If you have just experienced a loss, the world can feel completely unrecognizable.
Life still carries on as it always does, and somehow you are expected to keep walking through this changed world while carrying something you cannot put down.
The stages of grief are often offered as a map for what you are feeling. They’re a useful tool for understanding your feelings, but they shouldn’t be used as a checklist or anything of the sort.
They are a description of common emotional terrain – and the most important thing to know about them is that almost no one moves through them in order.
What We Mean By Grief
Grief is the response of a whole person – body, mind, identity, relationships – to a significant loss. Most often we associate it with bereavement.
But, grief can also follow the end of a marriage, a miscarriage or pregnancy loss, a serious diagnosis, the death of a pet, the loss of a job, estrangement from family, the slow loss of someone to dementia, or the loss of who you used to be after trauma.
If a loss has reorganized your life, your grief is real. It does not have to be ranked against anyone else’s, and it does not have to look a certain way to count.
Where the Five Stages Came From
In 1969, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying. After years of working with terminally ill patients, she described five emotional stages they often moved through as they faced the end of their lives: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The framework was later extended to bereaved people, then to anyone facing significant change.
Kübler-Ross herself was clear that the stages were never meant to tuck grief into a neat sequence. They were a way of giving language to a chaotic experience.
The Five Stages of Grief
Denial
Denial is what the mind reaches for when news is too big to absorb. It is not a refusal to face reality – it is a buffer. It can sound like she is going to walk through that door any second, but more often it shows up as numbness, fogginess, or going through the motions while telling people you are fine. Denial protects you while the rest of your nervous system catches up.
Anger
Anger is the part most people are afraid to admit to.
You may be angry at the doctors, at God, at the person who died for leaving you, at your ex, or at yourself for what you did or did not do. Anger is usually pain in disguise – pain that has nowhere to go. When it has somewhere safe to be expressed, it tends to soften. When it is suppressed, it tends to seep out sideways.
Bargaining
Bargaining is the what if stage. What if I had gone to the doctor sooner. What if I had answered the phone. What if I had been a better partner.
This is the mind trying to find a place where the loss could have been prevented, because that would mean it can still be undone. Bargaining rarely produces useful information about the past – it points to how much the loss matters and how little control you had over it.
Depression
The depression of grief is not the same as clinical depression, though they can overlap. It is the heavy, quiet stage that arrives when you can no longer outrun what has happened. You may feel exhausted in a way sleep does not fix, withdraw from people you love, or struggle to imagine the future. Tasks that used to be automatic become enormous.
This is often where people start to worry that something is wrong with them. Usually nothing is wrong – the grief has finally landed. That said, when this stage does not lift over time, it is worth speaking to someone, because grief and clinical depression can coexist. Depression counseling can sit alongside grief work when the two are tangled.
Acceptance
Acceptance is very often misunderstood. It isn’t about ‘getting over’ the loss – this is something that will never actually happen in 99% of cases.
Instead, it’s about learning to have more good days than bad, while carrying your grief. It’s important to remember that grief is the price we pay for loving someone or something, and it isn’t something that just goes away.
What About the Seven Stages?
Some clinicians work with an expanded version: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, the upward turn, and acceptance and hope.
It simply unpacks the original – separating the initial numbness of shock from later denial, and naming the gradual lift after the heaviest period as a stage of its own. Whether you find five or seven more useful matters less than understanding that no version is a sequence to march through.
Grief Is Not Linear
You may move through the stages out of order. You may skip some entirely. You may sit in one for months and then loop back to it a year later for reasons you cannot identify. You may feel acceptance on a Tuesday morning and full denial again that afternoon when you reach for the phone to call them.
This is not regression. This is grief. A more accurate image than a staircase is a wave. The waves come in. Some are small. Some knock you off your feet. Over time, most people find the gaps between the big ones get longer. But the ocean does not go away.
When Grief Becomes Stuck
For most people, the intensity of grief gradually softens over the first year. For some, it does not. Research suggests that around 7 to 10 percent of bereaved adults experience what is now formally recognized as Prolonged Grief Disorder – a clinical condition in which intense yearning, identity disruption, and difficulty re-engaging with life persist beyond twelve months and significantly interfere with day-to-day functioning.
Stuck grief is not a personal failing. It is more common after sudden, violent, or traumatic loss, after the death of a child, and after losses that were never fully acknowledged by those around you. It also responds well to specialist support.
What Grief Therapy Actually Looks Like
Effective grief therapy is aimed at helping you deal with the symptoms of grief, rather than trying to ‘fix’ anything within X number of therapy sessions.
Different approaches help with different parts of grief.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the industry standards for approaching grief and its symptoms.
- Trauma-informed therapy is often used when the loss was sudden and unexpected, leading to serious symptoms of trauma.
- Psychodynamic work explores attachment, identity, and the deeper dynamics of mourning, particularly when the relationship was complicated.
- Couples therapy can help partners work through grief together, rather than shutting off.
At Nexum, we can connect you with therapists who have years of experience dealing with grief, and helping clients get through it.
Reaching Out
If you are struggling with grief, you need to understand that it is completely normal and that there are people who can help you.
You don’t need a formal diagnosis to speak to somebody, or justify anything.
It’s always better to get in touch with a therapist before you start feeling worse, rather than trying to work through your feelings on your own.
Healing Is Not Forgetting
Grief is not a problem that can be solved in any one way – in fact, it isn’t something that should be looked at in this way at all.
Instead, it’s better to view grief as the price for having loved something. It’s the price we must all pay at some point in our lives for feeling deeply for another person.
It is the price of having loved something. The goal of healing is not to feel less, but to slowly build a life large enough to hold both the love and the loss.
Let Nexum Walk This With You
At Nexum, we connect people across Illinois, Texas, New Mexico, Missouri, and other locations with licensed therapists who specialize in grief, bereavement, complicated loss, trauma, and the depression and anxiety that often travel alongside them.
Reaching out takes a few minutes. The support it leads to can change the shape of what comes next.