Grief is a natural response to loss and is not a mental illness. It is the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. Often, the pain of loss can feel overwhelming. You may experience all kinds of difficult and unexpected emotions. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also includes physical, behavioral, cognitive, social, cultural, and philosophical elements.

 

The Five Stages of Grief

A theory developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggests that we go through five distinct stages of grief after the loss of a loved one: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

Even if it is not a comprehensive model and we know that grief is not linear, it still serves as a good basis to better empathize with the person who is grieving (any type of grief).

deny

  Denial is the stage that can initially help you survive the loss. You might think life makes no sense, has no meaning, and is too overwhelming. You start to deny the news and, in effect, go numb. It’s common in this stage to wonder how life will go on in this different state – you are in a state of shock because life as you once knew it, has changed in an instant.

  Once the denial and shock starts to fade, the start of the healing process begins. At this point, those feelings that you were once suppressing are coming to the surface.

anger

  Anger is a completely natural emotion, and very natural after someone dies. Death can seem cruel and unfair, especially when you feel someone has died before their time or you had plans for the future together.

  It’s also common to feel angry towards the person who has died, or angry at ourselves for things we did or didn’t do before their death.

bargaining

  When coping with loss, it isn't unusual to feel so desperate that you are willing to do almost anything to alleviate or minimize the pain. Losing a loved one can cause us to consider any way we can avoid the current pain or the pain we are anticipating from loss.

  It’s also common to find ourselves going over and over things that happened in the past and asking a lot of ‘what if’ questions, wishing we could go back and change things in the hope things could have turned out differently.

depression

  After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness.

  It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness.

acceptance

  When we come to a place of acceptance, it is not that we no longer feel the pain of loss. However, we are no longer resisting the reality of our situation, and we are not struggling to make it something different.

  You understand your loved one can never be replaced, but you move, grow, and evolve into your new reality.