The stages of grief are a myth: what really happens after a loss

“Apparently I’m in the anger stage now,” said a woman whose mother had died four months earlier. She reported it the way you might report a blood test result. Then she added: “But yesterday I laughed all day with my sister. Have I gone back to denial?”

I hear that question often, and every time something tightens in me. Not because it is silly — quite the opposite, it is perfectly logical if you believe grief moves up a staircase. It tightens because a woman who has just lost her mother is carrying, on top of the loss, a piece of homework: she has to check whether she is grieving correctly.

The five-stage model — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — is the most widely known psychological idea the field never actually confirmed. In this piece I want to show where it came from, why it does not hold, and what we have instead. Because we do have something. And what we have is considerably kinder to the person who is in the middle of it.

Where the five stages actually came from

In 1969 the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying. It was a brave book for its time: hospitals did not talk about dying, dying people lay behind curtains and nobody asked them how they were. She asked. She interviewed around two hundred people with terminal illness and drew out five recurring attitudes from what they told her.

Two things about this are crucial and almost never mentioned. First: she was describing dying people, not bereaved ones. People who had learned they would die — not people whose person had died. The transfer from one group to the other happened later, without data and without her explicitly arguing for it. Second: she never claimed this was a sequence everyone walks through in the same order. That was added by the culture around her — films, self-help books, popular articles, even training for healthcare staff.

The model caught on because it was useful for the people standing beside the bereaved. It gave them vocabulary and a sense that they understood where someone was. Only the grieving person was handed a timetable that never matched the road.

What the research showed

The first serious attempt to test the stages against data came only in 2007. A group around Paul Maciejewski followed several hundred bereaved people and asked whether the five states really appear in the predicted order. The result was interestingly mixed: some states did peak at different times, but the strongest feeling across the whole period was none of the five. It was yearning — that pull in the chest when you want the person to walk through the door. Yearning does not appear in the five-stage model at all.

The critiques showed something more damaging still: the data were compatible with several different readings, including one that needs no stages whatsoever. When researchers looked at individual people instead of averages, it turned out almost nobody moves through the sequence. The average was a curve nobody lived.

That is why the stage model no longer appears as a framework in serious guidance on bereavement. It has stayed in general culture because it is simple, and simple always outlives accurate.

Grief does not progress, it oscillates

Instead of a staircase, we now have the model I find most useful in the room: the dual process model, described in the 1990s by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut. Its basic claim is simple and slightly unexpected: a bereaved person is not only dealing with the loss. They are dealing with two kinds of task at once, and they oscillate between them continually.

The first kind is loss-oriented: crying, going through photographs, yearning, anger, replaying the last week in your head. The second is oriented towards rebuilding a life: what happens to the house now, who pays the bills, how to go back to work, how to sit down to dinner without him. Healthy grieving means moving back and forth — and taking breaks from both in between.

Why oscillating is not avoidance

The most common accusation a bereaved person hears, from others or from themselves, is that they are running away. Too much work, too much organising, not enough crying. The dual process model turns this around: stepping back from pain is not avoidance but regulation. A nervous system cannot hold unbroken distress. During the step back the body settles enough to approach the pain again.

The same holds in the other direction. Someone who spends days among photographs and touches no practical matter is not more devoted to the dead — they have simply got stuck on one side. The problem arises when there is no swing at all: when a person shuts themselves into one side and stays there for months.

This is why, in early sessions, I am less interested in content than in mobility. I do not ask whether someone cries enough. I ask whether they can move — and what happens when they try.

The bond does not break, it changes shape

The second big shift in understanding grief arrived with the collection Continuing Bonds (1996). Until then the assumption — from Freud and everything that grew out of him — was that the task of grief is to detach from the dead, withdraw the investment and leave them behind. Anyone still talking to them was suspect.

Klass, Silverman and Nickman showed that most people do not do this, and are often better off for not doing it. The bond remains, it only changes form. The father you consulted about cars becomes the voice in your head telling you not to buy the first one you see. Your grandmother’s recipe becomes the way she is present at lunch every year. This is not denial of death. It is keeping a relationship in the only form still available.

In practice this changes the questions. Instead of “when will you let this go” I ask “where do you keep him now” and “what would he say to you today”. Many people cry for the first time at that — not from pain, but from relief that nobody has to be erased.

There is no single path through loss

George Bonanno has followed people before and after loss for decades — rare and valuable, since most research catches people only afterwards. His data show not one curve but several distinct trajectories, and that the most common one is the one almost nobody expects: resilience. A substantial share of people suffer badly after a serious loss yet keep functioning and return within months to something near their earlier level — not because they do not care, but because the human system can do this.

Others go through a period of heavy distress that gradually eases. A smaller group stays in high distress for longer and needs help. There is also a group who were already in distress before the death and for whom it brings relief — after long caregiving, for instance, or after a relationship that was violent.

What is still worth keeping from the stage model

Now the part I would not like to lose. The stage model was not malicious and it was not empty. The contents it named do exist: after a loss people really do feel disbelief, anger, bargaining with what cannot be changed, emptiness and a gradual settling. Kübler-Ross was the first to say these things out loud in a world that kept quiet about death. That is not nothing.

I also know people whom the model genuinely helped — not as a timetable, but as permission. “Ah, anger is part of this too, I’m not a monster.” If five names give you the sense that your state is not outside the human range, keep them. It only becomes dangerous when a description turns into a measure: when someone checks at the one-year mark whether they are in the right box, and blames themselves for being behind.

And something that argues against my own case here: the newer models are not proven much better. The dual process model is above all a description that fits experience well, not a precisely measured mechanism; researching grief is methodologically hard in much the same way as researching psychotherapy in general. The difference is not that we now have the truth. The difference is that newer frameworks do not prescribe when anyone must feel what.

What this means when you are in the middle of it

In practice it works out like this. Stop checking where you are. The question “am I grieving properly” is almost always a by-product of the model I am taking apart here, and it has no answer. Watch instead whether you can move: whether you sometimes manage to approach the pain, and sometimes manage to step away from it.

Allow yourself both sides without explanation. Laughter at a funeral is not betrayal. A Sunday when you do nothing is not backsliding. If the smell of his coat knocks you over seven months later, that is not a sign you missed something — it is a sign of how much he mattered.

Watch your sleep, because that is where the first things fall apart. Loss often brings waking in the middle of the night and a churning that is hard to escape. If that settles in, it is worth acting on, even if everything else looks “normal”.

And let yourself differ from your own family. In the same household one person sorts the paperwork while another lies down. Both are grieving; they are simply swinging to a different rhythm. This is often the first source of resentment after a funeral.

When it is something more

Grief is not a disorder and we do not treat it. In a smaller group of people, though, the distress stays so strong and so unchanged that life comes to a halt: yearning is daily and intrusive, a year or more passes without any return to what used to matter, everything reminiscent is avoided, or the sense of having a future has gone out entirely. The field calls this prolonged grief, and there are specifically adapted forms of help for it.

It matters that this is not confused with the difference between sadness and depression. Grief swings and has windows in which a person is still themselves; depression is flatter and tends to take away the sense of one’s own worth as such. When both are present at once — which is not rare — it makes sense to see a doctor first before deciding about therapy.

And if thoughts arrive that you would rather not be here, that is no disgrace and no sign of weakness. It is a sign that the pain exceeds what a person can carry alone, and that it is time to call.

What to remember

The five stages are not a map of grief. They came from dying people, not bereaved ones, they were never meant as a sequence, and the data do not confirm them as one.

What actually happens is oscillation: between the loss and the ordinary day, between crying and the bills, between closeness to the dead and a life that goes on. The bond does not break — it takes a different form. And there are several paths through loss; the most common is more bearable than we assume, which is not a promise but a finding.

If you take one thing from this piece, let it be this: you are not behind. There is no schedule to catch up with, and sadness in itself is not a malfunction. If it does feel as though you have stalled and cannot move in either direction, that is a good reason to talk it through with someone who will not be watching the clock.