The Stages Of Grief Have Been A Topic Of Debate In Grief

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler came up with the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although grief is individual depending on the person and the situation, these stages help organize the process of grieving. The stages act more as tools than a timeline. The movie My Girl portrays these stages after the death of Thomas J., Vada’s best and only friend.

Theorists like Lindemann claim that there are five phases that are normal to go through in grieving: somatic disturbance, preoccupation with the deceased, guilt, hostility or anger, and difficulty with everyday tasks. Kubler-Ross identified the commonly recognized and accepted stages of grief

The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Axelrod, 2017). She stated that

Five stages of grief were identified by Dr. Kubler-Ross; Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Everybody will grieve in their own unique way, and the order of the five stages may differ from everybody. Some people may not even go through certain stages at all. Grieving helps us get through a rough time whether is finding out a love one has passed or even your own dying process.

The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.

Wolterstorff, N. (1987). Lament of a Son. In Lament for a son. Michigan, 49505, Grand Rapids: Wm. B Eearmans Publishing 2140 Oak Industrial Drive, N.E.

Death is a universally experienced phenomenon. In the United States alone, over 2.6 million people die each year (Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2015). For practitioners, it is of utmost importance to better understand the process of grief to develop better interventions for bereaved individuals.

According to American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the five common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance respectively. However, humans are quite fascinating creatures as we might alter the order in which every stage hits us. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain, in every stage of grief of any kind, we must come to terms and accept the cards that are casted in front of us; and it’s entirely up to us how we choose to play them.

As stated by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, and a pioneer in near death experiences, and the author of the world famous book On Death and Dying, which first explores the 5 stages of grief and the key emotional reactions to them. The common stages and effects of grief are accepted as the following; Denial and isolation can be summarized as, “…helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense” Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969.After denial comes anger, which is explained as outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying, 1969, one’s anger can extent to anyone and anything in our surroundings, including God, in the sense, ‘Why did God allow this to happen?’. And under the anger is pain. The next stage in grief is bargaining, to be understood as trying to bargain with the universe or God hoping that ‘it isn’t so’. To quote

In our bereavement, we spend different lengths of time working through each step and express each stage more or less intensely. The five stages do not necessarily occur in order. We often move between stages before achieving a more peaceful acceptance of death. Many of us are not afforded the luxury of time required to achieve this final stage of grief.

Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of

In the first stage that I will discuss is denial. In this stage people may deny the reality of the situation by blocking out the words and hiding from the facts ("5 Stages of Loss & Grief | Psych Central," n.d.-a). For instance, someone could be diagnosed with some form of cancer. That person may not want to know because it might overwhelm them. So they would not want to know the reality of

In her seminal work on grief and grieving, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the concept now very well known as the Five (5) Stages of Grief, enumerated chronologically as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In this concept, Kubler-Ross explored and discussed the normative stages that people go through when they experience the loss of a loved one and feel grief as result of this loss. It is also through these stages that people are now more aware of their feelings and thoughts when experiencing grief and the loss of a loved one. While the stages of loss are mainly developed for grief experienced with the death of a loved one, it is a generally accepted framework in understanding feelings of grief when an individual experiences the loss of a significant individual in his/her life. The discussions that follow center on the discussion of Kubler-Ross' 5 Stages of Grief, applied in the context of the Story of Job in the Bible.

Anger is the next stage when the individual is starting to experience pain. This anger starts to be aimed at objects, strangers and friends and family. The anger that is faced is aimed at the individual who has died but we know it’s not their fault but it causes upset as the person has left, this then causes guilt which makes individuals angrier (businessballs.com 2016).

Theories and models that have been developed to explain how or why we feel what we do and ways of working through grief. Many professionals have expanded on Freud’s model of bereavement, which emphasises that grief about personal attachments and the process of experiencing pain, detaching from the deceased and rebuilding a new life with them (Walsh, 2012). Margaret Stroebe and Hank Schut’s model attempts to explain how people alternate from intense pining and normality for the dead person (Walsh, 2012). Psychologist J. William Worden’s stage-based model outlines four tasks of grief, to: accept, work through, adjust, maintain and move on (Worden & Winokuer, 2011). Therese Rando’s model outlines how people proceed through six phases of mourning in order