'Here's what we get wrong about the 5 Stages of Grief.'

and a personal plea 'Don't grief-splain me'

Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to our new Carer Mentor community members!

I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why?

Summary and My Personal Commentary

The work of Megan Devine¹ was an important discovery for me. Her book ‘It’s OK not to be OK. Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand’ was a revelation. Her website and advice on ‘How to help a grieving friend’ was spot on.

I’m sharing a video and the direct transcript here because I believe it helps us shift our understanding from popular beliefs to the realities of Grief, as a non-linear, messy, and challenging Human Experience that is highly personal.

Megan has great respect for the work of Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (1969); quote, ‘she was a pioneer of her time.’

However, her work was quickly oversimplified, popularised, and used as a tool to control and corral grief—a hugely complex, personal, amorphous Human condition. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.

In Western culture, we’ve learned to discuss Grief more than before, but we still want to be the hero for those we see in grief-pain. We try to comfort those we love using the Dr Kübler-Ross stages; we want to be ‘helpful’ or remove that pain to stop our loved ones from hurting.

Be warned - small soapbox ahead!

Feel free to ignore this personal opinion and skip to the expert advice from Megan Devine in the video!

Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

- Megan Devine-

Please, let’s unlearn and relearn how we respond to those who are grieving. Can we ‘just’ empathetically sit in grief pain instead of griefsplaining?

The most precious, most appreciated friendships I have were deepened because these special friends chose to listen and learn from these pleas: ‘No advice, no solutions, no pushing, or trying to recentre the grief to your own grief experience. Please help me not to be alone in my grief. Hugs, hand-holding, and tissues, please. Let me cry.’

No deflecting our discomfort or, worse, under-valuing the pain we’re experiencing.

Please don’t tell me, ‘You know how I feel’. You don’t know how I feel because you didn’t live in my skin these last few years.

Have you noticed how that phrase can lead to you, the person grieving, being the empathetic listener for that person, using energy that you don’t have?

Like ‘caresplaining’, grief-splaining may be well-intentioned, as people want to be ‘helpful’ or save us from pain. [I’m probably more grumpy right now because I don’t have much energy (still recovering from Strep-pneumonia/COVID)]. I just don’t want to explain justify my grief/pain to others.

One of the hardest lessons was learning how singular my experience really was. No one had the relationship I had with my Dad, or went through the losses I’ve had that caused me to grieve. There is no standard, no norm, no right or wrong. So doesn’t that mean I’m all alone, isolated and unable to be related to? Unrelate-able?

I’ve learnt that it’s the exact opposite. This is why I curated the Bereavement and Grief Anthology.

By reading/listening to numerous diverse experiences of bereavement and grief, I’m not expecting to say, ‘Matchy match!’ that’s me to a tee!’ I can see pieces I can relate to. Read/hear the resonance in the tone and feelings expressed. Draw empathy and inspiration from how others have articulated their experience in words or created something—art or music.

Curiously, embracing the diversity of our human experiences empathetically and sharing something about our experiences can connect us more powerfully than labels and stages. It can inspire us to understand our own grief better, one small piece at a time, so that we can carry it forward with a little less struggle/fight. That’s my personal insight-creation. It may not ring true for you.

So, please don’t griefsplain my experience of bereavement and grief. Sit alongside, I accept warm hugs of empathy and resonance. I respect your experiences and feelings, please respect mine. No explanations or labels are required. xo

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‘Here's what we get wrong about the 5 Stages of Grief.’ (Sept 1, 2024)

Her Website: Refuge in Grief by Megan Devine

Resource: Megan Devine's 'How do you help a grieving friend?'

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REFERENCE: Timestamped Transcript of the Video - Megan Devine.

Have you heard of the five stages of grief I'm pretty sure you have but did you know that those five stages of grief bear no resemblance whatsoever to actual real grief. Let's talk about it. So if you have heard anything about grief it probably had something to do with those five stages of grief, right.

I bet you can name them even if I have to sometimes work to remember them there's denial there's bargaining there's anger there's depression and there is acceptance right right The Holy Grail of all things grief is that you reach that stage of acceptance and everything ‘goes back to normal’.

None of that is true but if we don't have some kind of order for grief does that mean that we're just kind of screwed honestly that we're just left alone with our feelings we're going to be sad and depressed and miserable for the rest of our lives when something difficult happens.

0.50 No the truth is that there's a big middle ground in there and it's called being human so in today's video we are going to talk about those five stages of grief. What they were used for,  for what the goal was, what it's really like in real life trying to fit a human process into a structure that is completely made up and what you can do to find some sort of order inside your grief that actually makes sense as a human being not a set of rules

1:16 let's talk about what normal means, because a lot of the times what we hear when we're talking about grief is, first of all, the new normal and friends or family or even you putting some pressure on yourself that you need to get back to normal… There is NO normal.

1:33 There's no life to go back to, there is no you without whatever it is you've lost, and that's not a downer that's the truth.

Normal is a moving point of balance. It is a constantly changing phenomenon what is normal for you today might not be normal for you tomorrow. This insistence on normal also isn't helpful.

1.50 We've got the five stages of grief that aren't helpful, we've got our insistence on normal or ‘a new normal’— also not a helpful term! Normal is what is typical for you in this new life that is unfolding and unfolding and unfolding.

2:05 Let's talk about the history of the stages of grief for a minute. There's sort of this rule book that we have saturated into culture and movies and books and pop psychology but what are they really the five stages of grief were created by Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in the late '70s. They were actually something that she found working with people who had just received a terminal diagnosis she never meant them to be concrete things that you have to go through she never meant them to go in order. She also never meant them to be required parts of adjusting to a terminal diagnosis

2:40 notice what I said there: A terminal diagnosis. What Dr Kübler-Ross  was seeing was these patients that she was working with as they received a terminal diagnosis as they came to terms with their own impending death they felt some things.

2:56 She meant those stages as a way to make a wholly disorienting time have some anchors in it have some markers of what makes sense for you to be feeling when you're facing your own mortality.

3:09 Now what happened unfortunately is that medical profession, the culture the therapist the nurses the doctors they ran with that and they said that grief is this really uncomfortable giant thing that feels messy and uncomfortable and unpredictable. Let's put some order on it.

3:23 So they took those five things that somebody might feel when they're facing their own mortality and turned them into a system by which we measure all grief. [They say} “There are five stages you must go through them in order OR ELSE you're not doing your grief work correctly— you are failing the stages”

3.41 AND it's not just that, SOME of those stages are better than others. “Right we understand that you might have a little bit of bargaining,  bargaining is when you're sort of arguing with the universe if only you let my person live if only you let the test results come back the way that I want them to I promise to be good right it's ridiculous when you look at it this way it's this like vending machine world where if you do all of the right things you get the result you want.  

4:06 so that's bargaining depression. Sort of resign to your fate everything is terrible everything is gloomy anyway there is anger

4:23 anger is my favorite in this made-up system anger is the one that we see somebody being angry in their grief in their loss whatever they're coming to terms with and we say anger is normal and healthy just don't get stuck there. Don't get stuck in your anger right? Anger is allowed but only a tiny bit and then you need to move on because we really need you to get to that acceptance piece right we really need you to do this correctly and do it quickly so that you go back to normal

4:41 Which is really just code for stop being sad in my face. It makes me uncomfortable

4:48 Sometimes I am really cranky about it because the stages of grief are this way of simplifying this complex Human Condition this complex Human Experience that we all go through in different ways at different times

5:02 We like things to be simple we don't like things to be complicated and we don't like to feel helpless in the face of Pain, any kind of pain and those handy dandy stages make us feel like we got this. We know what to do we know what to expect we know what to expect of ourselves and we know what to offer to somebody else when we see them struggling. “Hey it sounds like you're in denial maybe you should do this hey you're being really angry and I know that's normal but you really need to get to acceptance

5:30 . It's this way of controlling and judging honestly this messy amorphous very Human Condition which honestly I get it it makes sense! It's hard to see somebody you love having a hard time it's hard to feel like you don’t know what to do about it. So anytime I see the stages of grief mentioned in a book or in a movie especially in movies or in like a major media newspaper article or online article

5:57 What really irks me about that, is that your friends and family are going to read that and that reinforces that there is a right and a wrong way for you to be living your life. That there's a right and a wrong way to respond in grief and that's just not true!  

6:11 So those stages of grief really enforce this misunderstanding that we have with ourselves and with each other that there is something right or wrong about being Human! There's nothing right or wrong about being human! It's just us, so I think what really happens is that we have the stages of grief we have this sort of transformation idea of any kind of hardship something crappy happens to you if you do your work correctly you come out bigger and better and stronger.

6:40 At the end, those stages of grief are just part of that transformation storyline. Crappy things happen yes but they happen to teach you a lesson and if you do your grief work correctly you come out better stronger wiser more resilient carrying with you lessons that you couldn't have learned any other way

6:55 How rude! How rude! Crappy things happen all the time beautiful things do too but we're better with the beautiful things than we are with the difficult things.

7:07 We say to somebody who's grieving yeah yeah yeah do your grief feel your feelings but don't stay stuck there. This is going to change this is going to get better

7:14 Can you imagine if we did that with happiness? Don't stay stuck in your happiness things are going to change, right? When you flip it, you can really hear how ridiculous it is some of the things that we say to somebody going through a hard time

7:25 I get it we haven't been taught the right tools to really be supportive of somebody going through a hard time. So of course we reach for these tools that we've been sort of force-fed over the last 40 or 50 years.  

7:38 Yet we reach for things that wouldn't work for us when they've been applied to us.  Nobody likes to be judged for what they're going through but we turn that around and we use these old tools that we've inherited just because we don't know what else to do and that's where I in this is what I have spent the last over a decade doing.

7:56 Helping people understand that the things we habitually do that things we've been taught to do when somebody's going through a hard time they don't actually work but that doesn't mean we're just helpless in the face of everything if we throw out those stages of grief it doesn't mean we have nothing.

8:10 it just means that we've got to expand our ideas of what it is to be human what it is to lose things what it is to be in pain and what it is to need each other. We don't need a narrow little set of rules to love each other and to show up what we need is more of a generous inclusive awkward Ness.  

8:31 so let's go back to those stages of grief for a minute Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross created those rules as a guide, as a comfort to people going through a really difficult time, in 1969

8:43 Grief existed before 1969. Sometimes people think that I'm dissing her work, absolutely not she was a pioneer of her time! I can totally geek out on the history of why we've been so pain avoidant from the dawn of human history right up until today but the important part for today is that her work pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in the decades that she grew up in. No one was talking about death. No one was talking about grief.

9:09 You didn't air your dirty laundry, everything was great, everything was happy all the time even more so than it is today. She revolutionized the way that we talk about The Human Experience.  

9:21 We have grown beyond those reductive terms that were so powerful in her time we've changed we're different. We know more about what it is is to be human, to be hurt to be suffering, to talk about what's really going on for ourselves and in ourselves and with each other. We can do this we don't need to use the tools that made sense 50 years ago.  

9:46 We can grow and adapt and become even more human and even more helpful and I can get super poetic about all of that stuff which is sometimes helpful and sometimes not but there's a real realistic practical way to approach grief for yourself and approach grief.

10:02 When you see it in somebody else again remember that I said that. Just because we throw out these old reductive stages linear model just because we throw those out doesn't mean there's nothing to do.

10:17 So if you're going through something that's difficult that could be a loss due to a death it could be a chronic illness it could be any number of things. If you're going through a grieving process I think the first thing to remember is that there's nothing wrong with you.

10:31 Don't underestimate the power of not feeling like you're doing it wrong. I didn't say that great but we do this thing because we have those five stages of grief because we have toxic positivity because we have GoodVibes only when you're not matching that happiness ideal you can feel like the problem is yourself. So don't underestimate the power of acknowledging that you are a human being having a human experience and you feel how you feel! Don't underestimate the power of that! So, that's thing one you're not doing it wrong. Maybe it's messy, it's probably painful but you're not wrong!  

11:02 You will feel a million different things. Those five stages of grief you might feel some of those. You might be angry, you might be in denial. Denial is really just a code word for I need a distraction. Denial is really a positive thing in some ways it means that your brain your nervous system can't take in the totality of what this loss brings to you or means to you or is right. So denial is actually not a bad thing you might move through 19 different emotions in 10 minutes.  Uncomfortable, yes but weird, no!

11:39 Whatever you feel inside your grief is correct just because it doesn't feel good doesn't make it wrong!

11:46 If you're trying to support somebody else who's going through grief all those things that I just said they also apply remember that whatever your grieving person is going through is normal. It is uncomfortable, it is hard to watch, it is hard to feel helpless in the face of somebody else's pain. Your job though is to notice that you're feeling helpless, recognize your instinct or your impulse to jump right there and make it betterfor them. Maybe you reach for those stages of grief and say “this is denial. It's perfectly Normal and you should move on to acceptance’  

12:15 If you reach for those tools that we've been taught, chances are pretty good you're going to miss your mark. It's not a bad thing to want to help somebody that you care about.BUT I want you to slow down your impulse to help and think about oh I'm feeling helpless in the face of this person's pain I really want to take that pain away I can't do that though My job is to feel helpless and awkward and show up anyway.

12:37 All you really need to remember friends, is don't try to fix your person's pain for them. If you just remember their grief is not a problem to be solved, your job is not to fix things for somebody but to support them exactly where they are you're going to do fine.

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‘On a beautiful summer day in 2009, I watched my partner drown. Matt was strong, fit, and healthy; just three months from his 40th birthday. All my professional experience felt meaningless. I’d never felt so destroyed - or so alone. Everything I’ve built since then has been to make the world a better place for grieving people (and that means all of us).’ - Megan Devine’s website ‘Refuge in Grief’

1. Psychotherapist and bestselling author Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. She's an international speaker, trainer, and consultant across many industries - wherever grief is found (aka: everywhere).
The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. She's an executive producer and host of the podcast It’s OK that You’re Not OK, and is a featured expert in the PBS documentary, Speaking Grief. Megan's celebrated animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world. For her 6 month clinical training intensive and other resources, visit refugeingrief.com/training
Megan is a licensed psychotherapist, and a member of the California Association for Licensed Professional Clinical Counselors. She’s run a private consulting practice - with a focus on helping healthcare providers and healthcare systems handle all forms of grief - for more than 20 years. Her work has appeared in GQ, Harvard Business Review, Washington Post, New York Times, Stanford University, and on APM’s Marketplace.