Being a CFR has put me in stressful situations. Trying to resusitate someone with kith and kin look on, is demanding.*
Last year I also started work carrying out bereavement support for a local hospice. The training involved in getting me up to speed in this work, has made me think a lot about how we behave in stressful situations such as bereavement.
Of course, I’m also a geek. Ruby programmer is my day job after all.
With all that in mind, here is my take on very stressful occurrences such as bereavement:
Bereavement: UDP and the unconcious mind
Your brain works very like a UDP stack, where the conscious mind sits at the application layer.
Most of the work is done within lower parts of the stack, and with everything working normally, stuff gets passed down into the unconscious brain and stuff pops back up without the top layer knowing or really caring about what happened lower down. You often think your conscious mind is doing all the work, but actually its all happening lower down.
Normally, the stack is able to handle problems and routes messages back and forth without any problem.
However, when something very stressful happens the stack gets disrupted. It gets information it doesn’t know how to handle. The result at the top layer is it doesn’t get any answers. Also as this is UDP, it doesn’t get any error messages either. So the net result is numb confusion.
With time the stack fixes itself. This can take hours or even days. Until then nothing computes properly. You can’t concentrate, you feel numb, and a little confused because you can’t figure out what is happening. These symptoms only go away once the stack fixes itself and normal conscious to sub-conscious communication returns.
This matches my experience:
Immediately after a very stressful situation I am left with a very numb, empty feeling where my brain just doesn’t work normally. The only thing that fixes this is time. I’ve learnt to recognise this feeling and the knowledge that time fixes it helps me deal with it. Trying to force my brain to fix the problem just makes the fix time longer.
Once the stack sorts itself out (for me, 2 to 12 hours is a common fix time), I can then start the rational process of sorting out the emotions and images that pop into my head.
* In fact, I find the reactions of relatives stick in my mind far longer than what actually happened to the patient or what I did. For example, the image of a wife crying at the bottom of the stairs is my main memory of a particular CPR attempt.