After my brother’s funeral, grief hijacked my nervous system for months

Warning: This article discusses suicide.

I was 32 when my older brother Sam died by suicide.

To call him that, a brother, feels inadequate. As kids, we were by each other’s side when our youngest brother, Luke, died of SIDS at eight weeks old, and as adults, we travelled overseas together, lived in share houses, and socialised in the same circles.

Jessica Maguire with her late brother, Sam, as kids.

Sam was my safe space, my cheerleader and my best friend. When he died, I was crushed. Emotionally, I felt life’s foundations collapse from underneath me. I experienced a sense of profound shock and felt untethered, like I didn’t know what, or where, home was any more.

For weeks, I couldn’t eat, suffered severe insomnia and was crippled by persistent and debilitating stomach cramps. In the months following, I would swing up to the highs of anxiety and hypervigilance, and lie awake for hours at night. I also found myself collapsed and exhausted, unable to muster the energy to face basic life admin, make decisions, or handle conversations with family and friends.

When Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler published On Grief and Grieving in 2005, they took great pains to explain that we shouldn’t think of grief as a linear process. Yet despite this, the pair say they still regularly receive feedback from readers who, feeling misled by the book’s message as they bounced between stages, try to make sense of their new reality.

It’s no surprise we try to paint-by-numbers our way through grief. Despite how much more we now know about the experience, we still largely struggle to support those going through it. Society pushes us to process our feelings in a singular way, with a checklist and timetable for recovery.

Through my physiotherapy training, and following Sam’s death, I now recognise the symptoms I experienced were signs that my nervous system was in a state of dysregulation. Some of the common symptoms of grief are insomnia, headaches, anxiety, tension, and fatigue, but losing somebody can also impact cardiovascular function and disrupt hormone levels, sleep rhythms and immune processes.

This isn’t surprising given that when reality begins to hit and we realise the person we loved is no longer available, the changes to our brain’s neurochemistry see our nervous system shift from connection to protection. The absence of this loved one literally threatens our security on a primal level.

When we fall in love, be it romantically or platonically, our brains rewire from “you and me” to a “we”. So when that loved one is no longer there, our brains are unsure of what to do – the “we” has a hole in it. For some people, this experience can be temporary, but in other people, it has the power to alter our brain chemistry and realign our nervous system indefinitely.

Following a death, people often go into a textbook fight or flight response, in which our sympathetic nervous system is activated, and the body tries to mobilise energy in response to overwhelming pain. If you’ve ever seen someone taking over funeral planning or clearing out closets immediately after the service, it’s likely they are in a dysregulated state of fight or flight.

Conversely, a dysregulated nervous system can lead to immobilisation, shutdown or freeze. Anyone withdrawing from life or battling feelings of extreme exhaustion following the death of a loved one is likely experiencing this, known as dorsal vagal shutdown.

These are all natural responses to the shock of grief. However, if the grief isn’t adequately processed, our nervous system can become stuck and recalibrate towards chronic hyper-arousal (too much activation) or hypo-arousal (too little activation).

The thousands of stories I’ve heard from clients who have lost children, family members and other loved ones make me believe we need a new model for grief care – one that enables us to move through the experience in an embodied and wholehearted way. Because while we’re all going to lose someone at some point, it’s only when we experience it for ourselves that we understand how momentous it is. Until then, grief is something that happens to other people.

Ultimately, our biggest tool in processing grief is each other. A dysregulated nervous system is soothed by connection, whether through physical touch, comforting conversations, or by simply being with others who understand the experience of loss.

After losing both of my brothers, and working within nervous system regulation, this knowledge didn’t make the grieving process any easier. However, I do know that if society as a whole and the immediate communities around us can better understand grief, we can access a blueprint that will allow us to prepare for, and navigate more gently, one of the most difficult, and common, experiences we will ever face.

If you or someone you know is in need of support contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

Jessica Maguire is a former physiotherapist and the author of The Nervous System Reset.

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