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Grief

How Grief Actually Works

The five stages were never about bereavement. Research reveals grief follows multiple paths, the most common being resilience, and the goal was never to let go.

Nancy Su Nancy Su, MA Clinical Psychology · CEO

Most people learn grief as a sequence: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Five tidy stages with a finish line at the end. It is one of the most recognized ideas in psychology, and one of the least supported by evidence.

The model was never built for bereavement. It came from observations of terminally ill patients describing their own dying process. If your grief has not followed a neat path, nothing is wrong with you.

What Research Actually Shows

Longitudinal studies reveal multiple grief trajectories, not one fixed path:

  • Resilience. The most common pattern. Functioning dips briefly and returns to baseline. This is not denial or avoidance.
  • Gradual recovery. A deeper decline followed by slow improvement over months.
  • Chronic grief. Prolonged distress that does not ease with time and may need professional support. In large prospective studies, roughly half to two-thirds of bereaved people showed the resilient pattern.

The Oscillation

You do not grieve in a straight line. The Dual Process Model of bereavement describes what actually happens day to day: you naturally oscillate between loss-oriented coping (sitting with the pain, missing the person) and restoration-oriented coping (handling logistics, trying new routines, re-engaging with the world). The back-and-forth is not avoidance. It is how your mind doses grief in manageable pieces.

The Bond That Stays

Older grief models assumed the goal was to "let go." Research on bereaved parents and children found the opposite: people who maintained a continuing bond with the deceased (keeping rituals, talking to them, sensing their presence) were not stuck. They were adapting.

What This Means For You

  1. Notice the swing. When guilt creeps in because you laughed or handled a task after a loss, name it: this is restoration-oriented coping, and it is part of the process.
  2. Keep one ritual. A phrase you say, a song you play, a place you visit. Maintaining a continuing bond is adaptive, not avoidance.
  3. Drop the timeline. If anyone implies you should be "over it" by now, remember: the most common grief trajectory is resilience, not a schedule.

Grief does not ask you to forget. It asks you to carry the connection forward in a different form.

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References

  1. Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. Macmillan.
  2. Bonanno, G. A., Wortman, C. B., Lehman, D. R., Tweed, R. G., Haring, M., Sonnega, J., Carr, D., & Nesse, R. M. (2002). Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1150–1164. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1150
  3. Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046
  4. Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis.