No right way to grieve
We've all heard of the famous five stages of grief: when you're grieving, you go through the following process:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
But as it turns out, we have got the five stages all wrong.
The five stages of grief come from the pioneering work of the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was one of the first scientists to devote herself to the study of death. Through conducting interviews with several hundred people who were terminally ill, she discovered that most of them went through these five experiences. Here is the first problem: most of us who are grieving are mourning the loss of someone or something, not our own lives.
Second, the way that these stages are described makes it seem like they are linear, like you must start at denial and must end at acceptance. But Kübler-Ross never meant us to think of them in this way. You don't move from 1-2-3-4-5; it's more like 1-4-2-3-5-2-3-2-1-4-2-5-2-1-4-5. Even more, some people don't experience certain stages at all and some people experience multiple stages at the exact same time.
The other problem with viewing the five stages as linear is that people might try to 'get you' to move faster through the stages to reach what they perceive to be the final stage of acceptance. (How unsurprising that in Old Happy's goal-obsessed culture that we've decided that grief must have a goal, too.) In reality, there's no moment that marks grief as being 'done.'
What Kubler-Ross attempted to do — provide a container for understanding some of the most common feelings and expressions of grief — has been taken far too literally, with so many people believing that one must grieve in this process. But she would be the first to say that there is no one way to grieve. Grief is profoundly personal. It will be different for every single individual and for every single loss.
If you are grieving a loss in your life — of a person, a relationship, a pet, a job, a stage of your life, a role, a dream, or anything else — please know that your experience will look very different to everyone else's. You don't need to force yourself to go through any stages; you simply need to be with your experience, whatever it looks and feels like.
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