What You Might Not Have Realized About the Grieving Stages
Grief is an intense, messy, overwhelming experience for everyone, regardless of how many times you have gone through it. Over the decades, people have developed and expanded on the idea of grieving stages. If grief is a journey through the wilderness to an unseen location called Acceptance, then the grieving stages are the guidebook of what to expect on the journey. During grief, you will encounter unpredictable emotions and surprising reactions. At some point, you will become stuck in depression or some other powerful emotion. As long as you know that what you are going through is normal, you will have less to worry about and a little more to look forward to. The stages you walk through during grief are not linear. They are not the same for everyone, and they do not account for how confusing grief can be. The grieving stages also apply to types of grief besides bereavement. They highlight that your experience is valid, even when no one else understands. The grieving stages are sometimes taught or explained in a way that makes grief seem oversimplified or confusing, especially when someone does not experience one of the outlined stages. They are a loose framework against which you can compare your experience and understand something about yourself. The stages are not a rigid step-by-step program that everyone must complete and do so in the same way. The grieving stages have always been about approaching death and loss with dignity and compassion, and not feeling alone as you try to deal with your thoughts and emotions. The Updated Grieving Stages Until recently, we have collectively talked about grief happening in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross originally provided this framework in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. After working [...]
