By Kimberly Blair | Founder of The Guides Holistic Therapies & The Pet Grief Relief App
The morning after my 16 year old cat Brody died, I reached for him before I was fully awake. My hand moved toward the edge of the bed where he always was curled up, that warm, familiar weight, and I found nothing. My brain hadn’t gotten the message yet. It was still running its old program: Brody is here, reach for him, he’s close. That moment of reaching, followed by the crash of remembering, is one of the most quietly devastating experiences of grief. And it happens over and over again. In my pet loss grief counseling sessions, I reiterate that grief is reaching out for someone who has always been there for you, and reaching out one more time, and they’re not there…and grief is also a change in a familiar pattern or behavior.
If you’ve lost a pet and found yourself doing the same thing: glancing at their bed, listening for their collar, turning to call their name, you’re not imagining things. You’re not being dramatic. Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do. Understanding this changed how I work with my clients and how I personally soothed myself, and it’s the reason I believe something like a Petsie isn’t just a keepsake. It’s a legitimate grief tool.
The Brain Doesn’t Accept Loss All at Once
In her groundbreaking book The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor explains that the brain has a genuine problem to solve when someone we love dies. We need our loved ones, human or animal, in a deeply biological way. Our attachment bonds are encoded in the brain’s reward network, the same system that motivates us to seek food, water, and safety. This is why grief doesn’t feel like just sadness. It feels like a craving. When your pet is alive, your brain builds a detailed internal map: where they sleep, when they eat, and the sound of their breathing at night. That map doesn’t disappear the moment they die. As O’Connor writes, there is a mismatch between the map the brain has always used to find a loved one and the new reality that they can no longer be found. The brain keeps running its search. It keeps predicting their presence. And every time reality corrects it, the pain hits fresh.
This is the neuroscience behind why grief comes in waves rather than a straight line. The brain is learning, slowly, painfully, through repetition, to update its predictions.
The Searching Response: What’s Happening in Your Nervous System
There’s a specific brain region at the center of this: the nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward and craving system. Research shows that after a loss, reminders of a deceased loved one activate this region: the brain is literally looking for its reward, the comfort and connection that used to be there, and coming up empty.
This is also why grief can feel so much like physical pain. Studies by neuroscientist Naomi
Eisenberger at UCLA found that social pain and physical pain share the same neural hardware: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. When O’Connor put bereaved individuals in fMRI scanners and showed them photos of their deceased loved ones, she found activation in both the pain network and the nucleus accumbens simultaneously — a finding documented in her landmark peer-reviewed study published in NeuroImage. The brain is grieving and searching at the same time.
For pet loss specifically, this matters enormously. Our animals are woven into the fabric of daily life in deeply sensory ways: their smell, the texture of their fur, the weight of them in our lap. The brain’s map of them is rich and physical. So when they’re gone, the searching response is just as strong, just as real, just as neurologically grounded as any loss. What the brain is reaching
Why Touch Matters in Grief More Than We Think
Here’s where the science gets especially interesting for anyone navigating pet loss. Our senses connect directly to the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. Touch, in particular, is a primal need. When we hold something familiar, something with the right shape, the right texture, the right weight, we send calming signals through pressure receptors directly to the brain. This is the same mechanism used in somatic therapy, DBT, and trauma informed care. O’Connor’s research also introduces us to the concept of continuing bonds: the idea that the brain doesn’t require us to “get over” a loss to heal and what I also propose during all my grief counseling sessions. Instead, it can transform the relationship, finding new ways to stay connected to the one who is gone. As explored by the Death with Dignity Foundation, feeling a presence, holding a meaningful object, engaging the senses in ways that echo the original bond, these aren’t signs of denial. They are the brain doing its work.
This is exactly where a Petsie enters the picture: not as a toy, not as a novelty, but as something that meets the brain’s real need.for, at its core, is something familiar. Something physical. Something it can land on.
What a Petsie Actually Does for the Grieving Brain
A Petsie is a custom stuffed animal made from photos of your pet: the same markings, the same colors, the same face. When you hold one, you’re giving your nervous system something it has been desperately searching for: a familiar shape. A recognizable form. A physical object that carries the sensory echo of the animal you loved.
I’ve seen this in my own practice. Clients who have lost pets often describe a specific kind of restlessness in early grief, they don’t know what to do with their hands. They keep gravitating toward where their pet used to be. The absence feels loud. When one of my clients received her Petsie after losing her 14 year old tortie cat, she told me: “I know it’s not him. But something in me settles when I hold it. I get to hold her”
That settling is real. That’s the nervous system receiving a familiar signal and, for a moment, not having to search.
The Petsie doesn’t trick the brain. It gives it something to work with, a tangible anchor in the grief process, something that supports the slow, nonlinear work of learning to live with loss.
Grief Isn’t Linear — And Neither Is Healing
One of the most important things Dr. O’Connor teaches us in The Grieving Brain is that grief is a learning process. The brain is not broken when it keeps reaching for what’s gone. It is doing the hard, necessary work of updating its model of the world.
That update doesn’t happen all at once. It happens through small moments — through being reminded, through feeling the pain, through reaching and finding something that offers comfort instead of a void. Over time, the brain begins to predict the loss more often than the presence. That’s not “getting over it.” That’s adaptation. And it’s one of the most profound things a human nervous system can do.
As a grief companion, I’ve learned to meet people where they are in that process — not rushing it, not minimizing it, and absolutely not shaming the ways they find comfort. If holding a Petsie helps someone get through the morning, that’s not weakness. That’s wisdom. It’s the brain doing what brains do: reaching for connection, reaching for something real.
You’re Not “Too Much” for Missing Them This Deeply
Pet loss is still one of the most disenfranchised forms of grief: minimized, misunderstood, often met with a quiet “it was just a dog” from people who don’t know better. But neuroscience doesn’t leave room for that dismissal. The bond was encoded in your reward system. The loss activates your pain networks. The searching response is automatic and biological. You are not too sensitive. You are not overreacting. Your brain built a world that included them and now it’s learning, piece by piece, to rebuild. A Petsie won’t do that work for you. But it can give your nervous system somewhere to land while you do.
And sometimes, that’s exactly enough.
Kimberly Blair is a grief counselor specializing in pet loss, clinical hypnotherapist, transformational breathwork practitioner, reiki master, sound therapist with a background in psychology., She works with clients navigating grief at her San Diego offices and virtually. Kimberly also developed the Pet Grief Relief app, first of its kind digital grief companion designed for the nuances of being a pet parent facing grief. To learn more or connect, visit https://www.theholisticguides.com
References & Further Reading:
O’Connor, Mary-Frances. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. HarperOne, 2022. (Primary source for this article)
O’Connor, M.F. et al. Craving Love? Enduring Grief Activates Brain’s Reward Center. NeuroImage, 2008. (Peer-reviewed fMRI study — NIH/PubMed)
O’Connor, Mary-Frances. How the Brain Copes with Grief — Interview, Scientific American, 2024.
O’Connor, Mary-Frances. How Do Our Brains Handle Grief? — TEDxUArizona Talk, 2023. O’Connor, Mary-Frances. What Happens in the Brain When We Grieve — NPR Short Wave Interview, 2021.
Lindner Center of Hope. The Biology of Grief: How the Brain Responds to Loss, 2025.
Death with Dignity Foundation. The Neurobiology of Grief: A Leading Researcher’s Perspective, 2023. PMC / NIH. Grieving as a Form of Learning: Insights from Neuroscience Applied to Grief and Loss. (Peer-reviewed, free full text)
