Woman’s Viral Thread Perfectly Explains Why You Can’t Just ‘Get Over’ Grief

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Something that we all need to deal with at some point in life is the death of someone we love. When we experience this for ourselves, we have a feeling of grief that is very personal. We often feel that nobody understands how we feel and to be certain, there may be parts of what we are feeling that are unique to our situation. In many cases, however, it is a process that can be defined, even if there are variations.

The difficulty is, explaining grief to others is not always the easiest thing to do. It is a difficult emotion that we experience and to try to sum it up in a single sentence is elusive, to say the least. Losing somebody in death may be a normal part of life but it isn’t something that our brain is able to take easily. That is why we often grapple with our emotions during that difficult time.

A Twitter username to Lauren Herschel posted information and it went viral. She shared the visual analogy of ‘the ball in the box’.

It was shared by her doctor who used it to describe how grief triggers in the brain.

The theory says that grief is like a ball in a box with a pain button. Right after the loss, the ball is largest and any action can trigger the pain button. As time continues to pass, however, the ball shrinks gradually and the pain button is not activated as frequently.

The ball may continue to get smaller but grief never fully goes away. We may find that the pain button is being activated when we least expect it. There are also triggers that cause the ball of grief to grow larger for a short amount of time, even if you thought that it was gone altogether.

It wasn’t long before people started sharing their stories about grief and how the analogy helps them to describe the process of grief to others.

One woman said that grief is something that we will always experience in our lifetimes so it is good to have language for it.

It is hoped that this analogy may help others to approach their grief and understand the experience. It is helpful to be able to describe something so serious.