Stages of Grief — What the Models Show, and What They Miss

Stages of grief is the umbrella term for the steps a person is supposed to move through after a loss — usually four, following the Swiss psychologist Verena Kast, sometimes five, following the American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Both models capture something real: grief has a shape, it doesn’t unfold formlessly. Their biggest blind spot sits in a place almost the entire genre inherits without questioning it — Kübler-Ross’s famous five stages originally described not the bereaved, but the dying themselves.

Maybe you’re reading this because you lost a loved one, and you keep being offered the same four or five stations as a map you’re supposed to check yourself against, as though coping with grief meant arriving at some final stage where you’ve come to terms with it. That’s different from a related, often-confused pain: the phases of heartbreak are often described with the same stage language, but there the center of gravity shifts. Heartbreak is grief for a person who’s alive and turned away — the broken heart is perceiving a truth about being abandoned. Grief for someone who died is something else. Here, no one turned away. The person themself is simply gone, but the bond to them doesn’t end — it only changes shape.

#What Are the 5 Stages of Grief?

The 5 stages of grief, as they’re most often cited, go back to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1969). Kübler-Ross developed this model through conversations with terminally ill patients at a clinic in Chicago, describing how a person relates to their own approaching death.

In the first stage, consciousness refuses what’s happening — denial protects against a reality that can’t yet be borne. Anger follows, directed at fate, at others, or at oneself. The third stage, bargaining, tries to still avert the unavoidable — with fate, with a higher power, sometimes only with oneself. Depression follows once bargaining finally fails and the full weight of the loss becomes tangible. At the end stands acceptance — not happiness about what happened, but an arrival at what is. A dying person may experience these five in almost any order, and often circles back through them more than once before the end.

These five stages became the best-known model for grief there is, even though they originally had a different subject. What was actually meant, and how this became a model for grief, is what the next section clarifies.

#Where Do the Stages of Grief Actually Come From?

The stages of grief, as they’re usually cited today, come from a context almost no self-help book names: in 1969, in On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described how dying people relate to their own approaching death — not how the bereaved process a loss (cf. Kübler-Ross, 1969). Her five stages emerged from conversations with terminally ill patients confronting their own fatal illness. The subject of the model was one’s own mortality, not grief over another person.

Only in the decades that followed did the model migrate from the deathbed to the bereaved — and in doing so became the most-cited map of grief there is, even though its original subject was fundamentally different: not the death of someone you love, but your own death. This transfer shouldn’t be understood as some kind of fabrication. The dying and the bereaved genuinely share a great deal: both face a final loss, both have to relate to something that can’t be undone. But it remains a transfer, not an original observation made on grieving people — and that difference is almost never spoken aloud when the five stages get sold as the stages of grief itself.

Nearly the entire genre of grief self-help repeats this quiet misattribution. Whoever cites the five stages as the original of grief research is, in truth, citing a model of one’s own dying — and treating it as though it had described the loss of another person from the start.

#What 4 Stages of Grief Did Verena Kast Describe?

The 4 stages of grief actually built around the loss of another person come from the Swiss psychologist Verena Kast: not wanting to accept it, the breakthrough of feelings, searching and separating, and a new relationship to self and world (cf. Kast, 1982). Unlike Kübler-Ross, Kast based her model on bereaved people from the start — people who had lost someone close, not people facing their own death.

#First Stage: Not Wanting to Accept It

The first stage is the shock that refuses the news. A person often keeps functioning with striking smoothness — organizing the funeral, making calls, receiving condolences — while part of them hasn’t really taken in the news yet. That isn’t a failure. It’s a protective mechanism: letting in the full reality of the loss all at once would overwhelm most people.

#Second Stage: The Breakthrough of Feelings

In the second stage, what the first stage was still holding off breaks through: pain, anger, guilt, fear, sometimes even relief when a long illness has ended. These feelings rarely follow any order. They can switch several times within a single hour and, because of that, can feel like a loss of control — even though they’re the opposite: the expression of a bond that was real.

#Third Stage: Searching and Separating

The third stage searches for the person who died — in habits, in familiar places, sometimes quite literally, when someone catches themself reaching for the phone. At the same time, this stage very slowly begins a separation: the recognition that this search won’t find what it’s looking for anymore. Both happen at once, not one after the other — the searching doesn’t stop before the separating begins.

#Fourth Stage: A New Relationship to Self and World

The fourth stage isn’t a conclusion, but a changed relationship to yourself and the world. The person who died doesn’t vanish from this new relationship — they become part of it in a different way than before. Kast deliberately didn’t call this last stage an ending, but a new beginning.

#Are There 7 Stages of Grief?

No single, scientifically recognized model with exactly seven stages of grief exists. The number seven, which circulates in a lot of self-help writing and blog posts, usually arises when one of the two established models gets subdivided further — for instance by splitting Kast’s breakthrough-of-feelings stage into individually named emotions like anger, guilt, and fear, or by grafting Kübler-Ross’s bargaining onto Kast’s four stages. As far as can be verified, these expansions are editorial blends that are rarely presented as independent empirical models — not new research on grieving people.

That isn’t an accusation against everyone who talks about seven stages — the confusion arises honestly, because both original models get freely mixed together in practice. What matters more for you, as someone grieving, is what stands behind each number, not the number itself: there’s no fixed, authoritative sequence you have to fulfill, whether it counts four stations, five, or seven.

#How Long Does the Worst Stage of Grief Last?

The worst stage of grief has no fixed length, because it isn’t set by a calendar but by the depth of the bond that was lost. In counseling practice, the emotionally intense second stage — the breakthrough of feelings in Kast’s model, or anger and depression in Kübler-Ross’s — is often described as the hardest, because the pain feels least controllable there. But that isn’t true for everyone: some people experience the initial refusal to accept it as more agonizing, because the distance from their own reality becomes its own burden.

How long this stage lasts can’t seriously be predicted in weeks or months. Whoever expects a fixed number is measuring their grief against a standard that doesn’t exist, and will feel every week the pain doesn’t ease as a personal failure. For grief over a parent specifically, with its own dynamic and duration, see losing your mother.

#What Does the Research Say About the Stages of Grief?

Grief research, which has spent decades studying the actual course of grieving processes, draws, in its majority, a picture considerably messier than the four or five stations suggest. The American psychologist George Bonanno has shown, across several long-term studies, that resilience — a stable continuation of everyday life with only mild, temporary disruption — is the most common outcome after a loss, not a pronounced depressive stage that everyone has to pass through (cf. Bonanno, 2009). A fixed sequence holding for all bereaved people can’t be confirmed empirically: some people skip individual stages, others move through them in a different order, still others experience several at once. What looks like a fixed itinerary in the models is, in reality, a rough description of common, but by no means mandatory, patterns — no law grief has to follow to count as real.

This criticism is legitimate, and some grief-support organizations have started raising it themselves. But criticism alone stays incomplete if it doesn’t say what takes the itinerary’s place. The stages aren’t wrong — they just describe the wrong thing as a route map instead of as a perception. What actually happens when a person grieves isn’t a journey through stations, but a perception turning toward a loss in different ways: it refuses the loss at first, because it’s too large (not wanting to accept it); it then registers its full force (the breakthrough of feelings); it searches for what’s missing (searching and separating); and it finally reorganizes itself around the absence (a new relationship to self and world). These aren’t stages with a finish line, but ways a perception deals with something irreversible — and they’re allowed to repeat, overlap, and appear in any intensity or order, without anything being wrong about that.

#How Do You Actually Process Grief?

Grief isn’t processed through distraction or the fastest possible return to normal, but by letting the pain be felt instead of just soothed. A person can be fully functional again within a few weeks, organize a new routine, and tell a coherent story about the loss — and never have really touched the pain itself in the process. That’s self-soothing: a comforting narrative that puts the feeling into a bearable shape without healing it. From the outside, this often looks like the fourth stage, the new relationship to self and world. In truth, it stays stuck at the mental level.

Healing happens a different way: where the pain is felt and carried alongside someone else, rather than being smoothed over. That rarely needs advice, and almost always needs time, plus a presence that can bear the pain not getting smaller right away just because someone is listening. What you need least in this stage is a program telling you when you’re supposed to be done. What you most likely need is a person who doesn’t treat your grief as a problem to be solved.

Sometimes this presence alone isn’t enough. When the disruption completely shuts down sleep, eating, or work for weeks on end, when a doctor-diagnosed depression sets in, or when thoughts arise of ending your own life, that belongs in the hands of a licensed psychotherapist, not a philosophical conversation. Philosophical accompaniment and family constellation work are then a complement, not a substitute. In acute despair, this isn’t the moment for reflection — it’s the moment for immediate help. In Germany you can call 112 or the Telefonseelsorge crisis line at 0800 111 0 111, available around the clock, free, and anonymous; if you’re elsewhere, your own country’s crisis line deserves the same call right now.

#Why Do the Dead Stay in the Life of the Grieving?

The fourth stage, the new relationship to self and world, often gets misread in everyday life as an instruction to let go of the person who died — as if the end state has to be one where they no longer appear. In systemic constellation work, as practiced in family constellation, the opposite holds: the dead are treated as equal to the living in their influence (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nachdenken über den Tod,” 34:11). An unresolved conflict between two people can still affect their descendants long after both have died — what constellation work calls an entanglement.

Bert Hellinger, whose work systemic family constellation traces back to, describes exactly this effect.

In a constellation, it sometimes becomes visible that a person is unconsciously looking toward someone who died — toward their fate, their unresolved conflict, their never properly said goodbye — and feels guilty about it without knowing why (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nachdenken über den Tod,” 36:16). This gaze narrows a person’s own life: a feeling of having no place, which in truth belongs to the person who died, who is the one missing that place.

That’s why letting go is the wrong task. What’s missing isn’t an exit for the person who died, but a place for them — inside your own inner family system, in memory, in recognition of what was and what remains.

#What Remains at the End of the Stages of Grief

The stages of grief are true as a description and incomplete as a route map. They trace what a person lives through after a loss, and they go wrong the moment they prescribe where that person has to stand and when they’re supposed to be done. Kübler-Ross’s five stages originally described one’s own dying, not grieving for someone else — Kast’s four stages land closer to the person actually grieving, but they too remain a rough map, not a set of instructions. What both models miss is the insight constellation work starts from: the bond to someone who died doesn’t end. It only changes how it’s alive in you.

If you notice that this bond is still caught somewhere — in a sentence left unsaid, a conflict that was never resolved, a place still missing for the person you lost in your life — a family constellation can make that place visible.

#Sources

• Kast, V. (1982). Trauern: Phasen und Chancen des psychischen Prozesses. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag.
• Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.
• Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. New York: Basic Books.
• Hellinger, B. (1996). Anerkennen, was ist. Munich: Kösel. (Quote p. 93)
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nachdenken über den Tod (1) — SYMPOSIUM” (Reflecting on Death (1) — SYMPOSIUM) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSltRJB88jg. (References ca. 34:11, 36:16)

If the bond to someone you’ve lost is still caught somewhere, that’s worth a conversation.

In a free initial conversation, we can look together at whether a family constellation can help you make visible the place this person now holds in your life — without pressure, without promises.

Learn more about family constellation →