The Myth of Grief Stages: What Healing Actually Looks Like

If you have ever been told that grief moves through five stages, you have been told something that is partially true, mostly misunderstood, and sometimes actively harmful. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross did not write about stages of grief. She wrote about stages of dying, observed in terminally ill patients. The stages were never meant to be a map for the bereaved, and they were never meant to be linear.

Grief does not move in a straight line. Grief moves more like weather. Sometimes the sun comes out and you think you are through the worst of it. Then a song plays, or you smell something familiar, or a date arrives, and the sky closes in again. This is not regression. This is grief doing exactly what grief does.

What grief actually looks like is something more like oscillation. You move between engaging with the loss and engaging with life. The space of the loss gradually takes up less of your daily experience, but it never disappears entirely. Over time, you learn to carry it in a way that does not prevent you from living.

Healing from grief does not mean forgetting. It means integrating the loss into who you are in a way that allows you to move forward. You can love what you lost and still live well. You can grieve and still be present. If you feel like you should be further along by now, challenge that. You are exactly where you need to be.

Angela Schellenberg is a grief and trauma therapist in LA County, specializing in attachment trauma, complicated grief, and the Grief, Trauma & Your Mama framework.