The Truth About the Stages of Grief
In 1969 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families was published. Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist who worked with individuals who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her book helped change the way that end of life care is viewed and conducted in the western world. Part of her work focused on stages a patient might go through when told they were going to die. The stages she outlined were denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She noted that not all patients experienced these stages- some patients experienced only a few of them, some experienced none of them, and some seemed to move forwards and back through them, never arriving and staying in anyone stage or reaching acceptance.
In spite of Kübler-Ross’s focus on a patient’s reaction to news of a terminal illness, and her own description of the stages of dying as being only a possibility for how a patient might react, her name and her work have become synonymous with grief.
It’s unclear exactly when the stages of dying became known in popular culture and media as the stages of grief. Her book was (and still is) widely read and studied in many sociology and psychology courses throughout the 1970s. Grief has long been an under-researched topic, and so when confronted with it, perhaps the professionals working with grieving people drew from what they had learned in school. As very little was taught around grief itself, the closest thing they may have had to fall back on was work such as Kübler-Ross’s.
Moreover, the human mind likes logic, patterns, and predictability. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have shaped our minds to take great comfort in knowing what to expect, and in fitting in with our social group. Perhaps the stages of grief caught on so quickly and have remained so ubiquitous because they provide some measure of predictability and a picture of what “normal” grief looks like. In the wake of a loss or transition, things may feel completely unpredictable and you might feel as though the world as you know it has shattered. This creates a lot of stress and questions- how long will you feel like this? Are you ever going to feel better? Are you grieving the right way? Is what you’re feeling/thinking/doing normal? When your mind is working through those questions, turning to a straightforward model like the stages of grief can offer comfort. It gives you a picture of what to expect- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The stages of grief seem to offer hope that the way you’re feeling isn’t forever, and gives you a way to gauge if how you’re grieving is normal.
But there are several issues with thinking about grief as a process that moves through the discrete stages that Kübler-Ross defined. The first is that Kübler-Ross’s work was never meant to be applied to grief in the way that it has been. Her work was specifically with terminally ill patients who were confronting the reality of their imminent death. Second, she described the stages as something that a patient might go through. Instead of taking her work in context, and including that all important word “might,” the stages have been inaccurately applied to grief as a precise description of what a grieving person will experience.
Third, and most importantly, the reality is that grief very rarely (if ever) fits into the stages Kübler-Ross described in On Death and Dying. Grief simply does not progress through discrete, predictable stages that encompass only a handful of emotions. Instead, grief is a non-linear process that can include feelings as varied as rage, joy, confusion, relief, heartbreak, hope, and countless others. In fact, in 2005 her book On Grief and Grieving, Kübler-Ross wrote that “there is no typical response to loss.” Although she herself refutes the idea that grief is experienced in stages, the idea remains in how we talk and think about grief. The popularization of Kübler-Ross’s stages have contributed to pushing grief into the shadows and isolating grievers; because so few people experience grief in the way we have come to think of as “normal,” they learn to hide their grief or themselves.
So if there are no stages of grief, how do you know if you’re grieving normally? The truth is that what normal grief looks like for you is unique to you- no two people grieve exactly the same way, and you may grieve things differently at different times throughout your life. You may feel all or some or none of what Kübler-Ross described. There is no timeline that you need to follow in order to be “normal.” Your grief has its own timeline. For many, grief does not have an endpoint. It becomes a part of their life, changing shape and intensity and meaning as time passes.
Allowing and making space for your unique experience of grief is one of the most healing things you can do. But it’s also one of the most challenging. In the face of decades of teaching and socializing our understanding of grief to fit around Kübler-Ross’s stages, deviating from that accepted norm is hard. Working with a grief counselor can help you process your experience, offer you tools to help you cope, and hold space for you to fully grieve your loss. Please know that if you’re grieving and feel stuck, alone, or hopeless, you don’t have to work through it on your own. Seek out a trusted friend, mentor, or certified grief counselor who can support you. However you are grieving, and for however long you grieve, is the right way and time for you. If you need support along the way, please reach out. While your grief is your own, you don’t have to do it alone.
