There Are No Stages

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It is probably the most widely known framework in applied psychology, and almost everything about how it is used is wrong.

Start with where it came from. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying in 1969, based on interviews with terminally ill patients. The subject was how people come to terms with their own impending deaths. The five stages were her description of what she saw in that population, in that situation.

They were extended to bereavement, meaning grief for somebody else, afterwards. That extension was not accompanied by the same observational work, and it is the extension that everybody now knows.

Bereavement research since has looked for the sequence in grieving people and has not found it. There is no common ordering of emotions that describes most of them. Grief varies in intensity, in duration, in which feelings dominate, and the variation is not noise around a shared path; the shared path is not there.

What the research does find, repeatedly, is resilience. Most bereaved people experience intense sadness that is severe for some weeks and then tapers, and they recover without professional intervention. That is not a claim about grief being brief or shallow. It is a claim about the trajectory, and it is the single most reproduced result in the field.

Two things to be careful about, in opposite directions.

First, the model was not designed to be prescriptive. Kübler-Ross was describing, not instructing. The damage is done in application, when somebody is told they have not yet reached acceptance, or that they must be in denial because they are coping, or that they have skipped anger and will have to come back to it. A loose description used as a schedule becomes a way of telling a grieving person that they are grieving incorrectly, which is an unusually cruel thing to do by accident.

Second, resilience is not universal, and the researchers who established it are explicit about this. A substantial minority experience prolonged, disabling grief which does need treatment, and which responds to it. Replacing one over-general claim with another is not progress.

The version of the finding worth holding is therefore about absence rather than presence. There is no schedule.

Which means a person who is functioning three months after a death is not suppressing anything and does not need to be warned that it will hit them later. And a person still struggling at two years is not failing at a stage and is not behind. Both statements follow from the same result, and the second one is the reason the first one should not be weaponised either.

It is worth asking why the five stages spread so far when the evidence for the bereavement version was never there. They are memorable, they are five, they have a satisfying narrative arc ending in acceptance, and they give anybody who has to speak to a grieving person something to say. That last one is the real engine. A framework that solves a social problem for the people around the bereaved will outcompete an accurate framework that says: it varies, there is no schedule, sit with them.