Why is it that no one ever gives any appropriate credit to the creator of the popular 7 stage grief process? I'm trying to research it's creation but have been having no luck.

The original 5 step process first appeared in the 1969 text, "On Death and Dying," by Swiss-born and Colorado-trained, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.

So to give appropriate credit where appropriate credit is due...can someone please tell me who came up with the 7 stepped adaption (inserting the added steps of shock/disbelief and guilt) to the Ross model, and where it was first published?

I was in the middle of writing a post discussing how people react to facts that are contrary to their world view and thought it was described pretty well by the grieving process. That is, until I read this post. Now, I have to reconsider my position. I think I might compare their reactions to a car wash instead (which might be more applicable, anyhow). Thanks for the insightful piece.

THis is long overdue. I don't know that I have ever really believed that death had to follow specific stages, especially stages that were neatly tucked into time frames. How can a grieving person put a time limit on their healing. I agree that the stages themselves are relevant; however, it is time to update their meaning and to decide to not bound them by time limits.

...it's just that we don't always recognize them for what they are. It's like all growth processes, we have to have one process finished before we can do another. Learning to walk comes after learning to crawl, which comes after learning to sit up independently.

We may not know exactly what a stage really is, as the stages are indeed combinations of factors for motivation (physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual), which helps explain why some people seem to go through slightly different processes, but it's very likely that it's just that the differences are only superficial, while the underlying processes are the same.

My own research on the growth (including healing) process suggests that we move through the following stages of focus/motivation, including the classic stages that come after a serious loss:

1. Physical input: needing the basics, such as air, water, food, energy - "shock/denial" where you just focus on staying alive.
2. Physical output: breathing out, pee/sweat, poop, energy to remove toxins and other stuff the body is overwhelmed by) - "anger" where you express yourself and get rid of all the stress chemicals.
3. Emotional output, with physical input: needing to personally connect with others - "bargaining" where you desire to find others who are willing to help you take care of your body.
4. Emotional output with physical output: using that connection with others to express yourself, which, if your expressions aren't welcomed, leads to "depression", and if they are welcomed, leads to number 5! :-)
5. Intellectual input, with emotional input, and physical input: understanding things in a big-picture, world-centric way, and finding one's place in the universe - "acceptance".

And from there on the stages are a lot more of intellectual understanding, with more input and output of emotional and physical stuff, up until the spiritual stage of output show up. But by #5 we usually say that people are mostly healed and are seen as "whole", and thus the grieving process is complete.

If you click on my name up there, you'll see a diagram of this process, which is, I discovered, the same as the I Ching, as well as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and many other growth process theories. Kinda cool, huh?

On number 5, it should be intellectual OUTPUT! Sorry. Input would be the learning process, while output is what happens once you understand and are able to act on that wisdom.

I couldn't agree more. I just lost my dad 6 months ago and I can tell you I didn't experience even close to a process as described by the 5 stage model. Niether did my mother, though she was expecting that was how she was supposed to feel. When she didn't feel the way she though she should she experienced a great amount of guilt, I think she would have had an easier time adjusting to her husband's death had she spent less time trying to figure out why she wasn't going through those stages.

Its my opinion that 'grieving' is just as simple to define as 'love,' which is to say that its not simple at all. How a person reacts to and feels after the death someone close is as unique to that person as how they felt about their loved one in life. Its not a defined series of states, but a complex combination of emotion and thoughts that is as unpredictable as one can imagine.

How and when the death occurred also makes the experience of grief unique. If a child dies unexpectedly (as was the case with my son a few years ago) the grief would be entirely different than that experienced if a parent died as the result of a terminal illness(as with my dad).

The one thing that bothers me the most about the 5 stage model is the use of the word 'denial.' I think it would be more accurate to call it a lack of understanding. "He can't just be gone..." That was a thought pressing at me in the days following my dad's death. While it may sound like denial, it was nothing close to it. I just could not process the fact that my dad was no longer animating the body that had belonged to him for so long. Death is just not something our brains are meant to comprehend. That, I believe, is the one aspect of grief that we all share.

It also needs to be said that I was with my dad taking care of him prior to his death. We talked a great deal about how he was feeling during his last year, and his experience was contrary to the original application of the 5 stage model. The theory isn't just incorrect as a model of grieving, its also incorrect in the way one feels when they know they are dying. This is just my opinion though.

Tune In Monday, 9/21, for a Full Frontal Assault on Stages of Grief at Broken Hearts PT Blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/broken-hearts

If, as we suggest, there are no stages of grief, it might make sense that there be no model at all to confuse grievers who have a hard enoght time without false definitions of their conditions.

Russell

www.grief.net