Stages of grief

You may have heard people talk about stages of grief, or about the five stages of grief.

We explain here what it means and what the stages are according to the stages of grief theory, or model.

However, it's important to remember that grief is different for everyone. And each time we experience grief in our lifetime, it will feel different too. So, there are no set stages that we all follow. There is no timescale for grief. And there is no right or wrong way to feel.

People talk about the five stages of grief as:

In reality, we do not experience feelings of grief one at a time or in a particular order. We know that there are no set stages that everyone goes through.

You may experience these things – because they are all normal feelings of grief. But they might come at different times, and you may swing between them at different times. It's normal to feel other things too, such as shock, anxiety, exhaustion, or guilt.

Some people feel numb after the death of a person they cared about. They may even try to carry on as though nothing has happened.

If you experience this, it could be because it's just too hard to believe that the person you know so well is not coming back. You may also still feel their presence and you may think that you have heard their voice or even seen them.

It is very natural to feel anger after someone dies. Death can seem really cruel and unfair. It can feel harder too if the person who died was too young to die, or if their death leaves you with a lot of responsibility or practical problems.

You may feel angry at the person who has died for leaving you, or be angry at yourself for things you think you didn't do right.

This is when some people who are grieving start making deals with themselves, or perhaps a god, if they are religious.

Maybe they promise themselves that they will now always do (or not do) something, believing that it could make the person who has died come back. Or maybe they believe it will stop anyone else dying − or other bad things happening. This is sometimes called 'magical thinking'.

People may also find that they keep going back over the past and ask lots of 'what if' questions, wishing that they could go back and change things so that they could have turned out differently.

Sadness and longing are the feelings we think of most when we think about grief. These feelings can be very intense and painful, and they may come and go over many months or years.

But most people find that painful feelings like this become less strong over time. If you do not feel this is the case for you, then you should ask for help.

As time passes, most people find that the pain of grief becomes less intense. They can accept that the person has died and that their life will carry on without them.

Rather than saying that grief ends, people often say that they learn to live with it. In time, their life is able to grow around their grief, and they are able to find enjoyment again while accepting that they will always miss the person who has died.

The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kúbler Ross was the first person to talk about stages of grief in her book On Death and Dying, published in 1969. In this book, she writes about the different emotions people may go through after they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. So, she was not writing about grief after a bereavement.

In the decades since that book first came out, her stages of grief theory has been used to describe the way our emotions can change during the grieving process after a bereavement.

How we grieve is completely individual and it's different for everyone.

There are no set stages that we all go through. And our feelings and emotions do not follow an order – they will come and go over time.

You may experience some of the things in the stages of grief model, or all of them – or you may have quite different emotions. For example, you may at first feel relief after the death of the person you loved, if they had been in pain, or if caring for them had become very difficult.

You may also experience other feelings such as guilt, or loneliness or anxiety.

Most of us find that our feelings come and go – this may feel chaotic or out of control, but usually these waves of feeling will become less intense over time.

We now know that talking about stages of grief, may not be helpful for people if they think it means they should feel a certain way at a certain time − or that their grief will follow a set order.

This could mean that you worry that you are grieving incorrectly even though there is no right or wrong way to feel when you are grieving.

People sometimes describe grief as a journey and you may be someone who finds it helpful to think of it as a journey with stages. The stages are then the emotions which dominate how you're feeling at different times. But they will come and go and will not follow in any set order.

Since people first started talking about the stages of grief theory, we have learnt about many other ways of understanding grief.