What are the phases of grief?

There are a few frameworks we can use to define and explore grief, but generally we understand grief through Elizabeth Kübler-Ross description that she outlined in 1969 and spent decades refining. She describes five stages, and while others have amended aspects of Kübler-Ross’ theory, psychologists continue to agree that in general, we have five or more “stages” or phases that we move through.

The stages include denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. Most psychologists agree these are not necessarily experienced in a linear fashion; indeed we rarely do. While we may want a clean and linear map through grief, grief is messy, repetitive, and sneaky. Generally though, we experience more denial than anything else in the beginning, and we experience it less as we move along. As we heal we experience more and longer periods of acceptance as we have created a new set of expectations and habits.

Denial is like a bandaid for our emotions. Our brain blocks out something extremely painful, or as much as it can, to help our brain function. Extreme pain releases a lot of chemicals in the brain that make it difficult for us to focus on daily life, and denial acts like a strainer to keep us from having too much reaction, too many chemicals, to handle. It might feel like shock, and a little bit odd as we go back to work after hearing bad news, but it is an adaptive behavior to help us finish something we can’t leave undone or to help us function until we are in a safe place to deal with the emotional fallout of an event.

Anger is that righteous frustration we feel when we have been wronged or when the loss of something is so big that other emotions just don’t allow for enough yelling or movement to communicate the pain. Anger shields us from the despair it covers up with its noise. Anger is energizing, until it has exhausts us.

Bargaining is our attempt to find the silver lining, or negotiate less of a loss. It can look like prayer or positivity, it can include trying to find a compromise with another person or begging for compromise with a diagnosis.

Finally sadness or despair settles in once we have acknowledged a loss to be true, we have admitted there is nothing else we can do, and we feel the grips of accepting reality.

This leads to acceptance, because we cannot truly create new habits, move through a new daily life, buy and sell and move the way we may need to if we still hold onto hope that something might change. Acceptance isn’t deciding the loss was actually a good thing, or changing reality. Acceptance is a full acknowledgement of our lack of control, and a desire to realign ourselves to a new reality.

These phases all look different depending on the situation, the intensity of the loss, the individual they are impacting, and the resources we have to move through them.

Consider how this looks when you grieve something personal, and when you grieve something climate-related. While the problem is very different, our mental and emotional processing tools are the same.