How many stages of grief are there?

When you lose someone, you may be told about the ‘stages of grief’ by professionals or those around you. The model by Kübler-Ross outlines 5 stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

What do the 5 stages of grief mean?

Denial:

Denial often takes hold in the first few weeks after such a loss. You may feel in shock, still unable to fully grasp what has happened. During this time, it’s common to carry on as normal or feel numb. Losing a parent at a young age is a huge life event, and it’s completely normal to struggle with processing it or to have difficulty accepting that it’s real.

Denial can also come in the form of dreams, nightmares or even feeling like you can see or hear the person. This can happen months or even years later and is completely normal.

Anger:

Anger is a hard emotion but one that is completely normal. Losing a parent young is cruel and unfair. Depending on the type of loss, you may have experienced illness or addiction, which can also bring up feelings of anger. 

One of our volunteers, Katie, wrote a really helpful article on anger and grief. You can read it here but one thing she highlights is to sit with your anger and work through it. 

“Our instincts can be to run and hide from our anger, often because we’re convinced it’s the ‘wrong feeling’. But instead, allowing yourself to feel the feeling, asking some questions, and letting it settle, can be a helpful way to process our emotions.”

Bargaining: 

As we all know, accepting and processing the loss of a loved one can be incredibly difficult. During this time, we may experience bargaining, whether it’s making deals with ourselves or with a higher power, like a God. This can manifest as attempts to ease our pain or reflecting on the past, fixating on things we could have done differently and getting caught up in the ‘what ifs’.

Depression:

Grief is often closely linked to depression, a feeling we often see in TV and film. The impact and sadness of losing a loved one can feel all-consuming, leaving you with a sense of emptiness and a feeling that life has lost its meaning. This can be a really scary feeling to process, so if you are struggling at any point with depression, please take it seriously and know there is help out there. Click here to find some amazing resources that can help you. 

Acceptance:

Although we never ‘get over’ grief, gradually the initial pain and confusion starts to ease. A good example of this is the idea of ‘growing around grief’, and you can read about that theory here. 

Do the five stages of grief happen in this order?

At first it may come as a comfort to know that your feelings make sense, there’s a timeline and you’re just working through it. However, sadly grief often does not fit a set structure and you can often find yourself experiencing all these emotions at different times throughout your life. It may be 10 years later and you may feel so angry about your grief and that is normal.

Try not to feel like you’re going backwards. You may have hard days or you may experience hard emotions at different points in your life but it won’t last forever. Grief is not a linear journey but you can build up your toolkit of coping mechanisms to help you in hard times, for example techniques from a therapist, journaling, talking to loved ones or joining grief communities and talking to people who understand.