The messiness of grief: beyond the stages

Photo by Darina Belonogova

If you’ve been bereaved at any time, you may have heard about the ‘five stages of grief’. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They’re often shared with use by well-meaning friends and family as a roadmap out of the horridness we’re feeling at that time.

Perhaps you’ve sat and wondered which stage you’re in right now.

And perhaps, if you're honest, these stages haven't quite fitted with what you’ve been experiencing.

Some days, you might wake up and manage to get through some practical tasks. Other days, you might stand in a supermarket aisle unable to decide which washing-up liquid to buy, paralysed by the choice. Some days you feel utterly sick in the stomach, unable to eat, and waves of tears flow down your cheeks. And at other times, you want to share all the stories you have. Some days, you’re calm and at other times you feel flooded with anger and “what ifs”, bargaining with a universe that doesn’t give an answer.

If this sounds familiar - if your grief feels messier, less linear, more unpredictable than the stages you’ve heard about - you are simply grieving as humans actually grieve.

What Kübler-Ross actually said (and what got lost)

The stages that people often associate with bereavement were developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. The model was based on her work with terminally ill patients. That is, she was drawing from her experience of those facing their own deaths, rather than bereaved people facing loss. Despite this, her model, soon became adopted as a useful way to think about grief in general.

She didn’t intend her stages to be a rigid, linear, and unidirectional process that reflected everyone’s grief. Instead, she described the stages as phases that the bereaved might move through - but also that they might around. She pointed out that not everyone experiences all of the stages, they don't happen in a fixed sequence, and we can revisit stages several times, moving backwards and forwards across them.

But somewhere along the way, the nuance got lost.

The stages became a checklist. A roadmap. An expectation. People might tell you that: “You should be past the anger stage by now” or ask “Why aren’t you yet moving on?”. This kind of comment wrongly suggests that the stages are worked through in sequence, that grief is simply something to complete and there are fixed milestones with a defined endpoint. And the need to complete this and to ‘do’ grief correctly, becomes an extra burden.

The reality: grief is messy

What most people experience is something far messier and less tidy than the concept of ‘stages’. Grief is your mind and body coming to terms with the very sad reality of the loss from the death of the person you have loved.

Grief can recede and return. Some days you might feel you’re functioning again, perhaps even noticing a faint smile - quickly followed by a feeling of guilt for this. Other days, the weight of loss is so all-consuming that everything feels impossible.

You might be angry and accepting in the same afternoon. You might think - and tell others - you're “doing better”, and then a song, a smell, a quick mis-sighting brings everything flooding back with the same intensity as the early days.

This is grief.

So, the concept of a linear set of stages doesn’t seem to tally with experience. There are other ways of looking at grief.

Oscillating between loss and life

In 1999, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut proposed a different way of understanding grief: the Dual Process Model. Instead of stages moved through, they described two types of experiences we oscillate between:

Loss-oriented processes involve confronting the reality of the loss. The yearning. The sadness. The pain of absence. Memories of the person you've lost. Processing what their death means. Crying, grieving, letting yourself feel the enormity of what has been lost.

Restoration-oriented processes involve dealing with the practical realities and changes that loss brings. Attending to everyday life. Learning to do things you’ve not had to do before. Making decisions. Perhaps finding a distraction at work or elsewhere. Embracing the relationships with others who are still around. Building a life that continues, even in the absence of the person you love.

Here's what's crucial: the model suggests we need both. And healthy grieving involves oscillating - moving back and forth - between these two processes (Stroebe & Schut, 1999, 2010).

Some days you'll be deep in loss-oriented grief, allowing yourself to feel and cry and remember. Other days, you'll be more restoration-oriented, getting on with practical matters, perhaps even experiencing moments where you're not actively thinking about your loss. And you'll move between these, sometimes multiple times in a single day.

Neither is ‘better’ or more advanced than the other. Both are necessary. The back-and-forth movement is a sign you are coping. The model also acknowledges something rather important: sometimes we need time off from grief. Moments where we simply rest, recuperate, and engage with life. Perhaps this isn't avoidance or denial but necessary breathing space.

The problem arises when we get stuck in one or the other; either avoiding the pain by keeping busy all the time, or being locked in the pain that nothing else can reach you. And that might be the time that you want support from a therapist to help work through this.

Growing a life around grief

There's another way of looking at grief stemming from the work of Lois Tonkin. She tells of a woman who she was working with whose child had died years earlier. The mother drew a picture to try to explain her experience. She described her initial grief as filling up her entire life. If her life were illustrated by a circle and grief by shading it in, the circle would be completely coloured in. She had expected that over time, her grief would shrink in size, becoming a smaller shaded area within the circle.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, her grief stayed the same size - but her life grew larger around it (Tonkin, 1996). New experiences came and new parts of her life developed. The grief didn't diminish, but it was no longer the only thing. Some days, grief still filled her awareness completely. Other days, there was space for other experiences and moments of joy.

This is sometimes called the “growing around grief” model. Grief stays the same, but life expands around it.

Using this, it suggests that we don’t ‘get over’ our loss. We’re not looking to make our grief smaller. But life can still grow and we can still feel joy at some point, create meaning and have new experiences - alongside the grief.

How therapy can help

This is where therapy - and particularly hypnotherapy - comes in. Not to hurry you through it. Not to make the pain disappear or bring back the person you've lost. But to give you the time and space to sit with grief, to explore the oscillation, to see when you might be stuck.

Grief rarely comes alone. There might be guilt about things said or unsaid. Anger at circumstances, at others, even at the person who died. Regret. Relief. Conflicting emotions that feel impossible to hold simultaneously. Therapy provides space to explore all of this without needing to make it neat or resolved. There is no need for guilt about laughing again or finding something enjoyable.

Often in grief, we need to explore not just the loss, but the relationship itself. The complicated history. The unfinished conversations. The ways we're learning to maintain a connection with someone who's no longer physically present. Through therapy, we can work gently with these relationship dynamics.

While there is grief for the person who has died, there is also grief for the life and future you imagined with them, that will no longer happen. Therapy can help you explore how to move forward.

There is no right way

Your grief is unique. Some days will feel manageable. Others will not. You’ll feel sick in the stomach and wonder why people in the street are getting on with their lives when you have experienced such huge sadness. You'll move between focusing on your loss and focusing on life. You might find your grief stays the same size while your life slowly, tentatively, begins to expand around it. Or your experience might look entirely different from any model.

All of this is OK. All of this is grief.

One of the most tricky things is that the people around you don’t know how to help or you don’t want to share how you are feeling with them. How you move through grief can be helped by having support through this.

If you're struggling and the messiness feels overwhelming, if you need someone to sit with you in it, if you need help navigating the oscillation between loss and life - then get in touch.

References

Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197-224.

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (2010). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: A decade on. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 61(4), 273-289.

Tonkin, L. (1996). Growing around grief—another way of looking at grief and recovery. Bereavement Care, 15(1), 10.