What to Expect When You’re Grieving: The 7 Stages of Grief

Experiencing loss can be painful, confusing, challenging, and deeply unsettling. One of the certainties of this life is that we all experience loss. That loss takes various forms, and while it won’t affect everyone the same way, we will all experience it. One of the ways to help you navigate grief is by making use of the seven stages of grief.

The Nature of Grief

Grief is the process we go through to come to terms with loss. Loss looks different for different people. Typically, we consider the death of a loved one to be a loss, but it’s not the only form of loss there is. It’s a loss if you lose your job or your home, and it’s also a loss to go through a breakup, separation, or divorce. When a person receives a terminal diagnosis or goes through a significant life transition like retirement, that is also a form of loss.

When a loss occurs, it changes your life as you know it. The patterns, habits, and relationships that make up your life start to unravel, and the changes loss heralds can be deeply upsetting and unsettling. Grieving helps you come to terms with that loss.

You may have heard about the five stages of grief, a model that the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pioneered through her work. Those five stages are denial, anger bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, another model was developed to highlight the complexities of grief; there are often other emotions and thoughts going through a person as they grieve than these five stages suggest.

The Seven Stages of Grief

The seven stages of grief are a way to help explain the complexity of going through loss. These stages are as follows:

Shock When you first hear of the loss, or the situation first becomes apparent, the initial reaction is often shock, disbelief, and numbness. This can be a way to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by the rush of emotions loss can unleash.

Denial The reality of the situation is often quite painful and unbearable, which may lead to a refusal to accept the reality of the loss.

Anger During the anger stage, you may lash out, and feel resentful, frustrated, or bitter about the loss. These emotions may be directed toward God, yourself, other people, and sometimes even the person you’ve lost.

Bargaining When your anger dissipates somewhat, you may feel helpless and not in control. One way to try and regain control of the situation is by pleading with the Lord or trying to make a deal with Him to remedy the situation.

Depression. When the reality of the situation, including the fact that there are no bargains to be made, sinks in, this can lead to experiencing hopelessness, intense sadness, and pain which can manifest as a struggle to fall asleep, being emotionally numb, changes in appetite, or other physical symptoms. You may feel lonely and isolated as you process and reflect on the loss.

Acceptance When you accept the situation, you’re coming to terms with the reality of the loss. This is your new normal, and you begin to adjust and rebuild your life without the relationship or the other person.

Integration With time, you find ways to begin integrating the loss into your life, to forge a new sense of identity, and to find ways of honoring the relationship or the person you’ve lost.

There are other ways of expressing the seven stages, including testing and acceptance. Testing involves trying to build your new normal and trying out different things that could help you move forward. Acceptance is about appreciating your life as it is now and feeling hopeful for new possibilities.

Others make the last few stages about the upward turn, where things start to change and you feel calmer after the anger and pain have ebbed somewhat, and reconstruction and working through, which is where you begin putting your life back together again.

Though there are different ways to articulate these seven stages, the main idea is that the individual goes through different stages of grief. These stages, it should be noted, aren’t linear, and it’s not a neat process that is demarcated and ends at a specified time.

The Value of Understanding the Stages of Grief

If the stages of grief aren’t linear, and if you might even skip some stages or find yourself working through a particular stage for a while, then what is their use? The value in the stages of grief, and in understanding the different ways grief will affect you, is that it helps you to anticipate what you might go through as you’re grieving.

Being aware of the typical stages of grief can be a useful tool as you process your experience of loss and find healing. You can anticipate what you may be going through, and if you have a loved one who’s experienced loss, awareness of these stages can help you consider what they might need. It allows people to be patient with others and themselves as they afford themselves the space to come to terms with loss.

Christian Grief Counseling in Plano, Texas

If you or your loved one have experienced loss, there is help available through support groups or grief counseling in Plano, Texas, especially if you’re struggling to adjust to your new reality. Your counselor in Plano can help you not only with processing your emotions but also with providing you with coping strategies to help you come to terms with life as it is now.

For more information or to schedule an appointment with a Christian grief counselor in Plano, Texas reach out to our office today at Texas Christian Counseling, Plano.