Many of us are familiar with The Five Stages of Grief. While often thought of as a linear step-by-step process, The Five Stages of Grief is anything but. Even Elisabeth Kubler-Ross emphasized that:  

“People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion.”

What are the Seven Stages of Grief?

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross created Five Stage Model during her work with terminally ill hospice patients. The ive Stages are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

Denial is less about denying the death happened, but encompasses feelings of shock, numbness, and disbelief. Anger can be directed at the deceased for not taking care of themselves, directed at the self for not being able to prevent the death, directed at doctors and/or professional caregivers for not being able to prevent the death, and anger of feeling left behind. Bargaining is described as the desire to go back to the way things were before the death, to go back in time and somehow prevent the death from happening. In the depression stage, grievers commonly experience feelings of emptiness, intense sadness, withdraw from life, feel like life is meaningless. In the fifth and final stage, Acceptance, it is less about being okay with what happened and more about accepting the reality that our loved one has died. 

Four Tasks of Mourning

Taking a more fluid and flexible approach to the grief process is the Four Tasks of Mourning. First developed in the 1980s by J. William Worden, this Task Model offers an alternative to earlier Stage and Phase models developed to explain the grief process. The Four Tasks are as follows: 

Task I: To accept the reality of the loss. 

Task 2: To process the pain of the loss. 

Task 3: To adjust to a world without the deceased.  

Task 4: To find a way to remember the deceased while embarking on the rest of one’s journey through life. 

These tasks are not meant to be a fixed progression, instead:

“Tasks can be revisited and worked through again and again over time. Various tasks can also be worked on at the same time. Grieving is a fluid process.” J.William Worden

Grieving is a fluid process, not a linear one. Never once have I witnessed a client’s experience of grief as neat and tidy, step-by-step, or linear, after all we’re talking about human emotions aren’t we? Those things that are uncomfortable and messy and unpredictable, right? However, what I have observed is clients moving through a series of emotional processes in grief.

As we move through Task 1 of accepting the reality of our loss (not the same as the Acceptance Stage of Grief), we can experience feelings of shock, disbelief, denial in line with the Denial Stage of Grief. 

As we move through Task 2 of processing the pain of our loss, we experience a range of painful emotions in line with Depression and Anger Stages of Five Stages, but more broad and inclusive of feelings and emotions including guilt, blame, anxiety, helplessness, loneliness, helplessness, and yearning among others.

And as we continue to move through Task 2, we can also experience some level of avoidance. Sometimes the pain of the loss is so unbearable and too difficult to confront. Avoidance can look like withdrawal, staying busy during all waking hours, becoming a workaholic, numbing with alcohol, substances, food, or TV, avoiding people, places or things that can trigger reminders of your loss, and denying your feelings or saying “I’m fine!” when you’re not.

As we move through Task 3 of adjusting to a world without our deceased loved one, we must work through internal adjustments (how the death affects our sense of self), external adjustments (how the death affects our everyday functioning in the world), and spiritual adjustments (how the death affects our beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world).  

Finally, as we move through Task 4 of finding a way to remember the deceased while embarking on the rest of one’s journey through life, in line with Acceptance Stage of Grief, acknowledging and accepting that our loved one is no longer with us in a physical/tangible way, but allows for creative ways to maintain a connection or bond with our loved ones.

CONSIDERING Grief COUNSELING For widows IN ANN ARBOR or across michigan?

Hi, I’m Nikki. A graduate of the University of Michigan School of Social Work and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 17+ years of experience. In my online therapy practice, I support women and widows through life’s tough transitions after the death of their husband, spouse, or partner. Contact me here for your FREE 15-minute consultation