Grief

Grief Is Messy

By  | 

Kübler-Ross was trying to do the world a service with her five stages of grief, and it has helped, but her model has ended up causing a lot of harm too because people take it too literally. They think they should be passing through neat, clearly defined stages, and start to question whether something is wrong with them if they aren’t.

But grief is messy, it’s not neat. The five stages of grief should not be taken too literally. They’re more like an outline to help you make sense of confusing thoughts and emotions by providing categories. But denial, anger, bargaining, and depression are all going to enter the picture at different times, sometimes all mixed together. They’re probably not going to occur as discrete, chronological, easily identifiable stages. And the last stage, acceptance, might not ever happen if by acceptance what is meant is getting over the loss and moving on with life. Can we ever expect to get over the loss of the people who are most important to us? Should we even want to?

Like we’ve written elsewhere, the only ‘wrong’ way to grieve is to deny how you are really feeling, to refuse to accept the truth of your existential state as it is. The only ‘right’ way to grieve is to accept your thoughts and emotions without censure or judgment, to have the courage to feel what you are feeling whether these feelings sync up with your expectations or not. Otherwise you’re forcing a square peg into a round hole, you’re trying to adjust your authentic experience to some theoretical model. If the stages of grief feel real to you and help you make sense of what you’re going through that’s great, but if they don’t this doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with you or that there’s anything abnormal about how you are grieving. It might only mean you are a unique individual with unique experiences who is working through your loss in an authentic way.

Related posts:

  1. Grief Is The Price You Pay For Caring We’ve written that when it comes to losing a loved one, the expression ‘little love little grief, big love big grief’ helps people wrap positive meaning around the boundless emotional pain and suffering they’re experiencing. That pain and suffering is a testament to their loved one, a proof that this person was special and important […]...
  2. Ambivalence While Grieving Simultaneous Contradictory Thoughts and Feelings  Ambivalence, which is holding simultaneous contradictory thoughts or feelings, is a disconcerting experience even under normal circumstances. Our Western minds remain influenced by the philosophical legacy of Aristotle, who held that something can be ‘this’ or ‘that’ but never ‘this and that’. He created three maxims to explain it. The […]...
  3. Subjected To Devastating Loss When subjected to devastating loss the paradox is that our grief is uniquely ours and our unique burden to bear but at the same time we’re not alone because the human condition is tragic and mandates losses of all kinds for all of us throughout the lifespan until we reach that final loss, which we […]...
  4. Grey’s Anatomy And Grief Recovery The season premiere of the ninth season of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ provides rich material for discussing the process of grief and grief recovery. We’ll give a quick overview of the circumstances that have led characters to be at varying stages in the grief process and then talk about a few scenes during the episode to let […]...
  5. Pleasant Emotions While Grieving We tend to put a lot of energy into trying to make our life experience conform to how we think things should be instead of how they actually are. In the context of emotions, we often repress the ones that don’t seem to fit the situation or we get down on ourselves for having them, […]...
  6. Acceptance Most people are familiar with the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. From our existential point of view the paradigm could be whittled down to the duality of non-acceptance and acceptance. Grief is a kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression are only a small […]...
  7. Grief And Despair When confronted with the loss of an important human relationship the enemy is not grief but rather despair. Grieving is healthy and productive. Above all grief is natural. As much as we want to avoid those painful thoughts and feelings grief is the adaptive response to loss. Those who have the courage to confront their […]...
  8. Why Grief Is Scary When faced with a situation that elicits grief the concrete loss is obviously scary to confront. No one wants to admit that something or someone they love has slipped through their fingers forever. But there’s a deeper reason grief is scary, and this is that all of the unfinished business from previous losses comes bubbling […]...
  9. Grief Recovery This article concerns grief, the misconceptions surrounding it, and suggestions on how to work towards recovery. A helpful book I have read on the subject is The Grief Recovery Handbook, by John W. James and Russel Friedman. Many of their theoretical underpinnings fit well within a Gestalt psychology framework.  In my practice I have found […]...
  10. Grief And Transitions After losing someone important to them people in the throes of grief usually add to the vicious cycle of despair through their beliefs about how this loss is going to affect their situation. They’re likely to engage in the faulty thinking pattern called fortune telling, where they make predictions about the future and take these […]...
  11. Grief And Control Grief could be defined as the response to a change in a customary pattern of living. But people change their lives all the time and these disruptions don’t necessarily elicit grief. On the contrary, they elicit joy when they’re the outcome of the decision to grow and self-actualize. By making this distinction we can see […]...
  12. Boundless Grief If your love for someone is boundless then it shouldn’t be surprising that when you lose them your grief will be boundless. We could say that grief is the price you pay for love. Little love little grief, big love big grief. Acquaintances, public figures, and other people you know pass away all the time, […]...
  13. Grief And Growth Grief means you have lost something or someone dear to you. You desperately want that something or someone back although you know it’s impossible, so you desperately want what you see as the next best thing, which is to be rid of your painful thoughts and feelings around your loss. Approaching grief in this way […]...
  14. Unacknowledged Grief Grief is usually consciously recognized when it’s connected to the death of a loved one but it casts a much wider net than that. Actually any time your circumstances change the potential for grief is there because implicit in change is loss, and loss is what grief is all about. We say the potential for […]...
  15. Grief Guilt When you lose someone you love you will experience a wide range of thoughts and emotions. Many people unnecessarily make what they are going through more difficult by secretly feeling guilty about some of them, either suffering in silence or relegating these thoughts and emotions to the unconscious, trying to stamp them out of awareness. […]...
  16. Ambivalence and Grief Ambivalence, which means having simultaneous conflicting thoughts and feelings about a situation, is common for most people dealing with the death of a loved one. An example that is almost always confusing and guilt inducing is being heartbroken, really not knowing how life can continue without this person around anymore, while at the same time […]...
  17. Positive Side of Grief Quiet contemplation on a still evening lake. Sheets of rain pounding the earth. Deafening claps of thunder. Flashes of lighting above the treetops. The star speckled sky. The sound of the ocean. A cool breeze in a summer field. When I think of grief I often think of nature. This is because the nature of […]...
  18. Minimizing The Pain of Grief “The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied.” – Eddie Vedder Probably the most common defense mechanism in the face of painful life experiences is the denial of sorrow. Outright confrontation with the grief seems overly threatening to the integrity of the psyche and so the unconscious solution is to try to minimize the impact […]...
  19. Grief Is Supposed To Hurt When confronted by the loss of something or someone we’ve grown accustomed to we’ll experience painful feelings of grief unless the situation was highly aversive to us, in which case we might feel relieved or even ebullient. But especially in the case of relationships it’s usually a mixed bag. Even if we feel mostly positive […]...
  20. Helping People Move Through Grief Grief is triggered by the irrevocable loss of something important to us. The mistake many of us make when helping people move through grief is to try to downplay that importance, to basically say “It’s not so bad,” while focusing in on the positives of the newly changed life situation instead. It’s a well-intentioned strategy, […]...
Related Items