Do the 5 stages of grief really exist?

What are the 5 stages of grief?

The 5 stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are based on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. They were originally developed in 1969 to describe the process terminally ill patients go through when coming to terms with death. But they are now often used to describe as the response people go through when they experience bereavement and enter a state of shock.

In recent years Kübler-Ross has added two more stages to her framework – shock and testing – to create the 7 stages of grief:

• shock
• denial
• anger
• bargaining
• depression
• testing
• acceptance

Kübler-Ross herself has always said that not everyone experiencing bereavement will go through these stages, and if they do, it might not be in this exact order. After all, grief is an individual journey and there is no defined ‘typical’ response.

Why the 7 stages of grief can be unhelpful

While it may be useful to know what emotions or sensations you might experience, grief doesn’t follow a neat, straight-forward pattern. Andy Langford, clinical director at Cruse Bereavement Care, says grief cannot be split up into a series of stages that you move through, one after the after.

‘That expectation to move from one stage to the next isn’t always helpful,’ he says. ‘We shouldn’t put pressure on ourselves to experience an emotion, like anger or acceptance, at a certain time.’

Dr Marianne Trent, clinical psychologist and author of The Grief Collective, says, ‘You could feel hopeful one day and angry the next, or even within the next moment.’ Or you might not experience either emotion at all.

There are no rules for how long each stage of grief lasts either, leaving you wondering if you’ve processed your grief ‘properly’ if you didn’t feel depressed or in denial for very long.

What’s a better way of understanding grief?

‘Imagine grief as a grey circle,’ says Adrienne Kirk, a psychotherapist who specialises in grief. ‘Rather than that grey circle shrinking over time, we grow around our grief. It stays the same size, but we learn to accommodate it and find a way of living with it.’

So should we ignore the 7 stages of grief?

It can be helpful to know what feelings we might experience during bereavement – so the 7 stages of grief are useful from that perspective – but you won’t be able to tick off each stage like a To Do list. However, Adrienne says there are normally 2 pathways through bereavement that we do tend to follow

One is dealing with all the legal and admin stuff, and the parallel pathway is all the emotions. ‘Grief normally switches between the two before settling somewhere in the middle, but you can get stuck on one or the other,’ she says. If that happens, you may find yourself bottling up your feelings and “being strong” to get through all the paperwork and events or, vice versa, feeling weepy, anxious and unable to cope.

To help you get ‘unstuck’, contact Cruse Bereavement Care or The Good Grief Trust. But don’t worry if this also doesn’t sound like your experience; grief is very individual, and everyone deals with it differently.

Whatever emotions you do or don’t experience, remember grief isn’t one-size-fits-all. Marianne says, ‘There’s normally a bit of everything in a bereavement journey: bargaining, anger, guilt, sadness. They’re like puzzle pieces rather than seven stages. And it’s OK to ask for help, whatever emotion you’re going through, whenever you go through it.’

If you’re struggling to find the right words to say to someone that’s grieving or need more bereavement or advice support, read our guides.