Journey 3 · Grief
The Five Stages, Tested With Grieving People
In 233 bereaved people, painful feelings peaked in the predicted order on average, yet acceptance was most endorsed from month one and yearning was the strongest of them.
In the main test of the five stages with grieving people, researchers interviewed 233 people at points between 1 and 24 months after a death from natural causes. Acceptance was the most endorsed item from the first month. Yearning was the strongest painful feeling. On average, disbelief, yearning, anger and low mood peaked in the order the theory predicts, within about six months, which the authors read as at least partial support.
But an average is not a path any one person walks. Reviewers found no sound evidence that individuals move through the stages in sequence, and they warn that expecting the stages can harm people whose grief doesn’t follow them. The stages began in interviews with people who were dying, about their own deaths. Some people do feel denial, anger or bargaining, and Kübler-Ross’s work mattered: it opened the conversation.
That’s why no sitting in Journey 3, Grief, asks where you’re “up to.” With Soraya, grief that circles back isn’t grief gone wrong. What changes if you stop checking which stage you’re in?
The research
Strong evidence Replicated findings and meta-analyses.
- Maciejewski, P. K., Zhang, B., Block, S. D., & Prigerson, H. G. (2007). An empirical examination of the stage theory of grief. JAMA, 297(7), 716–723.
- Stroebe, M., Schut, H., & Boerner, K. (2017). Cautioning health-care professionals: Bereaved persons are misguided through the stages of grief. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 74(4), 455–473.
- Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. Macmillan.
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