Grief Doesn't Come in Stages

You're probably here to check whether you're doing this right. Which stage you're in, whether you skipped one, whether you're behind. I've been where you are, twice, and I teach this material to people who get examined on it, so let me save you some time. There is no order to be behind on.

The Night Wayne Didn't Turn Up

In 1981, on a Wednesday afternoon, I was walking through Wolverhampton town centre when a lad from school came out of the shop he was working in to talk to me. I could tell from his face that something was wrong. He asked if I'd heard the news about Wayne, my best friend, and I said no, he was supposed to meet me at the karate club the night before to train and he hadn't turned up.

Wayne had died that night.

I put my hands on my knees and said that can't be true. He was young and he was fit and people like that don't die. I don't know how I got home, and I've very little memory of the days and weeks that followed.

That was denial, years before anyone gave me a word for it. And here is the thing I want you to notice about it. It lasted about a minute. Then something else arrived, and then something else, and none of it came in any order I could have drawn you on a chart.

Where the Five Stages Came From

You already know them. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They come from a book called On Death and Dying, which Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published in 1969 after sitting with people who were dying. Not people who had been bereaved. People who had been told they were going to die and were working out how to face it. The five stages were her description of what she heard in those rooms. Only later were they turned into a map for the rest of us, the ones left behind.

I'm not going to pretend I was above any of this. I've taught the five stages to students, chart and all, and I've said "the stages of grief" on the radio more than once. Everybody says it, because it is the only vocabulary most of us were ever handed.

And it is everywhere. When Kate Avis, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut went through 72 websites about grief, 44 of them presented the five stages, and the review found little criticism of it and plenty of outright endorsement. Which is odd, because the people who study grief for a living have been asking for the model to be retired for years. The BMJ put it plainly in 2017: stages of grief in a set order are a popular but inadequate picture of what grieving people actually go through.

Forty-four of the 72 grief websites reviewed in 2021 presented the five stages. Source: Avis, Stroebe and Schut, Frontiers in Psychology.

The One Study That Tested Them

Here is what surprised me when I went looking. For nearly forty years nobody had properly tested the five stages on bereaved people. Then in 2007 a team at Yale did. They followed 233 people in Connecticut for two years after a death and asked them, at intervals, about disbelief, yearning, anger, depression and acceptance.

I'll give you the part that goes against the title of this post first, because it wouldn't be fair to leave it out. When the researchers lined up the peaks, the five feelings did reach their highest point in the order the model predicts. Disbelief first, then yearning, then anger, then depression, with acceptance climbing all the way through.

Now the rest of it. Acceptance was the most common feeling from the very first month. Disbelief was never the dominant one, not even at the start. And the biggest negative feeling right through the two years was yearning, which is not on the list at all. So the study most often cited in support of the stages found people mostly accepting from week one, mostly missing the person, and only faintly doing what the chart says they should.

When each feeling peaked in the Yale study. The order matches the model; the levels do not. Source: Maciejewski and colleagues, JAMA, 2007.

Two limits, and they matter. Nearly everyone in that study had lost a husband or wife, and every death was from natural causes. And anyone whose grief had already got stuck was taken out before the analysis began, so it tells you about ordinary grief and nothing at all about the other kind.

The lesson I took from it is simple. The five words are real feelings. The order is a story we tell afterwards.

An Hour in a Lay-By

My father raised my brother and me on his own. He died at 66, and I wasn't expecting it. The phone rang one evening and that was that.

I did everything you're supposed to do. I went to the funeral home to see him. I helped organise things and I spoke at the wake. I helped my brother clear his flat. By any outside measure I coped well, and people said so.

Nine months to a year later I was driving home from work. I couldn't tell you now whether it had been a good day or a bad one. By reflex I dialled my dad on the hands-free to tell him about it, and as it rang the realisation that he was gone, and that I would never tell him about my day again, kicked me in the stomach. I had to pull over. I sat in that lay-by for about an hour and I cried, and in that hour I went through every one of the five stages. All of them. I hadn't known until that moment that I'd been stuck in denial for the best part of a year.

Think about what that does to the idea of stages. If all five can arrive in sixty minutes in a parked car, nine months after the funeral, they were never stages. They are weather!

The chart, and the lay-by. Nine months of coping, then all five in an hour, then on.

Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, who have spent their careers on this, describe grief as moving back and forth rather than forward. You face the loss, then you get on with the washing and the work, then you face it again. Both halves are the work. The swinging between them isn't you failing at either of them.

I said it on Stony Radio in November 2024 and I'll say it again here. Grief takes as long as it takes, and you need to let it run its course.

What the Stages Get Right

I don't want to throw the whole thing out, because I've watched it help people put a name to something. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance is a decent list of five things you might feel. I used to tell people they hit in waves and loop back round a few times before they fade, and I'd still say that today. The list is useful. The ladder is what does the damage.

The damage is specific. Stroebe, Schut and Kathrin Boerner wrote a paper in 2017 cautioning health professionals against prescribing the stages, and their point wasn't an academic one. When people are told grief has an order, the ones who don't follow it decide they're grieving wrongly. People tell me they never bargained, never felt the anger, and want to know what that says about them. Others felt something like peace within weeks and are ashamed of it. Others are two years on and still furious, and have decided that means they're stuck at stage two.

And most people never go through anything like a five-step course in the first place. George Bonanno and his colleagues did something rare. They had data on 205 people from before their husband or wife died and followed them to eighteen months after. The commonest pattern was resilience. What the model calls ordinary grief, the deep dip and the slow climb, was relatively infrequent. That's one study, spouses only, but it says the same thing my lay-by said. There is no standard route.

What grief looked like in 205 widowed people followed from before the death. Source: Bonanno and colleagues, 2002.

What I Tell My Students

I tutor counselling and hypnotherapy students, and the five stages still turn up in their reading, because they turn up in everybody's reading (mine included). So here's what I tell them, and it's what I'd tell you.

1. You're not doing it wrong. There's no order to be behind on and nothing to complete. If you went straight to something like acceptance, that is grief. If you are angry a year on, that is grief. If it all came at once in a car, that is grief.
2. Feeling nothing is protection, not a flaw. Pain makes the mind ration what it lets through, and it does that without asking you. I said as much on air last November to someone who wrote in numb after a break-up, and I've said it to more people than I can count. Feeling nothing in the first weeks says nothing about how much you loved them.
3. Do the basics. Eat something. Drink water. Walk, even if it is only round the block. Sleep when you can. This isn't a cure and I'm not offering it as one. It is the floor that stops the rest getting worse.
4. Work out what you are actually mourning. Often what people are grieving is not only the person but what they expected life to be. The hardest losses are often the futures we imagined. I don't know who said that first, but it's true, and it's why the wedding they'll miss can hurt more than the funeral did.

When It Has Stopped Moving

Most people come through this. Not over it, through it, with the people around them and with time, and without anyone like me. That's what the research says and it's what I've seen.

A smaller number get properly stuck, and that is a different thing with a different name, and it does respond to help. I've written about what stuck grief looks like, and how to tell it from grief that is simply slow, on my bereavement counselling page, and I'd rather you read that than take a line from me here.

If you come and see me, I'll ask what's brought you here and then I'll mostly listen. There is no chart on the wall.

Send me a message

Whenever you like. You don't need to know what stage you're in. Nobody does.