Textbook Grief: The 5 Stage of Grief redefined – Part 1
- Antoinette
- Feb 19, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 20, 2024
Before we set off on my yoga journey I think it is important to view the ranges of emotions that death brings to your life.
I’m going to outline everything that was happening from a text book perspective first. The text book explanation did not help me. I think the text book explanation is there for professional counsellors to understand where to begin working with an individual. Yes it helps to understand where you are in the process but it does nothing for your soul, mental state or assist as a coping mechanism. It is literally text book white noise to me.
If you have ever struggled with any kind of loss, debilitating or life threating medical condition, fought an addiction or as I have, lost a love one, chances are you have either been presented with or encountered “the five stages of grief”.
These five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They can occur in any order, overlap and last for any amount of time. To top it off there is this catch-all phrase used after explaining each phase which is: “each person mourns in their own way” … whatever, right??
I read on the Marie Curie site that these five stages of grief originated from The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kúbler Ross in her book On Death and Dying, published in 1969. She proposed the stages to demonstrate the different emotions people can experience after a terminal illness diagnosis. Originally not intended for grief after losing a loved one, but it has found application in this field. I’ve not worked with a psychologist or counsellor recently or previously on this topic, so I’m not sure if these are still used in formal psychology but they are referenced a lot online when you search for “grief management” or under similar keywords.
Let me outline the stages of grief I’ve felt. I’ve managed to get a handle on them because I first lost my mother in 2017 and then my childhood best friend (let’s call her Sarah for the purpose of this blog) in early 2022. I was frustrated with the sense of familiarity I felt during Sarah’s journey as a lot of feelings I had never dealt with from my mother’s passing resurfaced.
It has helped me to assign new names and a different order for my personal stages of grief, and maybe you can identify with a more personal approach. I would encourage anyone to do the same of their grieving process, when you move into a calmer and more introspective phase. I found this a very self-soothing exercise and part of getting to know myself again. My stages are:
1) Pre-mourning
2) Death admin
3) Numbness & Guilt
4) Blaming
5) Self-loathing
6) Desperately seeking
7) Self-Medicating and dismissal
8) Self-Awareness
9) Walking the path with grief
10) Fear of suffering the same fate
My stages do not contradict the mainstream stages but I feel they better define what I was actually feeling. For example the denial phase is defined by numbness and continuing with your daily life as if nothing has happened. But what else are you suppose to do? You have to go to work, you have to buy groceries, pay the bills, put out the garbage weekly. If you have a family you have to resume the family admin duties or child welfare will be on your doorstep.
We no longer have the sensible ancient community approach to loss whereby you can hide in a tent in the deepest wilderness with your closes friends and family members mourning loudly from full moon to full moon while the rest of the tribe tend to your children and home (I’m generalising here). But life must resume and in this modern society as you pick up the reigns to your routine life and get your house chores up to date, or return a text message you never replied to 4 months ago. You begin the process of slowly suffocating yourself as you pretend everything is OK so that you can be an active participating member of society. Well done you.
I do know those who have gone totally off the rails when a loved one dies, I’ve seen it with some divorcees as well. Our society loses patience with these individuals who “self-indulge”, we medicate them and try put them back on the tracks, much to their detriment, when addiction follows we tut-tut at them.
I think we need to be kinder to each other. It is certainly my experience that nobody wants to be around the sad person, so we struggle through these predicable stages as best we can and try not to be the “Debbie downer” at social engagements, or worse still we extract ourselves from social life until we feel we can maintain ourselves in a presentable fashion.
Do we even know what we are doing to each other? I know I am certainly guilty in equal part of this, the “hurry up and get over it culture”, I am part of the problem. I never knew it until it happened to me. I want to change that. I want to change that by talking about it, by writing about it.
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