Posted On: October 25, 2018
Grief can seem desolate for those in the thick of it who often feel unable to imagine a way out of their suffering writes Nick Haslam Professor of Psychology at University of Melbourne. But, as time passes, the pain usually dampens or becomes more fleeting.
Understanding the normal trajectory of grief matters for the person experiencing the grief and those treating them. Attempts to provide a map of the bereavement process have typically proposed a sequence of stages. The “five stages” model is the best known, with the stages being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
While there is some evidence for these stages, the experience of grief is highly individualised and not well captured by their fixed sequence. Some of the five stages may be absent, their order may be jumbled, certain experiences may rise to prominence more than once and the progression of stages may stall. The age of the bereaved person and the cause of death may also shape the grief process.
Stages of grief
The first major attempt to outline the stages of grief was made by British psychiatrist
John Bowlby, father of
attachment theory, an influential account of how infants and children form close bonds to their care-givers. Bowlby and his colleague
Colin Parkes proposed four stages of grieving.
The first is of numbness and shock, when the loss is not accepted or seen as not real. The second stage of yearning and searching is marked by a sense of emptiness. The mourner is preoccupied with the person who has been lost, seeking reminders and reliving memories.
In the third stage, despair and disorganisation set in. This is a sense of hopelessness and sometimes anger where the bereaved person may withdraw into depression. Finally, in the re-organisation and recovery stage, hope rekindles and there is a gradual return to the rhythms of daily life.
Read more: Death and families – when 'normal' grief can last a lifetime
Bowlby and Parkes’s model, first proposed in the early 1960s, may have been the first. However, it’s Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model coined in 1969 that has become the most widely known. Her five stages of grief – originally developed to map patient responses to terminal illness – have become famous. They have been applied not only to responses to death but also to a variety of other losses.
Kübler-Ross’s first stage, denial, resembles what Bowlby and Parkes labelled numbness and shock, but her second, anger, departs from their scheme. The affected person demands to understand why the loss or illness has taken place, and why it has happened to them. In the third stage, bargaining, the person may be consumed with “if only”, guiltily wishing they could go back in time and undo whatever may have led to the illness, or death.
Stages four and five involve depression and acceptance. Despair and withdrawal gradually give way to a sense of fully acknowledging and making peace with the loss.
Evidence for the five stages of grief
Kübler-Ross’s stages emerged from her clinical work with dying patients rather than systematic research. Empirical support for the existence of the proposed sequence of stages has been scant but intriguing.
One study followed 233 older adults over a 24-month period after the death of a loved one from natural causes. It assessed them on experiences associated with a modified version of Kübler-Ross’s stages. In accord with her theory, each of the five experiences peaked in the predicted order.
Disbelief was highest immediately after the loss and declined gradually thereafter. Yearning, anger and depression peaked at four, five and six months respectively before declining. Acceptance of the loss rose steadily over the two-year period.