Stages of Grief

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8 May

What are they and do the models work?

There has been much written about grief, and people like to break it down into stages or models to help us understand and rationalise our feelings. But if grief is unique to each of us, is there any point in finding models that set out the phases of the grieving process? Below, I review some popular grief models and give my thoughts and a summary on how, when and if you can benefit from them.

As a widow, I primarily think about grief in relation to death, but it is important to note that grief is not simply related to the loss of a person: it could be the loss of a job, the end of a relationship or a change at work. Nonetheless, death is the only certain thing that is waiting for all of us, and at some stage in our lives we will all experience death. As we are all different, the grief we each feel for the death of a loved one is different because, just like a snowflake or a fingerprint, every individual is unique, every relationship is unique and every death is unique.

Although the emotions within grief can be difficult to predict, many people look to the stages of grief to help them understand the concept behind the grieving process.

Five stages of grief

The concept of ‘stages of grief’ began in 1969 when a Swiss-American psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote that grief could be divided into five stages in her book On Death and Dying. Her stages of grief are:

Denial – a numb feeling where you imagine that the loss has not happened
Anger – an intense feeling towards something or someone to mask the pain of grief
Bargaining – moments of ‘what if’ or ‘if only’ trying to regain control of the situation
Depression – a place of deep sadness for the loss that has happened
Acceptance – not necessarily a happy place but an understanding that the loss cannot be changed and how that now affects life going forwards.

These stages have become a commonly understood pattern of adjustment. While they have been good for softening the stigma around grief, they were never intended as a set pattern for grief after a death. They were actually created to describe the process that patients go through as they come to terms with a terminal illness.

Four stages of grief

In the 1970s, British psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes developed another model of grief similar to Kübler-Ross but based on our attachments and relationships with important people in our lives. Parkes’ four stages of grief are:
Shock and numbness – like denial, this is the initial emotion where the loss feels impossible to accept
Yearning and searching – this is a preoccupation with the loss and a need for something to fill the void
Despair and disorganisation – this is a realisation of the loss, possibly together with feelings of anger &/or despair for the future
Reorganisation and recovery – finally a move towards healing and accepting of a new way of life.

The concept behind these four phases is that if an attachment to a loved one is broken, the feelings of grief that we feel are a normal bodily process of trying to adapt to the loss.

The sixth stage of grief

As someone who experienced the loss of his son at only 21 years old, David Kessler more recently introduced a sixth stage of loss, adding to the five Kübler-Ross stages, in his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Believing that society can be insensitive and make us feel that we need to ‘get over’ loss, Kessler was keen that we should each be allowed to continue to grieve.

For Kessler, the concept of ‘Acceptance’ as the final stage of grief did not sit well. He, therefore, added a sixth stage of grief:
Finding meaning – rather than looking for ‘closure’ after loss, this last stage is about reaching a more peaceful and hopeful place by finding meaning in a way that honours the loss we feel.

Although the various models and theories of grief are useful in helping us to ‘normalise’ our emotions, the problem with the ‘stages of grief’ is that they create a false perception that grief follows a set pattern or formula.

Instead, maybe it’s just a ball of grief?!

Having avidly learnt the stages, I was surprised to hear that maybe the truth of grief is that it is more like a tangled ball of emotions. This suggestion came with a picture of a tight ball of thread, and along each piece was the word of an emotion. Instead of a set formula or a limited number of steps that we have to go through, grief is shown as a messy knot of feelings, which perhaps more accurately suggests the vast number of emotions that we might experience. The tight ball also shows how intermingled the emotions can be and how hard it is to find where one emotion starts and the other ends.

Grief may feel more like a ball of emotions, but where do we go next with it? I think that the magic comes from acknowledging each thread and trying to untangle the ball that the loss has created.

Emma’s thoughts

• The ‘stages of grief’ are helpful: they help us to identify and normalise feelings that may seem alien to us, but they are only a rough guide.
• Grief is not linear: there is no set pattern: the emotions can be experienced in any order and you may experience one or more of them more than once or not at all.
• There is no requirement to feel all the ‘stages’: you may experience many more feelings than those set out above, or there may be some you do not feel at all.
• Once you have felt all the emotions you are not “over it”: the grieving process is not about fixing or “getting over” the loss, instead it is about learning to live a good life while acknowledging that the loss will always be there.
• Grief is totally unique: how you feel the emotions and deal with the loss will be as unique as your fingerprint or a snowflake.