Shaun Hellige

Psychology 1010
Time Heals All Wounds
Following the loss of a family member, friend, or pet is difficult because your brain is

conditioned to associate the things around you with particular events or people/animals to make

them easier to remember. This can be from a positive or negative standpoint. For instance, your

grandmother might have made you a quilt for your birthday and this quilt becomes a conditioned

stimulus for a happy memory, which is the conditioned response. There is an unconditioned

response. This unconditioned response is being sad whenever you see the quilt. But then,

grandma passes away a few months later and the conditioned response changes to you being sad

when you see the quilt. However, if a loved one passed away and the last thing that you did with

them or said to them was negative, the conditioned response might be you staying away from the

area or the objects used when the negative event happened. You might also feel regret about that

and think negative things of that area or object.

When Pavlov conditioned his dog to salivate at the sound of the bell but not the smell and/or

sight of food, he also reversed the experiment. After a while, Pavlov would stop ringing the bell,

the conditioned stimulus, and put the food in front of the dog, but the dog wasn’t salivating.

Eventually, the dog started to salivate again at the sight and/or smell of its food, thus changing

the response from unconditioned to conditioned. This same thing happens after a while in the

event of losing someone. After some time, without the repetition of associating a specific object

and/or area with a person/pet, or repetitive conditioning, the grief response will go away.

When the response of grief goes away, this can be considered extinction of the grief response.

This is because the response that was once associated with the specific event has gone away. The

grief response that was conditioned to the memory has gone away.
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Let’s say your grandmother passed away a few months ago and you can finally use the quilt that

she made you without bawling your eyes out. Then one night after 2 weeks, you see the blanket

and you start bawling again. One thing that might provoke this is if you were recently

reminiscing about your grandmother with someone else or by yourself. You go talk to your

therapist about it, and they say to do the same thing as you did before, put it away and come back

to it later. But this time, they tell you to come back to it after 2 weeks instead of a few months

since it’s easier to extinguish this response the second time around.