very end. I'm sure some would see that as noble or respect their principles and maybe in certain situations they are. However, when it comes to our own nature, who or what are they fighting against?
If you've spent a significant amount of time with another person you may find yourself able to predict how they're going to behave in various situations. In some cases you may even have an idea of what they're going to say next. Basically you've been near them long enough to just know what comes next. As it was mentioned in the movie Groundhog Day, maybe God doesn't know everything, instead he's just been around so long that he can predict what's going to happen based on a few billion years of experience. It could be that some of that is because they are running along a predetermined track of behavior. Of course humans by their very nature are chaotic so really trying to predict exactly what one is going to do is a lot like trying to predict the weather. The slightest variation could have drastically different results. Still we understand how weather works and what should happen based on certain variables and the same is probably true with a person. How they get to the emotional destination may be a mystery, but the destination can be plotted. If that's true then why isn't there a manual on what we're going to do next?
