The Five Stages of Grief

and how they correlate with one another

Introduction

What causes us to go through each specific stage? How does one go from denial to bargaining? What is the correlation between each stage?

The First Stage: Denial and Isolation

This stage starts off with something ‘earth shattering’ within someone's life, and is often related to death. But why do we often deny things which may be harmful to our mental well-being?

A Freudian mechanism of Defense

• Denial is actually a defense mechanism the mind goes through in order to protect the ‘ego’ from that thing that the individual cannot cope with.

• As the book states, denial is: “Usually a temporary defense and will soon be replaced by partial acceptance. Maintained denial does not always bring increased distress if it holds out until the end, which I still consider a rarity”

How does one go from Denial to Anger?

• I think anger is really a result of all those pent up feelings that a person represses within the Denial stage.

• People need to ventilate the rage just like Sister I did in the chapter on anger, or else she would not be able to move on.

What happens when the anger subsides?

• As we see in the previous slide, after the anger has subsided (the active point of emotions) the emotions start going to a downward slope, going from an active emotional state (anger) to the more passive emotional states (bargaining, and finally depression)

Bargaining

• Bargaining is just setting the person up for more pitfalls in the future. But why?

• As the book states: “The bargaining is really an attempt to postpone; it has to include a prize offered “ for good behavior,” it also sets a self imposed deadline.”

Relevance

• It is relevant because once you make those bargains with yourself, you set yourself up for depression later on because those self imposed deadlines will probably never come in a situation that involves death.

• “Tipping” someone into depression in this case may be the best way to help them overcome it faster, because they won’t be able to make any more bargains with themselves.

Depression

• After all that has been said and done, and the bargains are not fulfilled, the person will slip into a passive emotional state which is Depression.

• This stage usually lasts the longest for people, as shown in the book after all that a patient can go through, the inevitable will eventually come; their health declining, and the ever impending death will soon to arrive, the patient can no longer shrug it off as before in the denial and bargaining stages.

Is there a correlation between depression and acceptance?

• Kubler-Ross herself never was able to accept her own demise, and I could not find any direct connection from the depression stage to the acceptance stage.

• The variables of the different situations make it hard to make the connection, and I think it is all a matter of will power to accept ones own demise.

Acceptance: Is it possible?

• Maybe the United States as a whole is a bad example of the acceptance of death, because we as Americans shun even the word death, let alone the concept and inevitability of death. We consider death as just something that other people go through, but we won’t ever have to go through, because it is nearly impossible for our human minds to comprehend the cessation of our own existence.

Conclusion

• I think the Kubler-Ross model is definitely good model on the stages we go through with grief and with death and dying. After going through this course a learned a lot of things, and the one thing I learned most is that everyone goes through different subtle stages that don’t pertain exactly to the 5 stage model. Not everyone will go through these stages exactly how they are laid out, because everyone is different in the way they handle dire situations.