The First Shockwaves
When Robin died, the world tilted. The morning after his body was taken away, I woke up shivering—so cold I shook. It was October, not the dead of winter, yet no blanket or sweater could cut through the chill. I would crank the heat until the rooms felt like saunas. When others were around, I could see them sweating, embarrassed for me, and I’d quickly turn it down, open a window, and pretend nothing was strange.
Robin had always hated being cold. For days, his body lay in a refrigerated drawer in the morgue. I didn’t consciously dwell on that, but somewhere, deep in my mind, I think I was aligning with him. My body felt the cold he must have been surrounded by.
The Strange Coincidences
At first, I called it coincidence—my grief playing tricks on me. But as the months passed, I began to notice something else. A year later, I found I could ask for a sign and—more often than seemed possible—get one. Not every time. Not always clearly. But enough to make me stop and pay attention.
Grief had rewired my senses. It was as if losing Robin had tuned my body to a different frequency, where memory and reality blurred.
When Grief Mimics Psychosis
One day, I experienced something psychiatrists call “thought insertion.” It’s the feeling that a thought appears in your mind, but it doesn’t belong to you. In psychiatry, it’s a symptom of schizophrenia, one of the hallmarks of psychosis.
The surreal part? I’m a psychiatrist. Even as it was happening, I was diagnosing myself in real time: Tara, this is a psychotic symptom. It was like living in two minds at once—the professional who understood the mechanics, and the grieving woman who was actually inside the storm.
What Grief Does to the Brain
Grief doesn’t just break the heart. It changes the brain. Neurotransmitters shift. Electrical signals misfire. Chemical pathways re-route themselves. Your perceptions bend and warp. In its intensity, grief can mimic mental illness—hallucinations, strange sensations, altered thinking. This doesn’t mean you’re “losing your mind” in a permanent way. It means loss has pushed your mind into a temporary, altered state.
The Compassion It Demands
I had the training to name what I was going through. That knowledge grounded me. But it made me ache for those who have no such map—people who find themselves lost in a reality that suddenly feels foreign, with no words to explain it. Without understanding, the experience can be terrifying.
This is why I have so much compassion for the grieving. They are not just navigating absence; they are navigating a mind that has been shaken loose from what it once knew as steady ground.
Summary
Grief changes everything. It can make you feel sensations that aren’t logical, notice patterns that seem impossible, and think thoughts that don’t feel like your own. It isn’t just sadness—it’s a full-body, full-mind upheaval that can look and feel like psychosis.
Conclusion
To grieve deeply is to step into an altered state of being. It changes your body, your mind, and the boundaries between what is real and what is memory. This is not weakness. This is the mind adapting to a wound too deep for words. If you can, slow down. Treat yourself gently. Because in grief, your mind is doing its best to carry you through a world that no longer feels like it makes sense.