Grief is More Than Five Neat Stages

As lights go up and holiday music follows us into every store, grief has a way of slipping into the season uninvited.

Someone mentioned to me recently that the “five stages of grief” have been debunked.

I knew exactly what they meant. For years, those stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) have floated around like a script we’re all supposed to follow. Movies use them. TV shows use them. Friends whisper them in church hallways and at hospital bedsides: “She’s still in denial,” or “At least he’s reached acceptance.”

So when my friend said that, I started thinking about all the people I’ve sat with after a loss who quietly ask, “Is it bad that I’m not angry?” or “It’s been a year and I still cry all the time. Am I behind?” Underneath the question is the real fear: Am I grieving wrong?

That sent me digging into what the research actually says. Is the “stages idea” truly outdated? And if so, what do we know now about how people move through loss?

First, a little context. The five stages came from psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross back in 1969. She was studying people who were dying from terminal illnesses, not people grieving a loved one who had died. Her work was groundbreaking in its time because it gave language to the emotional world of people facing their own mortality. But as her ideas seeped into popular culture, the stages started getting applied to just about any loss: divorce, job changes, breakups, bereavement.

Even Kübler-Ross later admitted people were misunderstanding her. The stages were never meant to be a rigid, one-size-fits-all roadmap. Real people don’t move neatly from Denial to Anger to Bargaining like kids going through an inflatable obstacle course.

But that’s how we started to talk about grief, as if we could check off emotional boxes and eventually graduate to “acceptance.”

Over the last few decades, grief researchers have been gently, and sometimes not so gently, pushing back on that idea. When they actually follow people over time, they don’t see one tidy sequence. They see a lot of variation. Some people have intense, overwhelming grief that slowly eases. Some struggle for a long time. And some, maybe more than we’d expect, show what psychologists call resilience: they are deeply affected by the loss, but they’re still able to function, experience moments of joy, and keep living their lives even in the shadow of that grief.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t love the person enough. It means human beings are surprisingly capable of holding pain and everyday life in the same pair of hands.

Researchers have also found that while feelings like disbelief, yearning, anger, sadness, and acceptance do tend to appear at different points after a loss, they don’t line up in neat, universal stages. You might feel mostly numb at first and break down later. You might cry constantly in the early months and find yourself laughing with friends sooner than you expected. You might feel “mostly okay” 90 percent of the time, and then suddenly get hit with a wave of sorrow at the grocery store because you passed your loved one’s favorite cereal.

So has the “stages idea” been “debunked”? In a sense, yes. What’s been tossed out is the notion that there’s one correct emotional sequence everyone should follow on a predictable timetable. The emotions themselves, sadness, anger, bargaining, acceptance, are very real. Lots of people recognize themselves in one or more of those experiences. The problem comes when we treat them as rules instead of possibilities.

Newer grief science paints a picture that’s less linear, more flexible, and honestly, more comforting.

One of the most helpful models I’ve come across describes grief as a kind of back-and-forth motion rather than a straight line. Instead of “step 1: denial, step 2: anger,” it suggests that healthy grieving means moving between two different modes.

In one mode, you’re “loss-focused.” You feel the ache. You talk about the person. You cry, remember, tell stories, look through photos, or sit in that empty chair at the table and let yourself feel how wrong it all is.

In the other mode, you’re “restoration-focused.” You pay the bills, answer emails, bathe the kids, and figure out how to mow the lawn even though your spouse always did that. You learn how to live in a world where this person isn’t here in the same way anymore.

And here’s the key: you don’t pick one. You oscillate between the two. Some days you’re right in the center of the pain; other days you’re mostly focused on everyday life. That back-and-forth isn’t avoidance; it’s how your brain and body pace themselves so you don’t drown.

It also means you’re not failing if you find yourself laughing at a silly video one minute and sobbing in the car the next. You’re not “in denial” because you went to a football game and actually enjoyed yourself. You’re not “stuck in depression” because your eyes still fill with tears when you smell your grandfather’s aftershave. You’re doing what grieving people do: feeling your loss, and also slowly learning how to live inside a changed story.

Another shift in the grief world has to do with what it means to “move on.” For a long time, the goal was described as severing your emotional ties with the person who died so you could “detach” and invest in new relationships. Now, many experts argue that’s neither realistic nor desirable. Instead, they talk about “continuing bonds” and finding ways to stay meaningfully connected to the person who died, even as you move forward.

That might look like cooking your mother’s recipes on holidays, talking to your spouse or your child when you drive by a place they loved, keeping their photo on the fridge and telling your kids stories about them, setting a chair at the table during special occasions, or donating to a cause they cared about.

For many people, those ongoing connections are comforting, not pathological. It’s not that you never accept their death; it’s that love doesn’t evaporate just because a heartbeat stops. It reshapes itself.

Grief researchers also talk more and more about meaning. When someone we love dies, the world we thought we knew can feel shattered. Grieving isn’t just about learning how not to cry in the produce aisle; it’s about slowly piecing together a world that makes sense again. That might involve spiritual questions and identity questions such as: “Who am I now that I’m no longer their spouse, or their caregiver?” It may involve choices about how to live in a way that honors what that person valued.

That’s why grief counseling today often looks less like a therapist trying to drag you through stages, and more like someone walking beside you as you ask, and eventually answer, some of those hard questions.

Of course, not all grief eases with time. A small percentage of people experience what’s now called Prolonged Grief Disorder, which is grief that remains intense and overwhelming for a year or more, to the point that it severely disrupts daily life. If you feel frozen, unable to function, stuck in guilt or yearning or hopelessness long after everyone else seems to think you “should” be better, that’s not a character flaw. It’s a sign you deserve more support. There are therapists and grief specialists who can help anyone in that place find a way forward.

But for most of us, grief looks less like climbing a staircase and more like learning to live with an ache that changes over time. It might be a roaring wave at first, knocking you flat. Then, months or years later, it might show up as a soft tug at your heart when your child graduates, or when you hear a song on the radio, or when you meet someone new and think, “I wish you could have known them.”

So if you’re grieving and worried that you’re not doing it right because you skipped a stage, or circled back, or never felt the thing you were “supposed” to feel, here’s the good news: there is no universal checklist. There is only your love, your story, and your way through.

You’re allowed to have days when you function just fine and days when you can’t stop crying. You’re allowed to keep their sweatshirt in your closet or talk to their photo, or bake their favorite cookies every year on their birthday. You’re allowed to laugh. You’re allowed to feel joy. You’re allowed to fall in love again. None of that erases what you had; it just means your heart is big enough to hold more than one thing at once.

Maybe the most merciful thing modern grief research tells us is this: you’re not behind. You’re not broken because you don’t fit into five tidy stages. You are a human being who loved someone and still loves them. You’re finding your own path forward, one breath, one memory, one day at a time.

Lauren Hall is the President and CEO of First Things First. Contact her at [email protected].