Mental Health For Metalheads

This page is for extra content. At first, chapters that were cut from the book during production. In the future, perhaps new content. Stay tuned.

The below have not been beta read, professionally edited or proofread like the actual book… but if you are hungry for more, you can check ’em out. Think of them as bonus demo tracks on the digipak of a metal album.

The End Complete:

Cut Chapter 1. King Of Loss – Bereavement And Mental Health.

New Death Sensation – Response To Loss:

When death replaces life, it can be one of the hardest things you ever have to endure. Intense and overwhelming emotions threaten to drown you. You protest the loss, you fall into despair, it overtakes your whole life when it happens. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor explains that grief is the natural response to loss. It is a mental, emotional and physical reaction. It is something that happens inside your brain and body. We can have a wave of grief at any time, if we think about the loss, no matter how much time has passed.  

Grief is widespread, has more physical effects than you may assume and can cause your body to have a surprisingly violent reaction to the loss. It causes changes in our cardiovascular system. It impacts your heart and blood flow. It impacts our digestive system, causing significant bowel issues and can cause loss of appetite. It affects our nervous system and can cause hyperarousal which affects your sleep. The increase of stress causes headaches and muscle tension. It can weaken the immune system and increase inflammation. Your body doesn’t create as many antibodies or natural killer cells to fight infections. It is physically exhausting as well as emotionally draining. It shrinks the hippocampus in the brain making you forgetful. Faith G. Harper, author of Unfuck Your Grief, explains that the number one fear humans have is abandonment. She states that the death of a loved one is the certainty of abandonment, and as such it has a lot in common with fear. It activates the amygdala and creates stress; it slows you down and makes you sick. It can even damage your nervous system. She claims that grief is worse for your health than smoking. Lewis Psychology reports that grief is not just psychological or emotional either, it also causes a lot of physical pain and sensations. It activates parts of the brain associated with pain. Gabor Maté states the pain is not metaphorical, it is literal, you can see it activate the pain centres of the brain on a brain scan. 

Runes To My Memory – Grief, Grieving & Mourning:

Grieving is different than grief. Grieving is a process, where the amount of grief we experience in the given moment is going up and down, day by day, but you can see a trajectory over the longer period of how you learn to live without the lost loved one. 

Mourning is different yet again. Mourning is the external way that you express your experience of grieving. It is how you communicate it to others and to the world. This may be through funeral ceremonies, religious events, art, public crying and more. We cannot process loss entirely by ourselves, we need to feel seen, heard and validated by other people. People aren’t supposed to hide their grief away, they need someone to witness them. 

Following the person’s death, when you first experience grief and start to mourn, it feels like you are trapped in some alternate reality with no way out, and like there will never be anything else. Grief expert David Kessler calls the first two years after the death “early grief.” It isn’t a few days or a few weeks, it’s up to two years. After that he calls it “mature grief,” defined as being able to look back on the person who died with more love than pain. Faith G. Harper states that your grief is an expression of love for the person you lost and your period of bereavement is the work your brain has to do, in order to understand that life is different now. It is a normal human experience and not a mental health condition in and of itself, but it is a massive life stressor that can absolutely exacerbate a mental health problem. 

Newfound Power – Growing Around Grief:

There is a concept called Growing Around Grief, by Lois Tonkin. In the moment, when the death happens and you get the first real explosion of grief, which can either be straight away or alternatively a few days or weeks later due to shock, the size of the grief is gigantic, the loss feels all-consuming. Your whole life seems to be taken up by this massive vacuum where the grief is sucking everything else in your world into it, like a supermassive black hole. You want the grief to get smaller. You may be reading this chapter wondering how to make the grief smaller. The thing is, it never does. The loss will always be a part of your life. 

The idea of Growing Around Grief is the recognition that over time, even though the grief is the same size, your life expands around it, so it begins to take up a smaller percentage of your overall life, even though it itself never decreased in size. Looking at the trajectory of your grieving over time, you will have had better and worse days, but overall, it can start to come down in intensity regarding how much of your day-to-day life that it consumes. Making new memories, starting new hobbies, going new places, having new experiences without the person you lost expands your world, but does not diminish the magnitude of your loss, it is not disrespectful to the person you lost. Life goes on, but some pain will last and the memory of your loved one doesn’t go away, the memory remains. Doing so can be very difficult though, thanks to the way our brains work. 

(Not) Rocket Science – Neuroscience Of Loss:

Most people cry when a person dies, you want to know why? The neural circuitry in your brain regarding attachment to people connects you to another person in terms of closeness of relationship, physical distance and time to reach them. We wire our brains in terms of how to “find” a loved one. Chemicals in your brain create a sense of “wanting” this person. When they die, we know objectively that they are no-longer here and so we cannot physically find that person anymore… But despite knowing it, our brain still tries to find the person, and this creates that deep sense of yearning – as our brain still wants them but can never get to them. 

The part of the brain that forms attachment bonds with loved ones is the same part of the brain responsible for addictions, obsessions and need. Our brains operate as if we need that person to survive in the same way as oxygen, water or food. As Paul Gilbert explains, that is because evolutionarily speaking, humans developed over time in small tribes and family units and would likely die without those other people. Furthermore, us trying to “find” our dead loved one can be activating, and our body fills with chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline to help us literally run around searching for them. Those sorts of chemicals are the same ones involved in the stress response, and we know that unresolved stress is physically and mentally harmful. 

Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor states that the attachment bond is everlasting and a part of us always believes they should still be here. Healing involves transforming our own understanding of the fact that we can no longer find them. You will never be able to lose the attachment to them. Losing them is like losing a part of your own body, and you feel the loss like a phantom limb. You can, however, still continue the relationship internally in your own mind, by thinking of things they would like or telling them things you want to tell them inside your own inner dialogue. You can try to reframe and adjust your relationship with them, now that they are gone… and adapt to the world as it is now without them. 

Never Ending Hill – When Does It End?:

Sometimes we can refuse to grieve, decline to mourn and just try to carry on. Soldiering on doesn’t actually work however, as it is just suppressing and delaying the grief, not actually removing it. As therapist Sarah Engler says “The loss isn’t going to go away. There is no way to skip it or go around it. If you aren’t processing your loss, it will impact you.” So, if you are reading this and thinking “when will the grief end?” The bitter and sickening truth is that it won’t. The good news is there are things you can do to help yourself adjust and adapt to it. The emotions can be intense, but you can learn how to accept and process them. 

Faith G. Harper explains that it is messy, complicated, piecemeal and doesn’t have an endpoint. The etymology of the word comes from the old French word for “burden.” It is something you carry with you from now on. If you find it really hard to swallow that your loved one is just gone forever, this little fact might bring a tiny bit of comfort: Energy never created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed. 

Road To Acceptance – Practice Radical Acceptance:

Denial and bargaining have been terms associated with grief for a while and are essentially your brain trying to “fix” the death and “find” the person. It obviously won’t work, because you cannot wake the dead… but it does take up neural energy. It costs you something to resist accepting that the person’s death is final and absolute. Ruminating on what could have been different, wishing for it not to be so, or pretending it didn’t happen all burns up resources in the brain that would be better spent on other things. (See the Wasting My Hate chapter for more details). What can you do instead of spending that mental currency waging an unwinnable war against reality? 

Practice radical acceptance. You don’t have to like it, condone it or approve of it… but you do have to accept it. Telling yourself “You love them, they are dead. They mean a lot to you; you won’t see them again” can help your brain ease the transition. 

The Way Out Is Through – Don’t Suppress Or Avoid it:

Grief is not a sign of mental illness. It is a completely natural emotion and just part of being human. It can feel a hell of a lot like anxiety or depression though, so it is easy to confuse it with mental illness, and it is easy for it to exacerbate any pre-existing mental illness. One of the main problems with grief occurs when we try to suppress it. Like with all emotions it is trying to deliver a message, and if it is not heard it will get louder to try and be heard. Emma McAdam states it is beautiful to feel so deeply about losing someone you loved, it is a sign of the depth of your love. She advocates practicing willingness towards the emotion and allowing yourself to feel it. When it is heard, it can dissipate a little, rather than trying to get louder and louder in order to get your attention. If you try to bury your thoughts about grief, then death shall rise and you will be overcome by grief eventually, often at an inopportune time. 

David Kessler says: “you cannot heal what you do not feel” and “what we resist persists.” He states that although culture and society may make us want to be tough and strong, to move on quickly and not acknowledge how much we hurt – you need to actually feel the pain for it to get any easier. Grief can be so painful that we want to stuff it down, lock it away and avoid thinking about it. It’s only natural, but this is not an effective solution. Instead, you have to allow and give yourself the permission to just really feel it. You can’t dodge it, and there’s no way around it. The only way out is through, in the words of Winston Churchill: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” 

The Pressure Will Blow – Scheduled Grief:

Have you ever seen a canister that says “Warning: Contents under pressure may explode.” Repressed grief is a bit like that. If you just try and ignore it, tough it out or power through then it is going to explode and leak out at inconvenient times. My mental health key worker told me about “Scheduled Grief,” where you set aside specific and predictable time to think about the person you’ve lost, cry, and let out the pain. This allows you to process the grief at a time that works for you, rather than letting it erupt at the worst time. I was advised to take one day per week to stay in bed the whole day feeling broken if I needed to. Having permission to do so felt helpful. In actuality, what I preferred to do was take set sessions of 15 minutes to look at pictures of my late mother while listening to the three songs that were played at her funeral, to try and bring about the tears and stop the emotions about loss from being bottled up. If I want a longer session, I also listen to the album Stage 4 by Touche Amore. 

Music is a great way to tap into emotions, and tears of grief are actually different in chemical composition than normal tears. They contain natural painkillers that can help you with the pain of loss. Andrew Huberman states that bereavement actually taps into the pain circuitry of the brain rather than typical sadness circuitry, so the natural painkillers in grief-tears are good for you. It is good to cry. It is bad to hold it in. Giving yourself a moment to lose all hope that they will ever return, to ugly-cry and to feel the full weight of it all crush you can all help you accept the loss and lower your risk of developing complex grief and adjustment disorders. 

Scheduled grief allows you to do so in a more controlled setting. It also teaches your brain that you are going to process the grief, so it doesn’t have to keep reminding you about it all day. This stops it bubbling up in the supermarket or carwash all of a sudden. Dr. Peter Levine describes the idea of a pendulum swinging between two sides. Some of us want to spend all our time immersed in the grief, as if a moment of respite is betraying our lost loved one. It isn’t a betrayal though; in truth it is learning how to function. It is good and right to honour the dead. However, you can’t only grieve. Pendulation is about setting aside some time to not grieve. Learning to swing both ways – grieving and not grieving. We need some time not grieving to release the pressure valve and find our new normal. 

It can be helpful to reflect on the times we said things like “thank you,” “I love you,” “I forgive you,” “I’m sorry,” etc.  When doing scheduled grief, it can be helpful to use self-compassion towards the end, as Kristen Neff suggests: start to hug and comfort yourself, say “awwww” and remind yourself that everyone goes through bereavement at some point, that you are not alone. It might sound cheesy, but it is scientifically proven to help. 

Bitter Loss – Name It:

Just like fear, stress or anxiety, a wave of grief can trigger the sympathetic nervous system to release a bunch of stress hormones and create a bunch of physiological symptoms like clenching, tooth grinding, heart palpitations, dysregulated bowels, tingling, breathing changes and more. It can feel similar to a panic attack at times. Just as with affect labelling our emotions of anger or sadness, Headspace grief therapist Dr. Ajita Robinson advises that you cognitively name what is happening as grief (say “this is grief” in your inner monologue) so that your brain and body can learn that the feeling of grief is not a threat, and then it learns to stop giving that fight/flight/freeze response when it feels grief. It can be helpful to pair that naming with grounding skills or breathwork to soothe the nervous system. You basically want to use classical conditioning to associate the words “this is grief” with a calm nervous system – like cued relaxation.

A Funeral Portrait – Writing About Loss:

Writing uses different parts of the brain than just thinking. Writing a journal about your loss and grieving process can help you with your adjustment. Writing a letter to your loved one can be a useful way to organise your thoughts and process your emotions towards your deceased person. The process of writing about the loss is helpful for the writer in organising their thoughts and feelings and expressing them in an artful way. This ties into the concept of mourning and having our grief feel seen and heard. 

Similar to a grief journal or letter, creating art, writing poetry or writing lyrics about loss can be a useful way to process your emotions. Just look at all the albums that people have written in the wake of loss; .5 The Gray Chapter, Nightmare, Magma, Crack The Skye or Stage 4 etc. 

Memories Of Old Days – Remember The Good:

Headspace has a helpful 30-day grief course. In it, it has a visualisation where you visualize the person you have lost being happy and safe in a place that was meaningful to them. The idea is about associating the person with happy memories and reestablishing them as a person who you have happy thoughts about, not just something that triggers sadness and grief. Thornton Wilder said: “The highest tribute to the dead is not grief, but gratitude.” Taking time to ponder upon and then list all the things you are grateful for regarding your lost loved one and your time together, however brief that time was, can help you focus your brain on the things that make you happy to think about, rather than on the bits that make you upset to think about. It can teach your brain to make you smile when you see their photo or hear their name, rather than become tearful. 

To Ride, Shoot Straight & Speak The Truth – Speaking About Grief:

Sometimes we don’t want to talk about the loss because of a core rule we hold that we cannot cry, or that we cannot burden others. As per the Crucify Your Beliefs chapter however, these are not helpful rules to live by. Talking about the loss is actually helpful and not something to be avoided. If someone asks us how we are feeling, we may say “fine” just to avoid the tears of admitting how we really feel. Using the DBT skill of Opposite To Emotion… if we feel like not talking about it, our best course of action may be to talk about it. If you live in the UK, Cruse is a charity for people experiencing bereavement. They have a free phone line for counselling. You can call on 0808 808 1677. 

Psychologically we need our mourning to be witnessed. Biologically, our brains need other human beings in the vicinity to help them through grief. We need the sight, sound, smell and touch of other people to help initiate our soothing and affiliation system. I attended a grief course in my area and found it rather helpful. You may think that a bereavement support group wouldn’t be much use, but it can give us some of the things our mind and body need if we are otherwise isolated. If you have good friend and family support it may not be necessary, but in a world with a loneliness epidemic, it can be worth exploring.

Slow And Easy – Go Easy On Yourself And Be Realistic:

The severity of grief and recovery from grief is not always linear or logical. It goes up and down, retreats then advances again, you may find moments when you don’t feel so bad anymore, but then afterwards have moments when you feel worse than ever. As Dr. Julie Smith reminds us: “that doesn’t mean you have gone backwards. You aren’t getting grief ‘wrong.’ Grief in waves that we can’t always predict.” Just go easy, don’t judge yourself for how you are grieving, for how often the waves come, or decide that you shouldn’t be having the waves anymore. Don’t feel guilty for being “too bereaved” or “not bereaved enough.” Those are essentially just forms of the cognitive distortion of “should statements.” Just give yourself compassion for what you are feeling and accept what you aren’t feeling at any given moment. 

Butchered At Birth – Pregnancy Loss:

The world of Metal can be tough for people going through pregnancy loss, you have bands with names like Dying Fetus, albums with titles like “Butchered At Birth,” songs like Slayer’s “Silent Scream” etc. This can be music you might usually love, but somehow becomes emotionally triggering after the loss of a pregnancy. It can be helpful to use the principles of how avoidance increases the stress response to stop yourself from making it harder on yourself. If you go into avoidance from such things, they will become bigger sources of stress over time, whereas if you can use cognitive and body based approaches to calming yourself whilst exposed to them, they will stop being quite as triggering over time. 

As someone who has experienced multiple pregnancy losses from the perspective of the father, I think it is important also to note here that pregnancy loss is tough, the bereavement it causes is as valid as any other and it is in some ways even tougher because most people don’t seem to understand the level of grief it causes unless they’ve also been through it too. The world might not always understand, but don’t let that trick you into suppressing or burying your feelings, don’t try to minimise your own loss and do be kind, supportive and compassionate to yourself. You need it. 

If you are not the person carrying the baby, but rather the partner, it can also be easy to feel like you aren’t “allowed” to be as bereaved as you are, and to try and bury all of your own hurt so you can better support your partner. Please don’t forget you are still a person, and that this has still been tough on you. You are entitled to feel and process your grief. It is not healthy to suppress or deny it, even if you are doing it for seemingly noble reasons. Take your time, be kind to yourself, and acknowledge your feelings. 

Considered Dead – Other Types Of Grief:

In the above information, I have primarily been writing about grief in terms of the death of a loved one. Interestingly however, professor Andrew Huberman explains that you can go through the same grief process for other things as well, such as the death of a pet, the loss of a job, or the destruction of an item with significant sentimental value. Sarah Engler in her “Understanding Grief And Loss” course (buy it for less than the cost of a new CD on Therapy In A Nutshell’s website or app) explains that loss is being deprived of something you value. What you value is individual to you, and it is not always a human. If you are recognising grief symptoms in yourself for any reason other than being bereaved of a human, the above options may still be of help. 

Stacking & Chaining Scheduled Grief and Writing for grief pairs well with: Scheduled Worry, Gratitude Journaling, Rest, Sleep Hygiene, Physical Activity.

Playlist: Pain Of Salvation – “King Of Loss,” Acid Bath – “New Death Sensation,” Tool – “10,000 Days Wings Part 2,” Smashing Pumpkins – “For Martha,” Touche Amore – “Rapture,” Urne – “Where Do The Memories Go?” Biohazard – “Loss,” Shadows Fall – “Revel In My Loss,” Entombed – “Bitter Loss,” Korn – “This Loss,” Type O Negative – “Everyone I Know Is Dead,” Clutch – “A Drink To The Dead,” Gorguts – “Considered Dead,” Spineshank – “Anger, Denial, Acceptance,” Bring Me The Horizon – “The Sadness Will Never End,” King Diamond – “Never Ending Hill,” Orange Goblin – “(Not) Rocket Science,” Damageplan – “Newfound Power,” Thin Lizzy – “The Pressure Will Blow,” Cancer – “Death Shall Rise,” Nine Inch Nails – “The Way Out Is Through,” Opeth – “The Funeral Portrait,” Bulletboys – “Slow And Easy,” Black Sabbath – “Electric Funeral,” Exodus – “Funeral Hymn,” Black Label Society – “Funeral Bell,” Overkill – “Nice Day… For  a Funeral,” Save Face – “The Funeral You’ve Been Asking For,” Foo Fighters – “Good Grief,” Sepultura – “Grief,” Harlott – “Grief,” Fear Factory – “Scumgrief,” Forbidden – “R.I.P,” Chimaira – “Beyond The Grave,” Crowbar – “Let Me Mourn,” Pantera – “Cemetery Gates,” Gallows – “Graves,” Creeper – “Headstones,” Emperor – “Thorns On My Grave,” Annihilator – “Shallow Grave,” Hallows Eve – “No One Lives Forever,”  Kreator – “Some Pain Will Last,” Metallica – “The Memory Remains,” Green Day – “Road To Acceptance,” American Headcharge – “A Violent Reaction,” Anthrax – “Discharge,” Hundred Reasons – “I’ll Find You,” Lamb Of God – “To The Grave,” Blind Guardian – “Ashes To Ashes,” Haken – “In Memorium,” Trivium – “Scattering The Ashes,” Gentle Giant – “Memories Of Old Days.”