Grief and Muscle Memory

By Dr Bill Webster

Have you heard of “muscle memory”? Frankly, I have forgotten the last time someone even acknowledged my muscles!

Muscle memory refers to “the ability to reproduce a particular movement without conscious thought, with improved efficiency and accuracy that is acquired through practice and repetition of that movement.”

Muscle memory enables us to do things well, almost without thinking.

Athletes, for example, depend on muscle memory. A gymnast will repeat a specific muscular movement in their routines with mindnumbing repetitiveness, for hours and days, weeks and years, so that each spinning, twisting landing off the high bar becomes an act of muscle memory. Same applies in every sport.

But muscle memory is found in many everyday activities that become automatic and improve with practice, such as driving motor vehicles, typing on keyboards, entering PIN numbers, playing video games, musical instruments, poker, martial arts, dancing and many other ordinary actions.

However, the fact you may know how to ride a bike and will likely never forget is more due to brain memory than muscle memory.

A neuroscientist will tell you that muscle memory is actually “the cellular memory of individual muscle cells”. Muscle memory refers to the brain learning a motor skill and referencing the changes in muscles cells caused by exercise, repetition or practice.

In my younger days rode a motorcycle. I owned a BSA and then a Triumph, British motorbikes which sadly were put out of business in the seventies by more mechanically reliable Japanese bikes.

I would love to ride a motor cycle again, but my biggest hurdle has to do with my muscle memory. British-built motorcycles had the gears on the right foot and the brake on the left. Japanese and American bikes are the reverse. For me to ride a motorbike again, I would have to UNLEARN everything I learned and was familiar with … and that isn’t easy at any age.

Just ask someone who retired after 30 years of getting up at 6am, showering, making a lunch and heading to work. Retirement means they don’t have to get up as early, but somehow the alarm clock in their system wakes them up at that hour every day.

People who have lost a limb sometimes experience the presence of that limb long after it has gone, as if the nervous system refuses to accept this new, altered reality.

Why is a grief counsellor talking about muscle memory? Because grief is like an amputation and this concept has an important application in the grief process.

Julian told me that for months after his wife died, he would come into the house after work, and call out “I’m home, honey” as he had done for 25 years. He would speak to her from another room, only to realize once again that she was no longer there. Once, he invited two friends to join him for dinner, and only after they arrived did he realize that he had set the table for four, his “muscle memory” telling him his wife would be there as well.

“It’s at times like this that grief feels like a life shaped around the person who is no longer there, but the shape remains” said Julian. “It is the kind of thing that my wife and I would have probably discussed. I tried to raise the subject with the cat, but she seemed singularly uninterested!”

Liz lost her first husband in a car accident, and six years after his passing she married again. Her second husband was diagnosed with cancer shortly after and Liz cared for him through 3 years of painful decline.

But when he died, it was eerily similar. Liz found herself experiencing the same emotions, reactions and behaviours that she had for her first husband, even though the circumstances were entirely different. One loss does not instruct a person in how to better weather another one.

“If anything,” Liz commented, “I found that this death was summoning the pain of all the other losses I had experienced … my parents, my first husband.” For her, grief was like a muscle memory.

But strangely, nothing, not the years of her husband’s decline, or even her previous loss, prepared her for the shock of his death when it came, or the startling pain she felt when she happened on a street corner or restaurant where they had shared a moment. Now the memories were hers alone, “echoes where there had been communication”.

Muscle memory can be helpful and useful in performing everyday tasks or actions. But it can be detrimental as well. “This is the way we have always done things” is not always the most progressive or constructive way of moving forward. Sometimes we have to change the way we do things.

I have realized that my desire to have another motorbike was really an attempt to relive and recapture those heady days in the sixties when all of life was an adventure. I’ve re-educated my muscle memory it to recognise that it is easier and safer at my age both to get into and also drive my car rather than to endure the rigors of riding a motorcycle. The song is ended … but the memories linger on!

As professionals, we likewise have to ask ourselves if the familiar way we have always done things is working for us, or if it is time to re-educate ourselves as to better ways to do what we do.

Not easy, I know, but your muscle memory will adapt if you only start ... and keep going.