Question

The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

Answer 1

• Throughout life, we experience many instances of grief. Grief can be caused by situations, relationships, or even substance abuse. Children may grieve a divorce, a wife may grieve the death of her husband, a teenager might grieve the ending of a relationship, or you might have received terminal medical news and are grieving your pending death. In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five popular stages of grief, popularly referred to as DABDA. They include:Denial;Anger;Bargaining;Depression;Acceptance.
• Kübler-Ross’ model was based off her work with terminally ill patients and has received much criticism in the years since. Mainly, because people studying her model mistakenly believed this is the specific order in which people grieve and that all people go through all stages. Kübler-Ross now notes that these stages are not linear and some people may not experience any of them. Yet and still, others might only undergo two stages rather than all five, one stage, three stages, etc. It is now more readily known that these five stages of grief are the most commonly observed experienced by the grieving population.
• Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Grief is not a one way tunnel, it’s more like a labyrinth.The stages are just tools, based on the experiences of many other grievers, to help you understand and identify how you feel. It completely normal to realize weeks after a death that you began at a different start point, passed over a step, or even moved backwards. A part of stages are not linear means that stages may repeat as well.