As I write this, I am considering the upcoming U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. For many, it’s a time of reflection and gratitude. But this year, many of us will be experiencing significant loss and grief. For some, this grief will be complicated.
According to the Mayo Clinic, complicated grief is “an ongoing, heightened state of mourning that keeps you from healing.” Stressors, including social isolation, financial hardships, and myths about the grieving process increase our risk for complicated grief. And, it’s not necessarily a response to the loss of a loved one. Any significant change or loss can trigger a grief response.
Getting stuck in grief is a very real problem. Fortunately, it can be corrected, and even prevented. We need a better understanding about the process of grief, techniques to manage our experience, and the time required for healing.
Five Stages of Grief
In the late 1960’s, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the stages of dying which she published in On Death and Dying. In 2005, David Kessler expanded on her hypothesis in their collaborative work, On Grief and Grieving, identifying five stages of grief:
- Denial: shock and disbelief that the loss has occurred
- Anger: that someone we love is no longer here
- Bargaining: all the what-ifs and regrets
- Depression: sadness from the loss
- Acceptance: acknowledging the reality of the loss
According to Kessler, the stages “were never meant to tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.” In other words, these five stages “don’t prescribe, they describe.” Have you found this to be true for you?
Although we grieve in our own unique way, we may experience these responses in the process. None of the stages are easy, including the acceptance stage, and we may move through each one more than once throughout our grieving process.
The Sixth Stage of Grief
In his newest book, Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief (Scribner, 2019), Kessler points to a crucial sixth stage to the healing process: meaning. This is the stage that allows us to transform our grief and find a path forward. Although the grief may never end, it does lessen, and through meaning we can make sense of our grief. We can stay hopeful, strong, resilient, and resistant.
I’ll dive into this in this series of posts. In the meantime, please take the time and care you need to manage through your loss and grief. And let me know how I can help. I can be reached here, on LinkedIn, or give me a call: 561-582-6060.
