Dealing with grief

Also known as the five stages of grief, the Kübler-Ross model suggests that people often manage grief in five different stages. Sometimes these stages overlap or are experienced in a different order, but the researchers suggest that everyone experiences these stages at some point in their grieving process.

Stage 1: Denial – believing something isn’t true and holding on to a false reality.

Stage 2: Anger – accepting the truth and becoming frustrated by the situation and what has happened.

Stage 3: Bargaining – trying to avoid the grief by trying to seek a compromise (usually with a ‘higher power’).

Stage 4: Depression – going into a despair and thinking that one’s own life is not important.

Stage 5: Acceptance – coming to realise nothing can change the situation and that life must move forward.

The model suggests that these grief stages are applicable in any situation where there is a loss, not just when losing a loved one. Further research has also been done to suggest there may even be a sixth stage of grief – meaning.

Another popular grief model suggests everyone coping with grief switches between focusing on ‘loss’ and focusing on ‘restoration’.

Loss – the thoughts, feelings, actions and event that make you focus on your loss.

Restoration – distractions of daily life to break focus from your loss.

This model suggests that someone who is grieving will switch their focus back and forth, and that it is important for the person to experience both as a way to process the grief in a manageable way.

Grief professional Lois Tonkin presents a radical idea that grief is not necessarily experienced in different stages or phases but, rather, individuals learn to grow around the grief. Instead of the grief fading over time, this theory suggests that grief starts as a great obstacle. But the grief stays the same size and intensity throughout, and it is the person grieving that grows and matures around the grief.