Are the five stages of grief real?
The feelings are real, but the stages are not a reliable description of how grief works. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are all common in grief. What research does not support is the idea that bereaved people pass through them one by one, in order, and come out the other side.
Leading bereavement researchers Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut and Kathrin Boerner reviewed the evidence in 2017 and concluded that stage theory lacks sound empirical support, does not help identify people who need more help, and can be harmful to people who expect to grieve in stages and do not. Their recommendation was blunt: it should be relegated to history. If you have worried that you are grieving in the wrong order, you are not.
Where did the five stages come from?
They come from psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 1969 book On Death and Dying. Kübler-Ross interviewed seriously ill patients and described how dying people come to terms with their own death. Each stage had its own chapter, which made them look distinct and sequential, even though she acknowledged that people moved between them.
The book was groundbreaking for its time. It encouraged doctors to talk honestly with dying patients, and it gave the public a vocabulary for something rarely discussed. Kübler-Ross herself suggested that families go through similar stages, and a later book with David Kessler, On Grief and Grieving, applied the stages to bereaved people directly. Over time the model spread into hospitals, classrooms and popular culture as a description of grief after a death.
What does the research say about the stages?
One of the few direct tests was the Yale Bereavement Study, published in JAMA in 2007. It followed 233 people whose family member had died of natural causes. When the researchers rescaled the data, disbelief, yearning, anger, depression and acceptance did peak roughly in that order. But the raw findings told a different story: acceptance was the most commonly endorsed response from the start, and yearning, which is not one of the five stages, was the strongest painful feeling throughout the first two years.
Other researchers have drawn more skeptical conclusions. Stroebe, Schut and Boerner point out that the study did not show people moving through stages one after another, and that the original model was built on observations rather than tested evidence. George Bonanno's prospective research on widowed older adults found several different paths through grief, with resilience the most common. Neither finding fits a single sequence.
Why the stages caught on anyway
Stages are tidy, memorable and hopeful. They promise that the pain has an end point. They also gave helpers something to say. The cost, as critics point out, is that grieving people start measuring themselves against a list, and friends and even professionals start telling them where they should be.
What replaced the stages? The dual process model
One of the most influential alternatives is the dual process model of coping with bereavement, published by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut of Utrecht University in 1999. It describes two kinds of stress after a death. Loss-oriented stress is about the loss itself: missing the person, crying, looking at photos, going over how they died. Restoration-oriented stress is about the life that has changed: learning new tasks, managing money, new roles, a new identity.
The key idea is oscillation. Healthy grieving, in this model, means moving back and forth between the two: sometimes confronting the loss, sometimes setting it aside to deal with ordinary life or simply to rest. Stroebe and Schut also argue that taking breaks from grief, which they call dosage, is part of coping well, not avoidance. Someone who spends a morning sorting the estate and an evening watching a comedy is not in denial.
- Loss-oriented: grieving, yearning, remembering, visiting the grave, letting the sadness in.
- Restoration-oriented: handling paperwork, learning skills the other person used to cover, building new routines and relationships.
- Respite: time off from both, which the model treats as necessary rather than a failure to grieve.
Continuing bonds: you do not have to let go
For much of the 20th century, many clinicians assumed that healthy grief meant gradually detaching from the person who died, an idea often traced to Freud's 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia. In 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman challenged that assumption in their book Continuing Bonds, arguing that many bereaved people stay connected to the person who died, and that this connection can be healthy.
Continuing bonds can look like talking to the person, keeping their belongings, following their values, telling their stories, or sensing their presence. Research since then has been mixed. A 2014 review by Benjamin Root and Julie Exline found contradictory results across studies and suggested that it matters whether the bond feels comforting or distressing, what the relationship was like before the death, and what the person believes about an afterlife. In short, staying connected is not a problem in itself; what matters is how the connection sits with you.
Faith often shapes these bonds, through prayer, ritual or beliefs about where the person is now. Grief and faith explores that side of it.
What this means if you are grieving
You do not need to check off stages, and there is no correct order. Swinging between deep sadness and getting on with things is how many people grieve. Keeping a connection to the person who died is common and can be comforting. And there is no deadline. For what the day-to-day experience can feel like, see what grief feels like.
Some grief does get stuck. When intense longing or preoccupation stays at full strength long after a death and makes ordinary life hard to manage, prolonged grief describes what clinicians look for. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, in an emergency call 911, and for crisis support in the US call or text 988.
Laura Bass, a psychotherapist in Charlotte, North Carolina, works with adults on grief in individual counseling. Counseling can make space for both the loss and the rebuilding, without a timetable. You can ask Laura about it or return to the grief and loss guide.
Common questions
What are the five stages of grief?
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying in 1969. She was describing people facing their own death. Each of these feelings can show up in grief, often more than once and in any order. Most bereavement researchers today do not see them as a sequence that grieving people go through, and some argue the model should be retired.
Is there a sixth stage of grief?
David Kessler, who wrote with Kübler-Ross, has proposed finding meaning as a sixth stage. Meaning-making is also an important idea in grief research more broadly. But adding a stage does not solve the main problem researchers raise, which is treating grief as a fixed sequence at all. Many people find meaning gradually, alongside sadness, rather than as a last step.
Is it unhealthy to keep talking to someone who died?
Not in itself. Talking to the person, visiting a grave, keeping a sweater or following their advice are common ways people maintain a bond after a death, and the continuing bonds research suggests these connections can be healthy. It is worth paying attention if the bond mainly brings distress, or if you cannot accept the death at all after a long time. That is something to talk through with a counselor.
What is the dual process model of grief in simple terms?
It is the idea, from researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, that grieving people move back and forth between two kinds of work: facing the loss itself, and dealing with the changes it has caused in daily life. Taking breaks from both is part of coping well. It explains why grief can feel fine one hour and overwhelming the next.