A few weeks back, my husband walked into our vet’s office carrying a box of things we no longer needed — the little foam steps, the puppy pads, the small accommodations we’d built around our Chihuahua Jilly’s failing heart, which finally gave out.. What happened next taught me something about pet loss grief that I haven’t been able to shake.He was there to donate them to another family who might need them.He came home and said the front-desk staff cried when they saw the box. These are people who see loss every week. It’s part of the job. And still, holding Jilly’s steps in their hands, something in them broke open too.

I’ve been sitting with that moment ever since — not just as a story about losing my dog, but as a window into something much bigger: one of the ancient, hard-wired emotional operating systems that run underneath everything we call feeling. This is where my work keeps landing lately. Not “why does loss hurt?” but “why do we have a system built to make it hurt, and what happens when we stop listening to it?”

The System Has a Name

Affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp spent his career mapping the core emotional circuits shared across the mammalian brain — not learned habits, but hardware, built into the basement level of what I call the three-story brain. Care is the circuit responsible for bonding and attachment. Panic/Griefis the circuit that fires when an attachment bond is severed. It shares neurochemistry with physical pain, overlapping with the brain’s opioid and oxytocin pathways — which is part of why grief is felt so viscerally in the body: the throat tightness, the ache in the chest, the bone-deep exhaustion no amount of sleep touches. I have been experiencing this acutely since Jilly’s passing. I miss her terribly. (Click here for tips to navigate grief).

I keep coming back to Panksepp’s systems in my work because they explain so much more than any single life event. Seeking, Care, Panic/Grief, Play, Fear, Rage, Lust — these circuits don’t just light up around sex, or around loss, or around any one domain of life. They’re the operating system underneath it all. Grief is one of the clearest, least deniable demonstrations of a core system doing exactly what it evolved to do, which is why it makes such a good teacher. The lesson is about what happens when we misread any core emotional signal, including grief.

Pet Loss Grief: The Ache Is Information, Not Malfunction

Here’s where our culture gets it backward. We’ve built an entire world around the premise that difficult feelings are problems to be solved, medicated, distracted from, or optimized away — scroll past it, numb it, reframe it into a productivity lesson before you’ve let yourself feel it at all. I call this collective habit the “Traumademic”: a culture so saturated with unprocessed feeling that it treats all strong emotion, even entirely appropriate emotion, as something to numb or avoid rather than something to move through.

Panksepp saw the strength of a Panic/Grief response as a direct measure of how much the bond mattered in the first place. The intensity isn’t dysfunction. It’s the system reporting, with total accuracy, on the size of what it lost. That’s true whether the bond was a seven-pound dog, a marriage, a friendship, or a version of yourself you had to let go of. Learning to read a core emotional signal instead of silencing it is one of the most useful skills a person can build — and it’s a skill that transfers across every one of these circuits, not just this one.

Pet Loss Grief and Why We Were Never Built to Regulate Alone

Panksepp’s research also found something gentler: comfort and social contact directly downregulate the Panic/Grief system. Touch, presence, and reunion soothe separation distress at a neurochemical level — not as a distraction from the pain, but as an actual intervention in it. No core emotional system is designed to be run in isolation. Care and Panic/Grief are wired to be navigated through connection, which is why the Traumademic’s instinct to privatize every difficult feeling—to mute grief and keep it out of view — works against our own biology.

If you’ve ever lost a pet, you’ve experienced disenfranchised grief: a core emotional response our culture doesn’t fully authorize. Studies comparing grief after pet loss to grief after human loss have found no significant difference in overall severity — the strength of the bond, not the species of the one we lost, predicts how hard the system fires. When my husband’s story reached that vet staff and cracked something open in them, that was Care and Panic/Grief doing exactly what they evolved to do: resolving in the presence of someone else’s nervous system.

You Cannot Selectively Numb a Core System

Here’s what I think matters most, and what pet loss happens to illustrate with unusual clarity: the capacity to feel loss and the capacity to feel joy run through overlapping circuitry. A nervous system trained to shut down Panic/Grief doesn’t get to keep an open channel to Seeking, to delight, to arousal, to awe. You cannot dampen one core emotional frequency and expect the others to play at full volume. This is the real argument underneath healthy hedonism — it was never just about chasing more pleasure. It’s about protecting the full bandwidth of the operating system, which necessarily includes the circuits that hurt.

Why This Matters Beyond Grief

We tend to imagine emotional health as arriving at a place where difficult feelings no longer touch us — where we’ve engineered our way out of the system altogether. But that’s not how any core emotional circuit works, grief included. Health isn’t the absence of the signal. It’s a working relationship with it: less shame, more tolerance for big feelings, and more willingness to let a system like Panic/Grief, Fear, or Rage tell you something important instead of rushing to shut it down.

My husband walked into a vet’s office with a box of foam steps, and five strangers briefly let one core system do its job in each other’s company. That’s not a small thing. It might be the clearest argument I know for why understanding these systems — all of them, not just the ones that feel comfortable to feel or talk about — is the work that matters. That’s the real lesson pet loss grief has to offer — not just about losing an animal, but about what happens when we let any hard-wired system do the job it was built for.

• Grief is one of several core emotional systems wired into every mammalian brain.
• We’re built to heal grief in connection with others, not by processing it alone.
• Numbing grief dulls joy too — the same circuitry carries both, so suppressing one mutes all.

References

Hyland, P. (2026). “No pets allowed: Evidence that prolonged grief disorder can occur following the death of a pet.” *PLOS One*, 21(1), e0339213.

Davis KL, Montag C. Selected Principles of Pankseppian Affective Neuroscience. Front Neurosci. 2019 Jan 17;12:1025. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.01025. PMID: 30705615; PMCID: PMC6344464.

Wise, N. (2020). Why good sex matters: Understanding the neuroscience of pleasure for a smarter, happier, and more purpose-filled life.

The post What Grief Can Teach Us, if We’re Willing to Listen: Why Core Emotions Matter appeared first on Nan Wise.

As the new year unfolds, I—along with many others—continue to struggle with painful levels of stress and anxiety. Beyond the evidence that political polarization is taking a toll on our collective mental health, waking up each day to alarming news only adds fuel to the fire. As Bob Dylan famously sang, “You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

When stress and anxiety reach these levels, our nervous systems are warning us loudly. Bottom line: chronic stress creates systemic dysregulation that slowly wears us down.

What Is Stress—and Why Does It Matter?

The pioneering stress researcher Hans Selye defined stress as the body’s response to a demand placed upon it. Stress is not the event itself, but our physiological and emotional response to it—an adaptive survival mechanism wired into us.

Selye described three stages of stress, known as the general adaptation syndrome: alarm, adaptation, and exhaustion. While we cannot always eliminate stressors, research shows that it is not stress itself that harms us—it is the inability to shut off the stress response. Chronic activation erodes mood, cognition, immunity, and our capacity for pleasure and connection.

Bottom line: we need tools to turn down the temperature of our stress responses.

When Personal Pain Meets Collective Distress

Recently, I’ve been caring for our Chihuahua, Jilly, who has advanced heart disease. We are adjusting medications, monitoring her breathing, and watching for signs of decline. Anyone who has loved a pet through illness knows this ache—the anticipatory grief, helplessness, and fierce desire to protect them. The loss of a beloved animal can be profoundly heartbreaking.

Layer personal pain like this onto collective distress, and it’s no wonder so many people feel anxious, dysregulated, or numb.

I call this convergence the Traumademic—the collision of personal challenges and trauma with ongoing societal stress. It reactivates old wounds, intensifies fear learning, and makes it harder to access joy or pleasure, particularly for those prone to anxiety or anhedonia.

I am struggling, myself, to accept what is so.

Why Acceptance Matters to the Brain

From a neuroscience perspective, chronic resistance to reality keeps the brain’s threat systems—fear, rage, and panic-grief—on high alert. This fuels anxiety and, over time, suppresses motivation and pleasure.

Radical acceptance does not mean liking what is happening or giving up. It reduces defensive reactivity and allows SEEKING—the core emotional system that supports curiosity, motivation, and forward movement—to come back online.

The goal is not to feel good all the time. The goal is to reduce suffering and make more room for positive experience, even when life remains hard.

Ventilation: A Powerful Tool for Regulation

One of the most underappreciated tools for radical acceptance—and for easing anxiety and anhedonia—is ventilation: giving the emotional brain a safe, nonjudgmental space to express itself.

As I have written about in my book, our emotional lives are organized around core wired-in brain systems—fear, rage, grief/panic, seeking, care, play, and lust. Under chronic stress, fear, rage, and grief/panic dominate. Anxiety reflects anticipation of threat; anhedonia emerges when SEEKING is dampened.

Ventilation helps by allowing emotions to be named, felt, and witnessed rather than suppressed. When someone listens without fixing or minimizing, the nervous system settles. Fear softens. Grief eases. Pleasure and motivation can re-emerge.

This kind of attuned listening is a powerful form of co-regulation. A great way to cultivate a safe space for ventilating feelings is to learn active listening tools.  Here’s a link to learn more about how to practice this form of ventilating feelings.

Know Your Defensive Style

Under stress, we default to familiar survival strategies:

• Fight: blame or attack
• Flight: overwork or distraction
• Freeze: numbness or paralysis
• Fawn: people-pleasing

These are learned adaptations or habits that don’t always serve. Without awareness, they keep the nervous system locked in a state of threat, preventing us from connecting with others. If you know your own defensive style, you can learn how to manage it.

Pressing Pause

Learning to recognize activation and press pause is essential. Tight chest, shallow breath, agitation, or muscular tension are cues to stop and regulate—not push through.

You can name this in relationship: “I need a few minutes so I don’t say something I don’t mean.” Regulation is a prerequisite for communication. And communication promotes connection.  And connection can soothe our nervous systems like nothing else.

Pleasure as Resistance and Repair

If suffering narrows our world, pleasure expands it.

As I suffer from anhedonia when stressed, I need to make pleasure-seeking a daily practice. Often, what helps me open to pleasure is to first ventilate my pain and worries.  I ask my husband to give me an active listening session. I pour out my pain, listen to my deepest fears, regrets, hopes, and dreams. Often, I have a good cry.  I grieve, I mourn, and then I move more into the moment.  And being in the moment is a major tool for stress reduction.

For those with trauma histories or harsh inner critics, pleasure often requires intention and permission.

Pleasure is not frivolous. It is how the brain relearns safety and hope.

Re-orienting to the moment

Re-orienting to the moment does not erase suffering, but it stabilizes the nervous system. Sometimes it’s as simple as:

• “In this moment, I am safe.”
• “Right now, we are okay.”
• “We will get through this together.”

Not forever. Just now.

Making Peace Without Losing Heart

Life is challenging. Loss is inevitable. Both my parents have died in the past few years. My dog is sick and not going to get better. The world is a hot mess. Many of us are carrying more than we expected.

Radical acceptance asks us to stop arguing with reality long enough to care for ourselves inside it—to ventilate, regulate, connect, and seek pleasure not as denial, but as devotion to being alive.

To the extent that things are okay, let them be okay.
And where they are not, let us meet ourselves with compassion.

That, too, is resistance.
And it is how we (I) heal.

The post More Tools for Emotional Regulation When Life Hurts: How to Ventilate Big Feelings to Relieve Distress and Promote Pleasure appeared first on Nan Wise.

 

Why talking about sexual pain disorders is key to promoting awareness and fighting the stigma and shame

In my book Why Good Sex Matters: Understanding the Neuroscience of Pleasure for a Smarter, Happier, and More Purpose-Filled life I explore how the ability to experience pleasure-both in and out of the bedroom- is not a luxury, but a necessity for overall wellbeing.

Having a happy, healthy sex life can greatly contribute to promoting a pleasure-positive relationship with ourselves and our partners. There are, however, some people for whom sex is a place of pain, rather than enjoyment and satisfaction.

A question I often get asked by readers is how to deal with pain related to sexual activity. Here I address some of what’s known about genital pain disorders to help women and their partners seek information and get proper treatment.  (Men also can suffer from pain related to sexual activity which will be a topic for another column).

For starters, we do know that genital pain complaints are quite prevalent. Since many women are hesitant to report pain associated with sexual activity to their health professionals due to embarrassment or shame, and their providers often don’t inquire, the prevalence of these disorders has been significantly underestimated.

End result?  Many women (and their partners) suffer in silence and simply don’t get the help they need to address the pain and improve the quality of life.

What are the various types of genital pain in women?

Dyspareunia is a term that refers to recurrent or persistent pain that happens before, during, or after having sexual intercourse.

 Superficial dyspareunia is when the discomfort is localized to the entrance of the vagina or the vulva- which includes the external parts of the genitals such as the inner and outer lips (the labia), clitoris, mons (the fleshy mound), and even the opening of the urethra.

In the case of deep dyspareunia, the discomfort or pain is felt more internally, extending deeper into the vagina and in some cases involving pain in the lower pelvis. This version can be associated with intercourse that tends to involve deep penetration.

Some women experience primary dyspareunia that occurs from the very first time they attempt intercourse, while others develop secondary dyspareunia that shows us after periods–perhaps even years-of painless sexual intercourse.

Another term, vulvodynia, can also be used to characterize painful intercourse.

Although the terms dyspareunia and vulvodynia are often used interchangeably, vulvodynia is further defined as chronic genital pain that persists for longer than three months, has no established cause, and can occur without any provocation–which means in the absence of sexual activity or touch–and is localized to the entrance of the vagina and the vulva.

In other words, dyspareunia can be thought of as a descriptive term for painful intercourse in general, whereas vulvodynia is used when the pain is chronic and localized either to the vulva or entrance of the vagina.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) which is the guide that health care providers use for diagnosis of mental health and pain disorders, now uses the term, “genito-pelvic pain/penetration disorder,” which encompasses both vulvodynia and dyspareunia, as the well as “vaginismus” –a condition in which intercourse is hampered or made impossible by involuntary muscle spasms that create pain upon attempted penetration.

As mentioned previously, it is difficult due to stigma surrounding sexual health issue to get a good read at the numbers of women affected by genital pain disorders, but It has been estimated based on a comprehensive review done in 2016 that 10-28% of women of reproductive age suffer from vulvodynia. A more recent paper published in 2020 indicates that vulvodynia impacts 8-10% of women of all ages. Rates appear to differ by country and how the condition is diagnosed and studied. More specifically, studies in the USA have found that approximately 16% of women experience vulvodynia during their lives with 7–8% of women experiencing symptoms by age 40. And of note, young women before the age of 20 appear to be at even higher risk of experiencing these symptoms.

What is truly distressing is that studies suggest that only 60% of women with symptoms of vulvodynia seek help and that 40% of these women never receive the appropriate diagnosis.  This contributes to the high toll these disorders take on those afflicted.

Here’s a direct quote from Dr. Bergeron’s primer on vulvodynia:

“Although pain is the characteristic symptom of vulvodynia, the effect of the disorder is far-reaching as it is associated with reduced sexual desire, arousal, sexual frequency, and sexual satisfaction, and can adversely affect women’s and their partners’ psychological and relationship adjustment.”

The diagnosis and treatment of sexual pain disorders

As a sex therapist, I always take a comprehensive approach to this issue. There can be many causes of physical pain during sex. As sex is a biopsychosocial phenomenon involving our bodies, our minds, our experiences, and our culture’s messages, physical pain during sex can result from any number of interacting factors.

 Biological factors

Issues affecting our bodies can underlie sexual pain disorders (such as physical problems with our genitals or reproductive systems, dysfunction with muscles such as those of the pelvic floor, infections, hormone imbalances, issues with the peripheral nervous system such as damage to nerves or increased inflammatory processes, and central nervous system mechanisms such as altered pain processing involving increased sensitivity in brain regions processing sensation or pain.

Starting with a check-up with a knowledgeable ob-gyn is always a good idea. See the resources section to locate a health care provider with experience diagnosing and treating sexual pain disorders.

Psycho-Social Factors

These factors involve our experiences and learning in the context of our families and our culture. What have we been taught to believe about sexuality? Have our experiences regarding our bodies and sexuality been pleasurable or unpleasant? Have we had negative sexual experiences or traumas?  “Yucky” experiences can range from being shamed as a kid by a parent for touching ourselves– to being touched inappropriately by someone else. And as we unfold our sexuality, traumatic experiences can range from having partners not honor our boundaries or give us a chance to truly consent to sex– to the extremes of rape, sexual or relational violence, or abuse. Having a history of sexual trauma can contribute to physical pain experienced during sex. And having a painful relationship with a partner may be part of the genital pain picture.

In the biggest of pictures, culture impact our beliefs about sex and sexual pleasure. Some cultures are more permissive as to how sexuality is viewed, others more restrictive. Cultures differ in gender equality which is a big factor in how women feel about their sexuality. Religion can play a key factor in how comfortable we are taught to be about our sexuality in general and our sexual pleasure in particular. And the stigma surrounding our sexuality is the biggest obstacle we face in approaching our sexual selves.

Treatment

Effective treatment of any type of genital pain disorder should start with contacting a sexual medicine professional. For example, certified sex therapists are specially trained to help clients take the biopsychosocial approach to find answers. They can coordinate treatment with physicians who can help address the bio part of a good treatment plan, which may include ruling out medical causes for the symptoms, prescribing medication as indicated, pain management therapies, and referral for pelvic floor physical therapy. Sex therapists can provide a multilevel approach using psychotherapy to help address and manage the various symptoms to improve the quality of life.

How to get more information and find a sexual medicine provider? 

Here are links to important resources for information and referrals

The International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (ISSWSH).

Includes physicians and therapists who specialize in sexual medicine here and abroad.

 The American Association of Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT)

Has resources for referral to sexual health providers in the USA and abroad.

The National Vulvodynia Association (NVA)

Great information and also a resource for finding health care providers specializing in sexual medicine in the US.

And you can always contact me to ask questions and seek help!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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