Key Takeaways:
- There are no five stages you have to get through. The model came from watching dying patients, not grieving ones, and researchers have been trying to correct the record for years.
- Believing in stages can make things worse. One review found that when the model is portrayed badly, bereaved people end up feeling they are grieving incorrectly.
- Most people do not need therapy to grieve. Time, people who care about you, and permission to feel awful get most of us through.
- You do not have to let go of them. Keeping a bond with someone who died is normal and healthy, whatever anyone tells you about moving on.
You may have heard from someone about the stages of bereavement. A friend, a colleague, an article that you have read at 2am.
Then you saw your own grieving, and it wasn’t like that. On Tuesday, he was angry, on Wednesday, he was fine; and on Thursday, totally undone by a scent in a supermarket. All that didn’t sound like it was moving through anything.
So let’s get the big thing out of the way first. The steps are not real as you’ve been led to believe.
California Mental Health
Understanding Bereavement Support and Its Role in Healing
Bereavement is the time after the death of a loved one. Grief is the feeling you experience, and mourning is how you act on it.
Loss support can be many things. Sometimes it’s a friend who will sit with you and not attempt to fix anything. Sometimes it’s a group that doesn’t require you to explain why you’re crying. Sometimes it’s a therapist, but not most people.
Why Professional Support Matters During Loss
Let me be honest, because a lot of clinics are not. The vast majority of grief is ‘normal’ and does not need to be treated. That’s not a poor result; most people “get through” with the time they have and those people they already know.
Grief counseling has a part to play in the more difficult circumstances. Abrupt and/or unexpected death. Losing a child. A complex loss – you are missing someone you were angry at. Or grief that’s been stuck for months when all has been expected of you to be functioning.
The Mourning Process: What Actually Happens
Let’s move on to the stages of grief that everyone is familiar with. They were described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 from interviews with people who were dying of a terminal illness, NOT those who were bereaved. The review, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, pointed out that the model has been heavily criticized as a set of guidelines for bereavement and that inaccurate representations of it can lead to bereaved people feeling they are experiencing grief in the wrong way, as well as to unhelpful bereavement reactions from family and friends and health professionals.
If you ever thought that you were doing this wrong, read that again. That feeling may have come from a model that was never meant to fit you in the first place.
Moving Through Grief Without Judgment
The grieving process resembles more weather than stairs. You have days where you can do it and days you can’t, and no rhyme or reason why.
A lot of individuals live in two stages. Some hours the loss hits you hard; other hours you’re handling paperwork, doing the school run, and wondering what to do with the clothes still in the closet. Both are aspects of grieving, and the latter is not avoidance.
How Individual Timelines Affect Your Healing Journey
You will not find a bereavement timeline, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. People ask how long it is going to take, so they can find out if they are behind.
The intensity is intermittent, and the periods between the intensities increase over months. But the waves will not be reduced in size. It is common for people to be struck at an anniversary or by a song, “knocked sideways” years later.
Grief Counseling: Creating Space for Your Emotions
Grief counseling is not about ‘getting over’ anyone. A good counselor will not rush you, nor will he or she be thinking of a set day.
What they do is provide you with someplace to say what you can’t say anywhere else. That you are relieved, which is unforgivable. You’re angry that they are dead. That you’ve begun to lose your voice. We all have a thought like that and generally don’t vocalize it.
Funeral Planning and Memorial Services as Healing Rituals
Funeral planning comes at the worst time, when you don’t have the ability to make decisions. It’s not fair at all.
However, rituals can be helpful. They publicly acknowledge that something has been lost and give people a reason to gather and do something together, at a time when doing nothing would feel unbearable. If the funeral was hasty or if you were unable to attend, it’s a loss already.
Honoring Your Loved One’s Memory Through Meaningful Ceremonies
Memorials do not need to occur immediately and do not need to be a certain type.
Some families have one later (when the shock is removed so that they can attend). Others do something small on their birthday. It doesn’t matter what it looks like; it has to fit the deceased.
California Mental Health
Coping Strategies That Actually Work for Daily Life
Take it easy during the first few weeks. It is the little coping strategies that are helpful, and the aim is to get through each day, not to process anything.
| What To Do | Why It Helps |
| Eat and sleep on some kind of schedule | Grief wrecks both, and both make everything else worse |
| Let people bring food and do tasks | Accepting help is not weakness and they want to help |
| Say yes to one small thing a week | Isolation deepens grief faster than almost anything |
| Be careful with alcohol | It helps for an evening and costs you the next month |
Emotional Healing and Moving Forward With Purpose
In emotional healing, there is no requirement to ‘let go’ of the deceased as previously thought in grief theory. That’s an idea that has been dropped–and it should have been dropped a long time ago.
Finding Compassionate Bereavement Resources at California Mental Health
There comes a time when grief transitions into something else, and there’s a point where it’s important to understand where that is. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, and for the first time, clinicians have a set of criteria. It typically involves severe grief that has not subsided after about a year and is preventing someone from functioning.
If you have not been able to accept your loved one’s death months ago, have become withdrawn, have trouble with work or self-care, start drinking more, or feel like there’s no purpose to life without them, it’s time to take action.
If any of this sounds familiar, please contact California Mental Health. There, clinicians are dealing with grief, and depression, and anxiety that sometimes accompany it. Call or text 988 if you are thinking of hurting yourself.
California Mental Health
FAQs
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How long does the mourning process typically last after losing a loved one?
There is no set length, and anybody giving you a number is making it up. Most people find the sharpest part eases over the first year, with waves still arriving afterward, often around anniversaries. What matters more than the calendar is whether things are gradually getting more manageable. If nothing has shifted after a year, mention it to a doctor.
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Can grief counseling help if you’re struggling with daily tasks and routines?
Yes, and struggling with basic tasks is one of the clearer reasons to go. When grief stops you from eating, sleeping, working, or looking after people who depend on you, that is beyond what time alone tends to fix. A counselor helps with the practical side as well as the emotional one, and you do not need to be in crisis to book.
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What makes memorial services and funeral planning important for your emotional recovery?
They give the loss a shape. A funeral marks it publicly, gathers people who cared into one place, and gives everyone something to do when doing nothing feels impossible. Plenty of people grieve well without a traditional service, but if you missed one, it is reasonable to hold something later.
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Which coping strategies work best for managing grief in the first weeks after loss?
Keep it simple. Eat regularly, sleep when you can, accept every offer of help, and let people bring food. Postpone big decisions like selling a house or changing jobs. Be careful with alcohol, since it worsens sleep and makes grief harder over time. And see one person a week, even briefly.
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How does professional bereavement support differ from relying only on family and friends?
Friends and family are usually enough, and that is worth saying first. What a professional adds is somebody with no stake in how you grieve, which matters if you are carrying relief, anger, or guilt that you would not say at home. They also spot when grief has turned into depression or prolonged grief disorder, which people close to you may miss.
References
- Avis, K. A., Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (2021). Stages of grief portrayed on the internet: A systematic analysis and critical appraisal. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.772696/full
- Friedland, H., Stripling, A., & Crocker, J. (2024). Prolonged grief disorder in adults over 65: A review in light of post-COVID-19 losses. Innovation in Aging, via the National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11691805/
