“Self-Brain Surgery® is like ten years of therapy in five minutes.”
🧠 Paid Subscribers: Scroll to the bottom for this week’s video self-brain surgery training. I give you an operation to take this week’s letter into daily practice!
Hey friend,
Today, I’m going to give you ten years of therapy in five minutes about learning to grieve well.
I’m writing this on the anniversary of the worst day of my family’s life. Thirteen years ago today, on August 20, 2013, my son Mitch died. I’ve spent thirteen years learning that grief is not a problem to be solved. It’s a wound that changes shape as your brain and your mind learn how to carry it.
So today, instead of ten years of therapy in five minutes, I want to give you thirteen years of grieving in about the same amount of time, six things I’ve learned in my own body and in the neuroscience literature about how grief actually works. We’ll smash it together with Scripture, because that’s what we do here.
Before we start, make sure you're following me on Instagram, where we're giving you daily self-brain surgery lessons to connect neuroscience and scripture to help you flourish. Here's a post I made about grief that went viral, and has over 1 million views so far.
Grief Is Not a Feeling. It’s Your Brain Trying to Update a Map That Won’t Update
For most of my life I thought grief was an emotion, like sadness, just bigger. It isn’t. Grief is what happens when your brain has spent years building a map of the world with a person in it, and that person is gone, and the map isn’t updating itself. Remember those early rental-car GPS units, the ones that would lose the signal between tall buildings and then suddenly jump ahead, so you’d already missed your turn before the map caught up? That’s what grief feels like. You’re stuck between the loss and a future you don’t understand yet, and the map just won’t redraw, even though the facts of reality have changed.
Neuroscience Nugget: Grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, has used functional imaging to study people stuck in complex grief, and she describes it as a fundamental learning problem. Your brain holds predictions built over a lifetime: Mitch is going to call, Mitch is going to walk through the door.
To this day I’ve never taken his contact out of my favorites, and every so often I’ll accidentally pocket-dial his old number and see a “missed call from Mitch” that wrecks me for a second before I remember. Those predictive circuits don’t erase on command. Every time reality contradicts the prediction, your brain has to relearn the loss again, which is part of why grief comes in waves instead of a straight line.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: The next time grief blindsides you out of nowhere, don’t ask, “why am I still not over this.” Ask instead, “what old prediction just got contradicted, what part of the map isn’t updating.” Naming it that way turns a mysterious ambush into a mechanism, and a known mechanism is something your mind can work with instead of just something your brain does to you.
Scripture: “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18, NIV
Your Body Grieves Whether You Give It Permission or Not
Grief isn’t only in your head. The tightness in your chest, the exhaustion, the way certain days hit you before you consciously remember why, that’s not weakness or drama. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do. I still carry a spot in my right shoulder blade where I broke out in shingles after Mitch died, and even now, on a morning like this one, it can flare up before I’ve consciously remembered what day is coming.
Neuroscience Nugget: Research on social pain, led by neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger, has shown that the loss of an attachment activates some of the same neural circuitry, including the anterior cingulate cortex, that processes physical pain. Losing someone you love registers in your brain as an actual injury, not a metaphorical one, mapped onto the same places physical pain lives.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: When your body tells you something before your mind catches up, the tight chest, the sudden tears, the fatigue, stop and say out loud, “this is real pain, it’s not a malfunction.” It’s neurobiology, not a character flaw. Then do one small physical thing for your body: a walk, a slow breath, a hand on your own chest. You’re not managing weakness. You’re treating an injury.
Scripture: “Jesus wept.” John 11:35, NIV
Continuing the Bond Is Not the Same as Refusing to Heal
For a long time, grief theory taught that healthy grieving meant letting go and moving on from the person you lost. That was wrong, and I’m glad the research has caught up to what grieving parents already knew. When I had Dr. Curt Thompson on my podcast, he told me it’s a real phenomenon, and a healthy one, that Mitch still feels like part of my life, because he is. You can’t let go of your child. You carry on with your life, but you never move on.
Neuroscience Nugget: Modern grief science has largely replaced the old stages-and-detachment model with what’s called continuing bonds theory, which recognizes that an ongoing relationship with the person you lost, through memory, ritual, and internal conversation, is part of healthy long-term adaptation, not a sign that you’re stuck.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: Give yourself one deliberate way to keep the bond, on purpose, instead of by accident, a date you mark, a place you visit, a way you talk about him. Do it as an act of love, not as evidence you haven’t healed. You’re not staying in the past. You’re carrying it forward with you.
Scripture: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.” 1 Thessalonians 4:13, NIV
Grief and Gratitude Can Occupy the Same Room
One of the strangest things about long-term grief is discovering you can be undone by missing someone and genuinely thankful you had them, in the very same hour. That’s not a contradiction your brain needs to resolve. It’s actually what integrated grief looks like.
Neuroscience Nugget: Studies on prolonged versus adaptive grief show that reward-related circuitry, including the nucleus accumbens, stays active around memories of the person who died for years, sometimes decades. That yearning-reward signal doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It means the attachment was real and your brain still values it.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: The next time a good memory of your person shows up uninvited and it hurts, don’t push it away and don’t only mourn it. Say both sentences out loud: “I miss him,” and “I’m grateful I had him.” Let your mind hold both without forcing one to win.
Scripture: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, NIV
The Anniversary Is Not a Setback
Every year about this time, something in me braces before I’ve even consciously remembered the date. The molar I fractured that year starts to ache. The old postherpetic neuralgia from the shingles flares. If that’s happened to you too, hear me say it’s not regression. It’s not you failing at healing.
Neuroscience Nugget: The body keeps its own calendar. The same predictive circuitry that has to relearn a loss over and over also encodes the season and timing surrounding that loss, so the nervous system can brace for an anniversary before conscious memory ever catches up.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: Mark the anniversary on your calendar on purpose, before it sneaks up on you. Decide in advance what you’ll do that day, solitude, family, a specific memory you’ll revisit, or all three. Meeting the day with intention instead of dread is its own form of self-brain surgery.
Scripture: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Revelation 21:4, NIV
Your Grief Can Become Someone Else’s Rescue Line
I didn’t choose to become a father who understands grief from the inside. I never intended to be the guy smashing neuroscience and Scripture together on a podcast. But thirteen years in, I’ve watched God take the very thing I would have given anything to avoid and use it to reach people I never could have reached any other way.
Neuroscience Nugget: Post-traumatic growth research shows that meaning-making after profound loss is associated with measurable changes in how the brain integrates traumatic memory, moving it from a raw, intrusive threat signal toward a coherent, narrated part of a person’s story, one that can be shared instead of only endured.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: Think of one person right now who is early in a grief you’ve already walked through. Reach out to them today, even with one sentence: “I know. I’m here.” You don’t have to have it figured out to be useful to someone who’s still in the dark.
Scripture: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4, NIV
Thirteen years hasn’t erased this wound, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. But I’ve watched my mind take real, disciplined authority over what my brain still carries, and that’s let grief become something other than the end of my story. It became part of the hard and holy work.
If Mitch’s life and this letter mean something to you today, hit reply and let me know. And if you’re early in your own grief and need somewhere to start, that’s exactly what my New York Times bestselling book The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery was written for.
How is your self-brain surgery practice going? If you like these “Ten Years of Therapy in Five Minutes” posts, hit reply and let me know you want more!
With you in the hard and holy work of healing, friend!
You can get the training you need to master self-brain surgery in my new book. You can go even deeper in The School of Self-Brain Surgery.
The good news is, you can start today.
Be sure to check out the archive of previous posts if you missed last week’s letter.
Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),
Lee
II Timothy 1:7, “For you were not given a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.”
From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA
Disclaimer: This letter is for informational purposes only. It contains general information, drawn from my experience, research, and best practices. It is not health care advice, and is not intended to replace the counsel of your health care provider. Consult your provider before starting any new treatments or making changes to your health routine. This message does not constitute a doctor-patient relationship between us.
