| QUICK ANSWER The five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) were developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on her observations of patients facing their own terminal illness. They were not developed as a model of bereavement (surviving the loss of others) and were never intended as a sequential roadmap that all grieving people should follow. They have been widely adopted as exactly that, which has caused significant harm by making people feel they are grieving incorrectly when they do not experience the stages in order, skip stages, or do not reach acceptance in the expected way. |
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If you have experienced significant loss, you have almost certainly encountered the five stages. Someone may have told you which stage you are in, or you may have tried to locate yourself on the model to understand what you are going through.
The stages have genuine value: they name real experiences that many grieving people have. The problem is the roadmap framing: the suggestion that these stages occur in a predictable sequence, that each should be completed before moving to the next, and that acceptance is the natural and expected endpoint for everyone.
The Five Stages of Grief: What They Actually Describe
Denial
In Kubler-Ross’s original work, denial was the initial response of patients to their own terminal diagnosis: the difficulty absorbing the reality of what they had been told. In grief, denial might involve the sense that the loss has not fully registered, the experience of reaching for your phone to call someone who has died, or the feeling that the person will somehow return. It is not a conscious choice to reject reality but a normal feature of the mind’s difficulty absorbing profound loss.
Anger
Anger is a common component of grief: anger at the unfairness of the loss, anger at the person who died for leaving, anger at caregivers who did not prevent it, anger at a God or universe that allowed it, anger without a clear target. Anger in grief is legitimate and deserves acknowledgment rather than suppression or apology.
Bargaining
Bargaining in the context of terminal illness involved patients negotiating with doctors, God, or fate for more time. In bereavement, bargaining often appears as the repetitive ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ thinking: what if I had called sooner, if only I had said this, what if we had tried that treatment. It is an attempt to locate agency in a situation where agency was absent.
Depression
The profound sadness, withdrawal, and absence of motivation are a natural response to significant loss. This is not clinical depression requiring treatment; it is grief’s expression through the emotional register that processes deep loss. Distinguishing normal grief depression from clinical depression that warrants treatment is important and is addressed in the grief article at /grief.
Acceptance
Kubler-Ross’s acceptance was not happiness or resolution. It was the coming to terms with the reality of the loss: acknowledging it as real and permanent and finding a way to continue living in its presence. Many people reach this state without ever losing the grief. Acceptance is carrying the loss without being unable to function, not the end of grief.
What the Stages Miss
| What the Stage Model Suggests | What Research Shows |
| Stages occur in sequence | Grief is nonlinear; stages are revisited rather than completed |
| Everyone experiences all five stages | Individual variation is enormous; some stages may be absent for some people |
| Acceptance is the universal endpoint | Many people maintain ongoing bonds with the deceased without ‘reaching’ acceptance |
| Grief has an end point | Grief has an endpoint |
| Resilience trajectories are unusual | Research finds resilience (less intense grief) is the most common grief response |
What the Stages Are Genuinely Useful For
Despite their limitations as a sequential roadmap, the five stages have genuine value. They provide language for experiences that might otherwise be nameless and bewildering: knowing that the bargaining thoughts are a recognized part of grief reduces the isolation of having them. They communicate that these responses are normal and expected rather than signs of weakness or dysfunction. And for many people, encountering the stages model was the first time they felt that their grief was being seen and recognized rather than judged.
The model is most useful as a vocabulary for experiences that are real, not as a roadmap that prescribes what should be happening when.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Kubler-Ross develop the stages of loss of loved ones?
No, the five stages were developed from her work with terminally ill patients describing their own anticipated deaths, not from research with bereaved survivors. The application of the model to bereavement was an extrapolation that Kubler-Ross later supported, but that was not the original basis of the framework.
What happened to Kubler-Ross’s later views on grief?
In her later career and writing, Kubler-Ross significantly revised how the stages model was applied, emphasizing that the stages were not sequential, that not everyone experiences all stages, and that the model should not be used to evaluate whether someone is grieving correctly. The sequential roadmap interpretation was a widely adopted interpretation of the model that she came to distance herself from.
