The Myth of the Five Stages of Grief

The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance have been repeated so many times they’ve become gospel. They show up in therapy rooms, self-help, and other bullshit psychology books like some sacred roadmap of emotional healing. The problem is, it was never meant to be that.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the model in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on interviews with people who were facing their own imminent deaths. These stages were descriptions of how terminal patients processed dying, not how the living processed loss. Later, the idea was generalized and like most things in mental health, oversimplified to the point of distortion.

In reality, grief doesn’t follow a script. It doesn’t unfold neatly from denial to acceptance. Many people never experience all five, and plenty skip them entirely. Some feel relief. Some feel nothing. Some feel everything at once. There is no universal sequence, and pretending there is only creates shame when someone doesn’t “grieve correctly.”

The five stages persist because people crave order. It’s comforting to believe that pain has predictable steps and an endpoint. But grief isn’t a staircase, it’s a storm. You move in and out of emotions, sometimes all in a day. Real healing is nonlinear, chaotic, and deeply personal.

If anything, the real lesson from Kübler-Ross’s work is not about stages, it’s about listening to the dying and acknowledging the complexity of the human response to loss. The stages became misrepresented because we wanted control. But control was never the point.