Why losing people changes us

A somewhat optimistic perspective from the worlds of developmental psychology and neuroscience

I have been thinking a lot about change lately. Some of my motivation has to do with the changes to my social world after my recent retirement. Some of it has to do with the recent death of a close friend. Some of it has to do with my ongoing interest in research on consciousness and “self”. So, I thought I would try to see how this all fits together with what I have learned as a developmental psychologist. Strangely, diving into this rabbit hole is helping me understand and deal with those changes I am going through.

Who we are is largely defined by who we are in relation to others around us. This phenomenon goes all the way back to infancy. Imagine suddenly appearing in a bright, noisy world full of strange smells and strange sensations all over your body. Luckily, you arrive with a brain that immediately begins to store memories. Without that ability, you would be locked into an eternity of terrifying “WTF!!!!!”. Memories categorize themselves into similar things, as opposed to different things. Some things are “things that feel good” and some things are “things that don’t feel good”. Or they may be “things that sound loud” or “thinks that don’t sound loud”, “things that comfort you” or “things that don’t comfort you”. Of course, I am approximating how these categories actually seem to the infant, but you get the idea.

Among the categories of memories that emerge quickly are “things that move” and “things that don’t move.” This soon gives rise to “people things” and “non-people things.” As we develop, your memories become increasingly complex as categories are combined to create new categories… like“people things” that “comfort you” versus “people things” that“don’t comfort you”. This sets the stage for something really important for our species… attachments with others.

According to John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, our first attachment with our primary caregiver (typically a “mother thing”) is crucial. Eventually, we begin to see ourselves as a “people thing who is comforted” by another “people thing who comforts me”. Our sense of “self” is born! Let’s not miss the irony here… our sense of being a unique independent individual is made possible by our ability to enter into an attachment with another unique and independent individual.

Our first attachments have other important benefits for us as a developing infant. They provide the contexts during which much of our early cognitive and emotional development occurs. For example, the “mother thing” might cleverly use distraction to help us calm down when we become distressed. Eventually this helps us to learn to shift and control our own attention so that we can manage both our thinking and emotions.

Sigmond Freud and his disciples speculated that healthy development entirely depends on our relationship with our mother. Bowlby did believe that the mother/infant attachment was important, but he saw attachment relations as somewhat malleable. Insecure attachments can develop into more secure attachments, but only if conditions change. Attachments with other care providers can also develop if the mother is not capable or available. Bowlby also speculated that our first attachments provide a model for subsequent relationships with other people in our lives. And these subsequent attachments provide many of the same psychological benefits that the early attachment relation did. This argument has been supported by decades of findings from research examining adult attachments.

Findings from developmental neuroscience help explain how all this works and why this is so important. Contrary to what we used to believe, our brains continue to reorganize across the lifespan. This reorganization occurs when we experience new people, places and things. It undoubtedly occurs when we develop new relations with people who interact with us in ways that others have not. This means that even when early attachments are less than secure, we have the ability to form secure attachments with other people that change the way we see the world and ourselves.

Why is all this important? For one thing, it explains the degree to which we are changed when our significant attachments with others change. For example, I recently lost a friend to Alzheimer’s. The real loss started long before his death. For years I had a good friend, with whom I shared a weekly lunch. We waxed philosophically, solved world problems, and laughed at ourselves. He was funny, insightful, and weird. And our friendship was a safe place for me to be myself… also sometimes funny, insightful, and equally weird.

As his disease progressed, our relationship changed. I increasingly became more of a caretaker. He needed my help, but he hated it with all his heart. That meant I had to deal with his increasingly volatile mood changes. Not only did I lose our fun conversations, but I began to feel less safe to be myself, ever worried about saying or doing something that would set him off. His disease was changing both of us.

Eventually, I became a vaguely familiar person who sometimes pissed him off. In the end, it was not clear if I was even vaguely familiar. Please note that I am not only describing who I was to him. I am also describing who I was to me. I was no longer the close friend who felt safe to be myself around him. I was now someone else.

It is inevitable that we will lose people with whom we are close, maybe through death, divorce, geographic moves, or just growing apart. We are changed by the loss of those attachments, just as we are changed by the attachments themselves. Those changes are sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Sometimes they are big, and sometimes they are small. We are a species that evolved to be social creatures, which allowed us to survive and thrive. It may not always feel like these social relations lead to thriving, and sometimes they don’t. But I am pretty sure that being eaten by a sabretooth tiger would have made us feel even less like we were thriving.

So, here’s to our brain’s marvelous ability to form memories that allow us to differentiate people who comfort us from those who don’t, so that we can form attachments that shape who we are. And here’s to our brain’s ability to keep allowing all this stuff to happen throughout our entire lives. Here’s to being a “people thing.”

For deeper dives into these topics

Bowlby, J. (1979). The Bowlby-Ainsworth Attachment Theory. Behavioral and Brain sciences, 2(4), 637-638.

Fraley, R. C., & Shaver, P. R. (2008). Attachment theory and its place in contemporary personality theory and research. Handbook of personality: Theory and research, 3, 518-541.

Frith, C. (2007). Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Wiley-Blackwell.

Gillath, O., Giesbrecht, B., & Shaver, P. R. (2009). Attachment, attention, and cognitive control: Attachment style and performance on general attention tasks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 647-654.

Power, J. D., & Schlaggar, B. L. (2017). Neural plasticity across the lifespan. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Developmental Biology, 6(1), e216.

Ruff, H. A., & Rothbart, M. K. (2001). Attention in early development: Themes and variations. Oxford University Press.

Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2009). An overview of adult attachment theory. Attachment Theory and Research in Clinical Work with Adults, 17-45.

Lehr. S. (2017). Brilliant Bob: My Husband with Alzheimer’s Disease: Our Love Story. Friesen Press.