Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - 5 Stages Of Grief Model

According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her book called “On Death and Dying”, there are five stages of grief. However, one should not conclude that these stages only apply in case of personal death or somebody else’s death. We can experience the stages in other traumatic life events such as social rejection, divorce, break-up, disease, etc. Although she is popular for her grief model, she also did a lot of research on other aspects associated with death, dying and overall personal trauma.

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Why are these theories applied in other aspects of life? First of all, let us analyze the concept of social death or psychosocial death. Social death can be defined as experiencing a profound sense of loss, but that loss cannot be publicly acknowledged if the person is still biologically alive. Some of the traumas previously named can be characteristic for social death. The grief process that follows a divorce, for example, is usually similar with the grief process one experiences when they physically lose their significant other. In other words, any type of loss or rejection feels like dealing with death and also reminds us, from an existentialist view, that we are alone in the world and there is no stability. These stages don’t respect an order of appearance, each person experiences grief differently and may skip or switch certain stages. The stages we previously talked about are described as:

Denial – During this stage, things will feel overwhelming so, as a coping mechanism, the person will try to deny their state because they feel a shock. This shock has changed everything in their life and it usually doesn’t make sense at first. Actually, although it would seem like a negative aspect, denial is actually good because it helps us cope and survive and understanding your pain begins with denial.

Anger – A very important stage in the healing process, anger is not endless no matter how much you think it is at the moment you experience it. Actually, the more anger you express, the better you will cope with your problem afterwards, because it helps you let go of your pain somehow. Anger is much better as despair because it gives you a focus towards an object, while despair is just a feeling without structure. Try not to suppress your anger.

Bargaining – this is a form of temporary truce, you will make certain promises to yourself, to God, or whatever you believe in that certain things will happen if you get through the traumatic event. In this stage, you will experience regret a lot and often think about times when you could have done things differently. 

Depression – depression is a state of mind characterized by the present, unlike bargaining which is characterized by the past. Depression is the appropriate response to a great loss and should be understood while experiencing it because it’s an important step in your grief.

Acceptance – although most people have the misconception that acceptance means being all right with your current situation, it is not the case when analyzing grief. Acceptance during the grief process is about seeing the reality just as it is and coping with it in an authentic way. In other words, acceptance is not denying our feelings, trying to recreate meaningful relationships, despite the loss you endured.

From an epistemological point of view we can notice that these stages of grief are very similar to the structure we use when we gather new information that contrasts the old information we believe in. It seems that our thought patterns are constructed to resemble the stages of grief whenever we learn something new, leading, more or less, to an emotional roller-coaster. Even if the stages of grief have been criticized by scientists who consider that there is no pattern similar to most people, but there is evidence that points to the fact that most people have the same way of integrating traumatizing or controversial information while experiencing some or all these stages.

Further reading:
http://jordan1990.hubpages.com/hub/The-five-stages-of-grief
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=five-fallacies-of-grief
http://grief.net/Myth%20of%20Stages.pdf