Understanding Grief: The Mental Loop Explained

Standing on the Ledge — Chapter 2 continues

Filed under: Field Notes

Analysis Is Pain. Wearing a Suit.

When I can’t feel it cleanly, I start thinking it endlessly.

I replay, revise, rehearse—like if I can just find the right angle, the right sentence, the right alternate ending, the whole thing will make sense and stop hurting.

But it’s not clarity.

It’s a loop.

And the loop is a way to stay busy so I don’t have to grieve.

That’s the part people don’t understand. The mind can turn “being responsible” into a disguise. It can call the loop a review, a debrief, a post-mortem, a lesson learned. It can make grief sound like strategy.

What I’m actually doing is this: I’m trying to negotiate with reality without ever meeting it.

Because if I meet it—fully—then I have to feel what I’ve been trying to edit out of the story: the loss, the humiliation, the betrayal, the fear, the gap between what I thought the world was and what it decided to be.

So instead, I put on the suit.

The suit is not fabric. It’s posture. It’s tone. It’s the version of me that can talk about the collapse like a case file instead of a wound.

Wearing a suit means I can sound composed while I’m unraveling. I can make the pain legible. I can make it seem “handled.” I can perform competence in a moment that feels like pure disintegration.

And it works—briefly.

Until it doesn’t.

Field Notes

• If I’m stuck on the “right explanation,” I’m probably avoiding the real feeling.
• If I’m rewriting the past, I’m bargaining with the present.
• If I’m rehearsing the conversation, I’m trying to control what already happened.
• If I’m calling it “clarity” but I’m getting smaller, colder, tighter—it’s not clarity. It’s armor.

The Sociological Angle: The Suit Isn’t Just Mine

C. Wright Mills had a way of naming this: the bridge between private trouble and public issue. When the ground drops out, it feels personal—like a flaw in character, like an individual failure. But the suit I’m wearing isn’t only a personal quirk. It’s a cultural script.

In a world that rewards composure, rationality, and “professionalism,” grief often gets treated like a defect. You’re expected to “bounce back,” to narrate your loss in a clean arc, to extract a lesson fast enough that nobody has to sit with your rawness.

So the mind adapts. It becomes managerial. It becomes analytical. It starts speaking in systems language because systems language is safer than sorrow.

Durkheim would call part of this the strain of anomie—that destabilized, normless feeling that hits when the rules you lived by stop producing the results they promised. When the social contract you believed in turns out to be conditional, the nervous system doesn’t just feel sadness. It feels untethered.

And then there’s the social stagecraft: what Erving Goffman framed as self-presentation. We learn early what emotions are allowed in public and which ones get you quietly punished. The suit becomes a way to remain “acceptable” while something inside you is screaming.

Which means this loop isn’t only a mental habit. It’s a social survival technique—learned, reinforced, rewarded—until it starts costing more than it protects.

The Psychological Angle: When Thinking Becomes Avoidance

Psychology has a blunt word for the loop: rumination—repetitive thinking that keeps circling distress without resolving it.

It can feel productive because it resembles problem-solving. But rumination often functions like emotional delay. It keeps you in the mental realm so you don’t have to drop into the body—where the grief actually lives.

And grief loves to disguise itself. Sometimes it shows up as bargaining: “If I can just understand it perfectly, I won’t have to feel it.” (That’s not wisdom. That’s negotiation with pain.)

Approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) describe this as emotional avoidance—how the mind tries to outrun discomfort by controlling thoughts and feelings instead of making room for them. The suit is one of those control strategies: a way to stay functional while staying untouched.

So here’s the pivot I’m learning—slowly:

I’m not rambling. I’m mapping the terrain.

But mapping only works if I’m willing to step onto the ground I’m describing.

Otherwise I’m just drawing circles around the crater and calling it insight.

A Small Exit From the Loop

I don’t need the perfect interpretation. I need a next action that respects reality.

Covey’s language for this is the Circle of Influence: the smallest part of the situation where my choices still matter. Not the whole story. Not the whole collapse. Just the next reachable handle.

Because grief doesn’t respond to analysis the way a broken machine does.

Grief responds to contact.

And contact starts with one honest moment where I stop performing and let the truth land.

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Close

• One line I am keeping: ________________________________
• One boundary I am setting: _____________________________
• One step for tomorrow: ________________________________

References

1. Mills, C. Wright — The Sociological Imagination (Chapter 1: “The Promise”)
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — “Anomie”
3. APA Dictionary of Psychology — “Rumination”
4. American Psychiatric Association — “Rumination: A Cycle of Negative Thinking”
5. Ehring et al. (2021) — “Thinking too much: rumination and psychopathology” (PMC)
6. FranklinCovey — Habit 1: Be Proactive (Circle of Influence)
7. Overview of Goffman — The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
8. Hayes et al. (1994) — ACT overview and emotional avoidance (PubMed)
9. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation — Five stages / change curve (incl. bargaining)