The 5 Stages of Grief: What Kübler-Ross Actually Said

About this psychology article

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — nearly everyone can list them in order. Almost no one knows the model wasn't originally about losing someone at all.

The five stages of grief might be the most widely known psychological framework in existence, repeated in movies, classrooms, and hospital waiting rooms for over fifty years. It's also one of the most consistently misunderstood, because the popular version — a tidy, linear checklist you move through on your way to "getting over" a loss — is a considerably different thing from what its original author actually studied, actually claimed, and later actually tried to correct herself.

The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — were introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying , based on her work with terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own impending death — not with people grieving the loss of someone else. Kübler-Ross later extended the framework to bereavement, but she and her collaborators explicitly stated the stages were never meant to be linear, universal, or a required, predictable sequence. Modern grief research has gone further, finding that most people don't move through discrete stages at all.

Where the Model Actually Came From

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages in her landmark 1969 book, On Death and Dying , based on extensive interviews with terminally ill patients about their own experience of facing death. Her original research question wasn't "how do people grieve a loss" — it was "how do people psychologically process the knowledge that they themselves are dying." The five stages she identified described a dying patient's internal process of coming to terms with their own mortality, not a mourner's process of coping with someone else's death.

This distinction matters enormously, and it's the single most commonly missed fact about the entire model. Over the following decades, through a combination of the framework's intuitive appeal, its simplicity, and its widespread adoption well beyond Kübler-Ross's original clinical population, the "five stages" became almost universally applied to grief and bereavement generally — a significant drift from what the original research actually studied.

Kübler-Ross's Own Later Correction

Kübler-Ross herself was involved in extending the model to general bereavement, co-authoring On Grief and Grieving with grief counselor David Kessler in 2005. But in that same extension, both authors went out of their way to caution against exactly the rigid, linear interpretation that had already taken hold in popular culture. They explicitly stated the stages were never meant to be a predictable, universal sequence that every grieving person moves through in order — not everyone experiences all five, not necessarily in that order, and there's no fixed or expected timeline for any of them.

This corrective largely didn't stick in popular understanding. The version of the model that spread through media, casual conversation, and even some clinical training continued to treat the stages as a linear checklist despite the model's own authors directly stating that was never the intended framework. It's a genuinely striking example of a scientific idea outrunning its own author's later corrections — not unlike how the Milgram obedience experiments are still widely misquoted and oversimplified decades after the original research was published, and long after critiques of the popular version were made public.

What Modern Grief Research Actually Found

Psychologist George Bonanno, one of the most prominent grief researchers of the past several decades, has conducted extensive longitudinal research directly testing whether bereaved people actually move through anything resembling Kübler-Ross's stages. His findings, detailed in his influential 2009 book The Other Side of Sadness , point in a genuinely different direction: rather than a predictable sequence of stages, Bonanno's research identifies several distinct trajectories of grief.

The most common trajectory, by a considerable margin, is resilience — people who experience real grief and sadness but continue functioning relatively well throughout, without ever progressing through a series of discrete emotional stages at all. Other identified trajectories include chronic grief that persists at high intensity for an extended period, delayed grief that intensifies well after the loss, and recovery from a period of depression.

A separate, frequently cited study by researcher Paul Maciejewski and colleagues, published in JAMA in 2007, specifically tested whether Kübler-Ross's named emotions actually followed the proposed order among bereaved participants. The study found some support for the idea that certain feelings, like acceptance, tend to increase over time on average, while others, like disbelief, tend to decrease — but it did not find evidence of a strict, universal, linear stage progression as popularly understood. Most participants experienced a mix of these emotions simultaneously, in widely varying combinations and orders, rather than moving cleanly from one discrete stage to the next.

Notably, the study also found that acceptance was frequently the most commonly reported response even shortly after a loss, rather than something that only arrived at the end of a long emotional sequence — a finding that directly complicates the popular assumption that acceptance is necessarily the final, hard-won stage of a longer process.

Myth vs. Reality — What the Research Actually Shows

Popular Belief

What the Research Actually Shows

The stages describe how people grieve a loss

They were originally about dying patients facing their own death

Everyone moves through all 5 stages

Most people don't experience a distinct stage-like pattern at all

The stages happen in a fixed order

Kübler-Ross and Kessler explicitly said there's no required order

Acceptance is the final stage, reached last

Studies found acceptance often reported early, not just at the end

There's a normal timeline for "finishing" grief

No empirically supported timeline for grief duration exists

The Real Cost of the Popular Version

Beyond simply being scientifically inaccurate, the rigid, linear version of the stage model has a genuine practical downside worth naming directly: it can leave grieving people feeling like they're doing grief "wrong." Someone who never experiences a distinct anger phase, someone who reaches something like acceptance only to feel fresh, intense sadness resurface months later, or someone who doesn't feel a clean sense of resolution at all can end up measuring their very individual experience against a rigid model that was never accurate for most people in the first place — adding an unnecessary layer of self-judgment on top of an already difficult experience.

Grief researchers today generally emphasize that there is no single correct sequence, no required timeline, and no universal endpoint that constitutes "finishing" grief correctly. Grief is now more commonly understood as something people learn to carry and integrate into their life, in a way that shifts and changes considerably over time, rather than a fixed process with distinct, orderly stages leading to a final resolution.

More Current Models of Grief

The Dual Process Model , developed by researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999, describes grief not as linear stages but as an ongoing oscillation between two modes: loss-oriented coping , which involves directly confronting and processing the pain of the loss itself, and restoration-oriented coping , which involves attending to the practical and secondary changes loss brings and gradually re-engaging with life and its ordinary demands. This back-and-forth movement, rather than a fixed sequence, is treated as a normal and even necessary part of adapting to loss over time.

Continuing bonds theory , developed by researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman in 1996, challenges an older assumption embedded in some earlier grief models — that healthy grieving requires eventually and fully "letting go" of the person who died. This framework instead proposes that maintaining an ongoing, evolving connection to the deceased, through memory, ritual, or an internalized sense of relationship, is a normal and often genuinely healthy part of adapting to loss.

Common Myths About the 5 Stages of Grief

"Everyone experiences all 5 stages." Research consistently finds wide individual variation — many people never experience one or more of the named stages at all, and Bonanno's trajectory research found that a large share of grieving people don't experience a distinct stage-like pattern in the first place.

"Reaching acceptance means grief is over." Acceptance, where it occurs, doesn't function as a fixed finish line. Many people who feel they've reached a place of acceptance still experience waves of grief resurfacing later, sometimes years afterward, particularly around anniversaries or reminders — this is considered a normal part of an ongoing, evolving relationship with loss, not a sign that acceptance "failed."

"If you feel angry or in denial, you're stuck in a stage." The stage framing implies each emotion is a phase to move through and complete. Most modern grief researchers instead describe these as recurring emotional experiences that can arise and recede unpredictably throughout a much longer, non-linear process, rather than discrete boxes to check off.

"There's a normal timeline for how long grief should take." No empirically supported timeline exists for "normal" grief duration, and researchers generally caution against measuring grief against a fixed calendar. Prolonged Grief Disorder, as a clinical category, is defined by significant, persistent functional impairment, not simply by the passage of a specific amount of time.

When Grief Becomes Something More

Most grief, even when it's intense and prolonged, is a normal, non-pathological response to loss and doesn't require clinical treatment. That said, researchers and clinicians do recognize that grief can, for some people, become significantly more impairing and persistent than is typical.

In 2022, Prolonged Grief Disorder was formally added to the DSM-5-TR, describing a pattern of intense, persistent grief that remains significantly impairing well beyond what would typically be expected, interfering substantially with daily functioning. This isn't about judging whether someone is grieving "too long" by some fixed calendar — it's a clinical recognition that, for a meaningful subset of people, additional support can genuinely help when grief remains severely disruptive to daily life over an extended period.

If grief is affecting your ability to function in day-to-day life over a sustained period, reaching out to a therapist, grief counselor, or support group is a reasonable and often genuinely helpful step — not a sign that you're grieving incorrectly, but a recognition that additional support can help with something that's legitimately hard to carry alone.

Understand Your Own Coping Patterns

Everyone processes loss and difficulty differently, and it's hard to see your own coping patterns clearly from the inside, especially during a difficult time. The Resilience & Mindset Assessment on PsychOS gives you a personalized breakdown of your coping patterns, along with practical insight into how they tend to show up during difficult or stressful periods.

→ Take the Resilience & Mindset Assessment

Takes about 5 minutes. No account required.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are the 5 stages of grief real?

The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — were introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, but based on terminally ill patients' experience of facing their own death, not bereavement. She later extended the model to general grief but explicitly cautioned it was never meant to be linear or universal. Modern research has found most bereaved people don't move through the stages in any predictable sequence at all.

Do you have to go through all 5 stages of grief in order?

No. Even Kübler-Ross and her later collaborator David Kessler explicitly stated the stages weren't meant to be a required, linear sequence. Research by grief researcher George Bonanno has found the most common response to loss is actually resilience, without progressing through discrete emotional stages at all.

What did George Bonanno's grief research find?

Bonanno's longitudinal research identified several distinct grief trajectories rather than a universal stage sequence, with resilience — continuing to function relatively well while still experiencing real grief — as the most common pattern, alongside less common trajectories including chronic grief, delayed grief, and recovery from a period of depression.

Is it normal to not feel anger or to skip a stage of grief?

Yes. Research consistently shows wide individual variation in how people experience grief, and there's no evidence that experiencing all five named stages, or experiencing them in a particular order, is necessary for healthy grieving.

When does grief become something that needs professional support?

Prolonged Grief Disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR in 2022 to describe grief that remains severely impairing well beyond what would typically be expected, significantly interfering with daily functioning. If grief is substantially affecting your ability to function over a sustained period, speaking with a therapist or grief counselor is a reasonable and often helpful step.