The Five Stages of Grief: Great for Narratives, Bad for Therapy
Few psychological concepts have captured the public imagination as powerfully as the “five stages of grief.” Introduced by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, the model proposed that individuals facing terminal illness and later, those experiencing loss more generally pass through five identifiable emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Kübler-Ross, 1969). In the decades since, this framework has been adopted, repeated, and dramatized in countless books, films, and cultural narratives, becoming a kind of emotional shorthand for the experience of mourning.
Yet despite its enduring cultural resonance, the five-stage model has not fared well under empirical scrutiny. Contemporary grief researchers and clinicians largely agree that it fails to capture the complexity, variability, and nonlinearity of real human grief (Bonanno, 2004; Stroebe & Schut, 1999; Neimeyer, 2001). While the model’s clarity and structure make it invaluable as a narrative device, its rigidity and lack of scientific support make it problematic in therapeutic and research contexts.
This essay argues that the “five stages of grief” endure not because they accurately represent psychological reality, but because they provide a compelling narrative framework. The model transforms the chaos of grief into a story — one that aligns with Western ideals of progress, control, and closure. As a cultural narrative, the model simplifies and humanizes loss; as a therapeutic model, however, it risks constraining and pathologizing natural emotional diversity.
The following discussion will first examine the origins and evolution of the five-stage model. It will then explore its appeal and utility as a narrative and cultural framework, followed by a critical evaluation of its scientific limitations and therapeutic risks. Finally, the essay will consider alternative, evidence-based approaches to understanding grief and propose a synthesis of why this outdated model continues to resonate in popular culture despite its shortcomings in clinical practice.
Origins and Evolution of the Five Stages
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed her theory from interviews with terminally ill patients in the 1960s. Her aim was to better understand how individuals emotionally responded to the prospect of death; both their own and others’. From these interviews, she identified what she perceived as five recurring emotional states: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Importantly, Kübler-Ross did not initially describe these as universal or strictly sequential stages, but as common themes that might appear in varying order (Kübler-Ross, 1969).
Nevertheless, as her book gained traction, especially in the self-help and popular psychology movements of the 1970s and 1980s, the stages were widely reinterpreted as a predictable, linear process that all mourners would eventually complete. The model’s simplicity and intuitive logic — that grief follows a pattern leading toward eventual acceptance — proved irresistible to both lay audiences and helping professionals seeking frameworks for care.
Soon, the stages were applied far beyond their original context of terminal illness. They became a template for understanding responses to all kinds of loss: bereavement, divorce, job termination, even cultural change. This expansion reflected the model’s adaptability as a metaphor for human adjustment, but it also diluted its psychological precision. As Corr (2019) and others have noted, the generalization of the model to every form of loss transformed a clinical observation into a cultural myth.
The Model’s Narrative Appeal
Despite the lack of strong empirical evidence supporting the five stages, the model remains remarkably powerful in narrative and cultural contexts. To understand why, it is necessary to consider its narrative structure, emotional accessibility, and cultural resonance.
1. A Clear Emotional Arc
At its core, the five-stage model provides a coherent emotional arc. It begins in denial — a refusal to acknowledge loss — and ends in acceptance, the point at which the individual integrates the loss into their life story. This arc mirrors the classic structure of a story or myth: conflict, struggle, transformation, and resolution.
From a literary perspective, the stages function like acts in a drama. Each stage represents a distinct emotional challenge, and progression through them symbolizes personal growth. This makes the model extremely useful to storytellers. Novels, memoirs, films, and even television scripts often adopt the five-stage structure to depict a character’s emotional journey through grief. Works like Manchester by the Sea (2016), Rabbit Hole (2010), or even animated films like Inside Out (2015) echo this progression, whether consciously or not.
Such storytelling offers audiences the comfort of emotional predictability. Grief, an inherently chaotic experience, becomes narratively manageable — a process that can be completed. In this sense, the model does not merely describe grief; it imposes order upon it.
2. Emotional Accessibility and Language
Another reason for the model’s persistence is its provision of a shared vocabulary for grief. Terms like “denial” and “acceptance” have entered everyday speech, allowing people to articulate and normalize their experiences of loss.
Language shapes experience, and by naming these emotions, the five-stage model offers a sense of recognition and validation. People can locate themselves within a familiar emotional map (“I’m still angry,” “I think I’m finally accepting it”), which can be comforting and socially connecting. Even if the stages are not empirically real, they provide psychological scaffolding for self-understanding.
3. Cultural Resonance: Grief as Progress
The five-stage model also resonates with Western cultural values, particularly the belief in progress, individual mastery, and emotional closure. The notion that one can “move through” grief and reach a stage of acceptance aligns with cultural narratives of self-improvement and recovery.
Sociologist Tony Walter (1996) argues that modern Western societies, uncomfortable with death’s ambiguity, prefer grief models that promise resolution. The five stages offer exactly that: a promise that suffering is temporary and that emotional equilibrium will be restored. In this sense, the model functions as a cultural script for how people are expected to grieve, reinforcing ideals of resilience and self-control.
Scientific and Therapeutic Limitations
While the five-stage model works powerfully as a narrative, its application in therapy and research is deeply problematic. Decades of empirical research have found that grief is far more complex, individualized, and non-linear than Kübler-Ross’s model suggests.
1. Lack of Empirical Support
Studies have consistently failed to confirm the existence of discrete, sequential stages of grief. Longitudinal research, such as that conducted by Bonanno et al. (2002), demonstrates that emotional responses to loss vary widely — and that many individuals exhibit resilience, experiencing little long-term distress even after major loss.
In a landmark critique, Wortman and Silver (1989) argued that the five-stage model is based on anecdotal observation rather than systematic evidence. Grief reactions, they showed, fluctuate over time and rarely follow a uniform sequence. Moreover, people may experience multiple emotions — anger, sadness, longing — simultaneously, rather than in any predictable order.
2. Individual and Cultural Variation
The model also fails to account for individual differences in grieving. Factors such as personality, attachment style, the nature of the loss, social support, and cultural background all shape how grief unfolds (Rosenblatt, 2008). For example, in collectivist cultures, expressions of grief may be more communal and continuous, whereas in individualist cultures, there may be greater emphasis on personal closure.
By promoting a universal, stage-based template, the model risks erasing cultural diversity and implying that certain emotional patterns are more “normal” or “healthy” than others.
3. Pathologizing Normal Grief
Perhaps the most serious clinical concern is that the five-stage model can pathologize deviations from its sequence. When individuals fail to move neatly from denial to acceptance, they may perceive themselves as grieving incorrectly or inadequately.
Therapists, too, may unintentionally reinforce this expectation, interpreting prolonged sadness or lack of “acceptance” as signs of maladjustment rather than legitimate variations in mourning. As Neimeyer (2001) notes, the model risks imposing “a timetable on sorrow,” undermining the deeply personal and nonlinear nature of bereavement.
4. Misapplication of the Model
Kübler-Ross herself later clarified that her stages were never meant to describe bereavement broadly, but the process of facing one’s own death (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005). However, popular psychology and even some clinicians extended her framework to grieving survivors. This misapplication turned a theory about anticipatory death anxiety into a prescriptive model for survivors’ emotions, a distortion that neither research nor Kübler-Ross’s later writings support.
5. Alternative Theoretical Models
Modern grief research has moved toward process-oriented models that better reflect the fluidity of mourning:
The Dual Process Model (Stroebe & Schut, 1999) posits that grieving individuals oscillate between loss-oriented activities (yearning, remembering, crying) and restoration-oriented activities (problem-solving, rebuilding life). This model captures the dynamic, back-and-forth nature of coping rather than a fixed sequence of stages.
Meaning Reconstruction Theory (Neimeyer, 2001) emphasizes the human need to reconstruct meaning after loss. Grief is seen not as a process of detachment but of re-narrating one’s life story to incorporate the loss.
Continuing Bonds Theory (Klass, Silverman & Nickman, 1996) challenges the idea that “acceptance” means detachment. Instead, it proposes that maintaining a symbolic or emotional connection with the deceased is a normal and healthy aspect of ongoing life.
These models are supported by empirical evidence and clinical experience, emphasizing flexibility, individuality, and meaning-making rather than progression through fixed emotional stages.
The Cultural Persistence of the Five Stages
Given these criticisms, why does the five-stage model persist in popular understanding of grief? The answer lies in its narrative power, emotional accessibility, and comforting simplicity.
1. Cognitive Simplicity
Humans are drawn to patterns and sequences because they reduce complexity. The five-stage model turns grief — one of life’s most chaotic experiences — into a manageable process. It provides a sense of predictability and control at a time when control feels lost.
As a cognitive heuristic, it simplifies the emotional landscape. For people overwhelmed by grief, being told “these feelings are normal, and you’ll move through them” can feel stabilizing, even if it’s not scientifically accurate.
2. Therapeutic Comfort, Not Therapeutic Accuracy
Many bereaved individuals find genuine comfort in the model, even when therapists caution that it’s not literal. The stages offer hope: the promise that emotional pain will eventually give way to acceptance. This emotional utility explains why the model endures in self-help literature and popular discourse.
Ironically, then, the model’s therapeutic value may be symbolic rather than factual. It works as metaphor — a story of emotional evolution — even if it fails as a diagnostic or predictive framework.
3. Media and Cultural Reinforcement
The model’s persistence is also a product of media repetition. From television shows like The Simpsons parodying the five stages to countless films that dramatize them, the concept has become cultural shorthand. Once a psychological idea becomes a meme, it’s difficult to dislodge — especially when it provides narrative clarity to a universal human experience.
Reconciling Narrative and Science
The dichotomy between narrative and science in grief models reflects a broader tension between the need for meaning and the need for accuracy. The five stages satisfy the former; modern grief research satisfies the latter.
Rather than dismissing the model outright, it may be more productive to view it as a cultural narrative, not a scientific truth. In this sense, the five stages are akin to myth — emotionally true, if not empirically so. Like myths, they offer comfort, structure, and a sense of shared humanity, even as they oversimplify reality.
From a therapeutic standpoint, acknowledging the model’s metaphorical value can still be useful. A clinician might explore a client’s identification with a particular “stage” as a starting point for reflection, rather than as evidence of where they “should be.” The danger arises only when therapists treat the stages as prescriptive rather than descriptive, or when clients measure themselves against a fictional standard of emotional progress.
Simply put
The “five stages of grief” have achieved iconic status in modern culture — a rare example of a psychological theory that transcended academia to shape collective understanding of emotion. Their appeal lies not in empirical validity but in narrative power: they transform grief from chaos into story, from incomprehensible pain into a process with a beginning, middle, and end.
For narrative and artistic purposes, the model is invaluable. It gives voice and structure to universal experiences of loss and transformation, functioning as both metaphor and emotional roadmap. But for therapy and research, it is deeply flawed. Its linearity and prescriptiveness fail to reflect the diverse, fluid, and culturally shaped realities of grief.
Contemporary grief psychology now emphasizes processes, meaning-making, and continuing bonds rather than sequential stages. These newer models recognize that grief is not something one simply “gets through,” but something one integrates and lives with.
In the end, the enduring popularity of the five-stage model may tell us more about our cultural need for coherent stories than about the nature of grief itself. As a narrative framework, it is great — even beautiful. As a scientific or therapeutic guide, it is, at best, misleading. The challenge for both clinicians and storytellers is to honour the complexity of grief without forcing it into a script — to let grief be not a series of stages, but a story that each person tells in their own way.
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