#one of my absolute favorite therapists (and yes I am that person who is startstruck by therapists snejdknddl)

[katebeckets]

Okay I saw some tags and am taking this opportunity to talk a little more about this lol

This is just off the top of my head, but here’s a little backstory. The original five-stage model comes from On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, but her book was based on work with terminally ill individuals. A lot of people criticize the model because it suggests that grief is linear and that you move through it in sequential stages, but I think she even stated before she died that she regretted using the term “stage.” And professionally I think it’s unfortunate because I don’t think her work is necessarily too outdated or incorrect, but the work made it easier to do what humans like to do—categorize and organize emotion and meaning.

If you think about anticipatory grief, however, the stages model makes more sense. All grief is unique and universal. Anticipatory grief with a fairly predictable timeline changes how you move through the stages because you’re trying to make sense and meaning of your experience before the loss, and there’s a defined timeline and certainty that isn’t present for all grief.

Of course there’s no way to break it down into stages, but that’s a bigger discussion about how we deem things “evidence-based” (and my personal belief is that having “evidence-based practices” is often a component of what makes therapy ineffective), but to an extent, it makes sense that there’d be five relatively sequential stages. But then those stages were taken and applied to all different types of grief, so of course it wouldn’t make sense—the situation in front of someone who is terminally ill is wildly different from someone who has experienced a sudden loss. The components of grief she defined are pretty solid, I think—just not sequential.

I personally find this sort of model useful, especially when someone isn’t well-versed in emotional discussions and talking about feelings. And David Kessler, who worked with her and co-authored books with her, still seems to use the five stages with some added stages, like “meaning.” Making meaning of the loss. But we move between stages, skip stages, revisit stages, etc. because grief is never ending. And it’s just unfortunate that the five stages model stuck because that’s no longer the best professional understanding of grief, but it’s still very much a part of our culture. Again, there’s much more to this (this is literally just me pouring all my thoughts out in bed lol) but that’s a little bit of what I was talking about.

i know this is very specific to me being a therapist but god I wish the stages of grief weren’t written into the album storyline this way 😭😭 it’s not her fault people think they’re sequential of course but just thinking about how things get perpetuated in media and the massive influence she has (“in my ___ era” is just… so normal now?) and I can already see the five stages becoming some sort of meme… miss swift I don’t need my job to be any harder