Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was a female trailblazer when she created the five stages of grief, a model that many medical schools use, working doctors forget, modern psychology ignores, but that is crucial for any one going through tremendous loss to understand. While she was referring mostly to cancer patients, it applies to any significant loss. The stages are not in any particular order, any one of them can show up at any time as one goes through the grieving process in no particular sequence. Above all they are NORMAL!!!
In 2013, after the DSM-V, the diagnostic standard, was published, after a decade long battle of good vs bad psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies, grief was one of the illnesses that was removed because it was never an illness to begin with. People and cultures grieve differently for different reasons in their own time.
The five stages of grieving are:
1. Denial/Shock
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression/Sadness
5. Acceptance
DABDA is a helpful mnemonic to remember them. They are normal emotions and anyone who needs support for any reason should remember them.
Situations are individual, but generally speaking with a few examples:
1. Denial- this cannot be happening. There must be a mistake. (We try to rationalize something we cannot accept as true)
2. Anger- powerless, helpless, often justified (how could this happen, if only I had done something, if only the mistake had not happened)
3. Bargaining- prayers, promises. (I'll eat healthy from now on. I'll do xyz if worse is averted)
4. Depression/Sadness-(in a way a finality to acceptance).
5. Acceptance- (this is the situation now) this stage allows someone to move forward, get through it, keep going)
These are normal emotions. We live in a society, where we are not permitted to have or express them. Where there is so much pseudo and armchair psychology that someone has read something online and is suddenly an expert. There is no weakness in having them, but sharing them with the wrong individuals can make a horrific situation worse. It's normal to be angry. It's normal to be angry at the people who caused harm. It's not normal to be violent or aggressive as a coping mechanism.
What we are currently going through is a collective grief where certain individuals thrive on the suffering of others. We cannot get closure. From covid to current events, there is a barrage of confronting people with so called "triggers" when they need to forget or compartmentalize to function.
I chose to post this, because as I read various sites and blogs, the amount of professionals that are supposed to help with this and do not know what they're talking about is troubling. I'll probably post more on this at a later time.
I am editing for clarity. KR is someone who addressed a system that needed improvement. Before that grieving people were discarded. She lay the foundation. It took decades to implement. In many cultures, there is still the advice to get "over it". Grieving is often misdiagnosed as depression and the psyche industry still treats it as such; something to be "fixed" rather than supported. The five stages also do not solely refer to illness but can be applied to any loss.
Feel free to share your thoughts. Please avoid mentions of certain individuals as I do not want to come up in those search terms.
I have observed these five stages in a few close people but it happened not necessarily in this order, rather initially all at once and then changing daily. When I was faced with a life changing diagnosis in 2010, I went through a period of grief very much like it. But it was "only" grieving the life I thought I would continue to have. I was grieving loss of what I thought I should have.
ReplyDeleteK-R herself died a long painful drawn out death after several strokes and I remember a very angry interview she gave a few months before her death.
Codex:@Sabine
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned above it doesn't happen in sequence. While the wikipedia entry is fairly accurate, KR had some controversies and the post wasnt about her experience. Keep in mind that this was in the 60s and we should have built on it.
I read your harrowing experience and can see the medical errors. I was focusing more on how we turn normal emotions into something abnormal or minimize it with 'well that's life'. There is little compassion.
You believe that this is the life you should have?
When my sister died suddenly two years ago denial wasn't part of it. She was dead and no coming back from that. I went straight to anger, pissed that she left me, that she ignored a few TIAs. Skipped the whole bargaining because...dead, no bargain would bring her back. Then sadness. I guess acceptance was in there somewhere. I guess the acceptance was getting used to life without her.
ReplyDeleteBut I agree, behavioral scientists are too invested in labeling every normal natural emotion besides contentment and happiness as not normal, as something to be fixed as you put it. The range of being in humans as normal has shrunk to a very narrowly defined 'normal'. Too many syndromes.
But I wonder, have people lost the ability to deal with trauma?
All these trigger warnings in media now. Has our culture so coddled everyone that they have to be protected from possibly reading about or seeing something that might upset them?
Codex: @Ellen, abandonment is in there as well, but you dealt with it in your way.
DeleteThe big success was to remove it from the diagnostic manual for mental illness. Second paragraph is what I was getting at. While I don't understand it, I know people who still grieve and need to grieve decades later, it really depends on circumstance. It's their process. And it's their NORMAL. Psychologists are overdiagnosing all kinds of individual differences as abnormal. There is a dumb movie Equilibrium where an authoritarian government suppresses emotions with pills...
Codex:
DeleteDepends on the trauma. Different topic but PTSD is a very debilitating medical condition. So yes, the trigger warnings are a positive progressive move. Before that eg. Vets used to experience shell shock and weren't really treated but left to veg at home. It's not coddling; they see something or hear a sound they're right back reliving it. They can't stop it.
If anyone is up to it there was an amazing article that I can't find again; about a former military vet who is now a forest ranger who marks trees and describes what various colors trigger. The Atlantic maybe?
In the years we lived in East Africa we met several Chagossian families. (The people of the Chagos archipelago were forcefully expelled from their homeland by the UK on request of the US to enable the US military base on Diego Garcia, one of the islands. There is a collection of documentaries online: https://www.letusreturnusa.org/video.html)
ReplyDeleteThe Chagossians have experienced severe trauma - I could of course list many others - and have suffered a specific form of collective depression (sagren in Chagossian Creole) which has caused a high number of sudden death among otherwise healthy and young people. Some years ago, I met a psychologist specialising in trauma and grief and she refered to the Chagossian sagren as a never ending, often lethal state of desperate loss, mourning and grief for their way of life, language and culture.
When I initially had to come to terms with the diagnosis that changed much of my life, it was suggested to me to do trauma therapy. I felt dumbfounded by this suggestion, it felt like an excuse, a terminology that bore no connection to what lay ahaed of me and in a way was a slap in the face of people who experienced actual trauma.