Five Stages of Grief: Shock & Denial
Due to the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist in 1969, and later David Kessler, we have a model for understanding and describing what happens to individuals suffering grief.  Her five stage model was later modified to include 7 stages of grief.  This model is a more in-depth analysis of the process.  She added two stages as an extension of the grief cycle.  The seven stages include shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance.  Each stage has its unique characteristics but grief is complicated and can be a mixture of several stages.  We are all different in how we respond to a significant loss.

SHOCK:  Even if the death of a loved one is expected at some point, we are temporarily shocked at the news and suffer initial paralysis at the bad news.  This can be characterized by disbelief, unable to think about the next steps.  A numbness can persist for a while. A realization that the individual has left our lives brings deep sorrow.    
 
DENIAL:  Denial is an attempt to delay the news or acknowledge that the event hasn’t happened or isn’t permanent.  It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. Getting through another day is the focus. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

These feels of shock and denial are intertwined and an individual can move from shock to denial and back again very rapidly.  The progression through any of the stages is rarely an orderly movement and you can experience them in any order and any number of times.  Kubler-Ross did not mean for us to understand these steps as a clean progression from one stage to the next, but her goal was to define, not only, what those emotions are, but, how people communicate their grief to others through their words, emotions, and behavior. 

Next column will discuss the stages of anger and bargaining.