If you asked most people to describe grief, they'd reach for the same script: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Five tidy stages, a predictable arc, and a destination called "closure." It's one of the most widely known ideas in psychology — and one of the least supported by evidence.
The stages model was never about bereavement
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages in her 1969 work On Death and Dying. But her observations came from interviewing terminally ill patients about their own approaching death, not from studying bereaved families. The stages were never intended as a universal map of grief, and Kübler-Ross herself said as much. Yet the model was quickly adopted by textbooks, counsellors, and popular culture as a definitive description of what grief should look like.
Corr, C.A. (2020). Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the 'five stages' model in a sampling of recent American textbooks. OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying, 82(2), 294–322.The problem isn't just that the model is oversimplified. It's that it creates expectations. If you're "supposed" to move through predictable stages, then feeling relieved, numb, or oddly fine must mean something is wrong with you. In reality, those responses are not just common — they're the norm.
What grief actually looks like
In 1989, psychologists Camille Wortman and Roxane Silver published a paper examining three widespread beliefs about grief: that intense distress is inevitable, that distress is necessary for recovery, and that the endpoint is acceptance. Their conclusion, based on available evidence, was that none of these assumptions were reliably supported.
Wortman, C.B. & Silver, R.C. (1989). The myths of coping with loss. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57(3), 349–357.Grief, it turns out, is far more varied than the cultural script suggests. Some people experience intense sadness. Others feel relief, guilt about feeling relief, anger at the person who died, or a strange flatness where emotion should be. Many experience all of these in a single day. And a significant proportion of bereaved people — a proportion that surprises most — function relatively well from the outset.
The Dual Process Model: oscillation, not stages
In 1999, Dutch researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut proposed what has become the most empirically supported model of bereavement: the Dual Process Model. Rather than stages, they described two orientations that the bereaved oscillate between.
Stroebe, M.S. & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.Loss-oriented coping involves confronting the reality of the death — crying, yearning, revisiting memories. Restoration-oriented coping involves attending to the practical demands that loss creates — paying bills, reorganising household roles, building a new identity. Healthy grief involves moving between these two orientations, sometimes within a single conversation.
A decade later, a comprehensive review confirmed the model's clinical validity and empirical support.
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.This is what grief actually looks like: not a linear march through stages, but an ongoing oscillation between facing the pain and facing the future.
Resilience is the most common response
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive finding in modern grief research comes from George Bonanno at Columbia University. After studying thousands of bereaved individuals, Bonanno found that the most common trajectory following loss isn't prolonged distress or depression. It's resilience — stable, healthy functioning, even in the weeks immediately following a death.
Bonanno, G.A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience. American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.Approximately 46% of bereaved people show this resilient pattern. They grieve, certainly. But they also laugh, work, care for others, and experience genuine moments of joy — not as denial, but as part of a healthy human response to loss.
Bonanno's later work documented that grief encompasses relief, humour, and positive emotion alongside sadness, and that this breadth is both normal and adaptive.
If you've lost someone and found yourself laughing at a memory the same day you cried, that's not a failure of grief. It's exactly what the research says healthy grieving looks like.
Why this matters
Understanding what grief actually looks like — messy, oscillating, unpredictable, and sometimes surprisingly resilient — doesn't make it easier. But it can make it less lonely. If you're not following the script, it doesn't mean you're broken. It means the script was wrong.
The people around you may not understand this. They may expect you to be sadder, or sadder for longer, or to have "moved on" by now. The research suggests you should trust your own experience over their expectations.
Grief is not five stages. It's not a straight line from pain to acceptance. It's a daily oscillation between confronting loss and rebuilding life — and the most common response is quiet resilience. Whatever you're feeling, the science says it's probably normal.
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