Nan and Jilly happy together: Photo by Nan Wise
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.
