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Surfing the (Repeating and Relentless) Waves of Grief
Grief comes in waves. You might be familiar with the popular concept of the five stages of grief. They are…
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
And what do we do with anything expressed as “stages?” In our modern, western culture, we treat stages as purely linear. We turn the stages into steps to be accomplished, and we assume that once we’ve worked past the anger or exhausted our bargaining energy, those stages are over and we can move on.
When Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote about these stages, she was doing so out of her research and work among people dying of terminal diseases. She was helping people accept their own imminent moments of death. Her work was ground-breaking and highly valuable to the field of psychology.
It wasn’t her fault that the rest of us applied her ideas to every kind of grief imaginable. We often accept the mistaken, common notion that when we’ve lost a marriage, a career, or a loved one, we simply need time (which is supposed to heal all wounds) to work through the stages of grief and then we’ll be back to feeling normal again.
But grief doesn’t work that way. At least, not the kind of grief I’ve experienced.
