I mean, c’mon - have books and films just been lying to me all this time?!
But maybe it’s not completely wrong - there must be a core of truth to it if it resonates so well. Maybe we can preserve that even if we don’t stick to the specific stages.
But how could I have been fooled by this for so long? What’s wrong with me that I believed it so unquestioningly?
But it’s not just me - this predates awareness of the reproducibility crisis in social sciences. It’s not so surprising that it doesn’t replicate. I’m sure there’s a deeper understanding out there, and this model wasn’t so bad as a stepping stone to that.
> ... Kübler-Ross remarked that the five stages are “not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or goes in a prescribed order.”
So these are more the possible reactions that someone may have to a grievous event - not everyone will experience all reactions, and also will definitely not go through them in the given order.
Or this random internet opinion article does...
All five, in order; nice.
"Alas 5 stages, we hardly knew ye."
I find it applies perfectly to what I see happening in all kind of personal grief (for others and for oneself) and unmovable threat settings, so couldn't care less if it was "science based", as long as it's a descriptive observation...
And, yes, obviously, not everybody will feel exactly the same. For an extreme example, some people are sociopaths and might not even feel anything at all, never mind this. Others are very shallow and selfish, and take selfies next to their parents coffins. But this is about a rough matching of what people feel and how they handle grief - not a topographical map of feelings.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/supersurvivors/20170...
"In fact, the actual grief process looks a lot less like a neat set of stages and a lot more like a roller coaster of emotions. Even Kubler-Ross said that grief doesn’t proceed in a linear and predictable fashion, writing toward the end of her career that she regretted her stages had been misunderstood."
Roller-coasters still have a specific route and different stages. I'd say in the same way there can be a prevailing sentiment at each stage of grief, even if this or that sentiment comes and goes at times at all stages.
I have a similar problem with the Heroes Journey, which if you are in fiction/screenplay writing, is considered the Bible, and criticising it is like being a heretic. So much so, many books on writing assume it to be true an starting point. But I always found it to be silly, and recently found a great article that points out its a nonsense made up list of common fantasy tropes:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journ...
Campbell does not "fundamentally claim" anything about "all human stories" in Hero with a Thousand Faces.
He merely points out a commonly recurring pattern among a certain subset of stories (namely, stories about famous heroes) across multiple human societies and cultures, even those with limited cultural overlap.
In fact, his work is like an early version of TV Tropes, giving names to thematically repeating elements of such stories.
You (and that blog's author) should actually read the book before declaring it nonsense.
Understanding the Hero's Journey (or the Story Circle, or the 7-Point Story Structure), and why it works is a critical foundation for moving beyond it.
Understand the Jolly Good Suggestion of Demeter before you code something that violates it. You have to understand the rules to the depth of "why" before your knowledge is deep enough to legitimately go beyond the rules.
Find the box first. Until you do that, you can't think outside of it.
That said, I certainly do imagine some psychotherapists out there taking the order literally and explaining it like that to their patients.
I actually didn't know this, but that makes a lot more sense.
* Not just imprecise but even has exceptions. What if you throw it straight down? What if you throw it straight down, and it bounces? What if it achieves escape velocity? What if you throw it down at an angle and it then achieves escape velocity?
I know I'm going to get over this eventually. I might as well start now.
It helps that I have aphantasia and a very poor autobiographical memory.
What an insight! Its a model, with all that that implies.
- That the popular perception of the model is not what Kuber-Ross herself had in mind and communicated. This can hardly be laid on her.
- That the empirical research, and it was both, has subjective elements and is again interpreted in contradiction of K-R's statements as some specific sequence of phases.
I'd bring to this a few additional observations:
Emotions seem to be common among at least many mammalian species. That is, both that they're a shared inheritence, and an evolutionary one. This isn't a novel observation, and the connection between emotion and evolution was first proposed, at book length, by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions...>.
Grief is one of those emotions. The notion of animal grief is well developed and much studied (see the Wikipedia overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_grief>). It seems highly likely that it serves some positive adaptive purpose.
As studied by K-R, one characterisation of the grief observed was of a profound change in the worldview of the patients themselves. That is, coming face to face with their own mortality or morbidity.
There is also at least an anecdotal understanding of stages of grief being associated with challenges to individual or group worldviews, paradigms, or understandings. This can be seen in, e.g, responses to the notions of limits to growth, in politics, and other social contexts.
What I suspect, though I've not come across any clear expression of this in scholarly literature, is that what we call grief is in actually part of a spectrum of responses to radical shifts in understanding of one's world. And that the stages, or perhaps more accurately phases or expressions relate to unlearning and relearning new patterns. That there's a value in not dropping a particular model too quickly, but that similarly there's not value in blindly holding on to a model which clearly no longer serves any specific use.
The lack of any significant discussion of these elements at least to my knowledge has long struck me as distinctly odd. Checking Google Scholar currently I find at least some theoretical work, e.g., Doka Understanding Grief <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813155...> and Hall, Bereavement theory <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02682621.2014.90...>, though by the blurbs, these don't seem to take the leap I'm suggesting.
"Did you ever expect that there were discrete and linear stages? I always assumed that these were emotional “attractors”, different emotional states that we migrated through without any particular vector. More like a cruise through a dismal archipelago."