Too many people who experience grief, in the hopes of getting “closure”, try to follow the ever popular “5 stages of grief”. This can cause undue stress and anxiety on top of the deep pain of the grief itself. Grief can exist in many ways, and for most it does not have the convenience of closure, but instead is a complex ongoing emotion, that follows no form nor direction. It is more described as waves of grief that can appear out of nowhere at any time, triggered by our everyday experiences, overcoming us, leaving us feeling like we are drowning. And until the wave passes over us, we have to just experience it, let it crash on us, then float to the surface again to find a relative calm. And we can experience this for the rest of our lives.
I know for me, it has ingrained itself in my character. There was my life before and then my life after. And there is a stark difference between the two. My mother died tragically when I was 6. I went to then live with her family, so every single thing in my life changed all at once. Some may say the passing of time must have given me closure, but that’s a very static sentiment, whereas grief lives on.
The psychologist who developed these stages, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, did not develop them for people who have lost a loved one, to be used as a guide to closure. Instead, it was to help those with a terminal illness come to peace with the imminent end of their own lives. She herself regrets how famous these steps have become, as it can cause more turmoil for those longing to just get through grief and frustrated that they can’t or are unable to get through the stages.
Take a look at this article, and hopefully if you are struggling right now, you can release yourself from this constriction of believing that this process will be your “answer”. The only real answer is to acknowledge that grief will always exist in your heart, and to best cope and/or find a channel that gives you some relief and some solace by finding purpose and the good in your grief.
“What you may not know, however, is that Kubler-Ross didn’t originally develop these stages to explain what people go through when they lose a loved one. Instead, she developed them to describe the process patients go through as they come to terms with their terminal illnesses. The stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were only later applied to grieving friends and family members, who seemed to undergo a similar process after the loss of their loved ones.
Grief turns out not to be so simple.
Studies now show that grievers don’t progress through these stages in a lock-step fashion. Consequently, when any of us loses someone we love, we may find that we fit the stages precisely as Kubler-Ross outlined, or we may skip all but one. We may race through them or drag our feet all the way to acceptance. We may even repeat or add stages that Kubler-Ross never dreamed of. In fact, the actual grief process looks a lot less like a neat set of stages and a lot more like a roller coaster of emotions. Even Kubler-Ross said that grief doesn’t proceed in a linear and predictable fashion, writing toward the end of her career that she regretted her stages had been misunderstood.”
You can read the full article – Psychology Today