In my opinion, grief is one of the most delicate processes a person can experience.

I personally am the type to use "distractions" to let myself gather my thoughts and accept the situation I'm in.

If you're like me an important advice I can give is to never do things you enjoy as a distraction, I've entirely lost the desire to pursue some of my greatest passions because they would recall painful memories years later and made me go through the whole cycle again.

NoStranger

We've all heard of the famous five stages of grief. When you're grieving, you go through the following process:

But as it turns out, we have got the five stages all wrong.

The five stages of grief come from the pioneering work of the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was one of the first scientists to devote herself to the study of death. Through conducting interviews with several hundred people who were terminally ill, she discovered that they commonly experienced these five experiences.

The way that these stages are described makes it seem like they are linear, like you must start at denial and must end at acceptance. But Kübler-Ross never meant us to think of them in this way. You don't move from 1-2-3-4-5; it's more like 1-4-2-3-5-2-3-2-1-4-2-5-2-1-4-5. Even more, some people don't experience certain stages at all and some people experience multiple stages at the exact same time.

The other problem with viewing the five stages as linear is that people might try to 'get you' to move faster through the stages to reach what they perceive to be the final stage of acceptance. (How unsurprising that in Old Happy's goal-obsessed culture that we've decided that grief must have a goal, too.) There's no moment that marks grief as being 'done.'

What Kubler-Ross attempted to do — provide a container for understanding some of the most common feelings and expressions of grief — has been taken far too literally, with so many people believing that one must grieve in this way. But she would be the first to say that there is no one way to grieve. Grief is profoundly personal. It will be different for every single individual and for every single loss.

If you are grieving a loss in your life — of a person, a relationship, a pet, a job, a stage of your life, a role, a dream, or anything else — please know that your experience will look very different to everyone else's. You don't need to force yourself to go through any stages; you simply need to be with your experience, whatever it looks and feels like.

tech

![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6047db270c9e837bb47bbb37/8768a86d-ec63-450f-acfe-ec5a73ec6c83/grieving_no+stroke.png?format=750w)

We've all heard of the famous five stages of grief. When you're grieving, you go through the following process: 

- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance

But as it turns out, we have got the five stages all wrong. 

The five stages of grief come from the pioneering work of the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was one of the first scientists to devote herself to the study of death. Through conducting interviews with several hundred people who were terminally ill, she discovered that they commonly experienced these five experiences.

The way that these stages are described makes it seem like they are linear, like you must start at denial and must end at acceptance. But Kübler-Ross never meant us to think of them in this way. You don't move from 1-2-3-4-5; it's more like 1-4-2-3-5-2-3-2-1-4-2-5-2-1-4-5. Even more, some people don't experience certain stages at all and some people experience multiple stages at the exact same time. 

The other problem with viewing the five stages as linear is that people might try to 'get you' to move faster through the stages to reach what they perceive to be the final stage of acceptance. (How unsurprising that in Old Happy's goal-obsessed culture that we've decided that grief must have a goal, too.) There's no moment that marks grief as being 'done.' 

What Kubler-Ross attempted to do — provide a container for understanding some of the most common feelings and expressions of grief — has been taken far too literally, with so many people believing that one must grieve in this way. But she would be the first to say that there is no one way to grieve. Grief is profoundly personal. It will be different for every single individual and for every single loss. 

If you are grieving a loss in your life — of a person, a relationship, a pet, a job, a stage of your life, a role, a dream, or anything else — please know that your experience will look very different to everyone else's. You don't need to force yourself to go through any stages; you simply need to be with your experience, whatever it looks and feels like. 