The stages of grief

Joel Dean, Founder of Joyful
Last updated October 29, 2026

A book about dying, read as a book about grief

Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist, and grief wasn't her subject. On Death and Dying drew on her conversations with more than 200 people who were dying, and the stages described how they faced their own death.² She wrote that the families of dying patients go through similar stages, but the book stayed with the dying.²

Her own book on bereavement came 36 years later, when she and David Kessler wrote On Grief and Grieving in 2005 and applied the stages to the people left behind after a death.³

Kessler's own site now calls the stages "not linear, not universal, and not a checklist".⁴

Plenty of people still hear a ladder. When their grief skips a rung, they wonder what's wrong with them.

The five stages, with examples

We wrote every example line below to show how a stage can sound. None is a quote from a real person.

Denial

In grief, denial is closer to disbelief or numbness than to refusing the facts. You know the person died. Part of you still expects them to call.

Anger

Anger lands on the doctors, on family, on the person who died, on yourself or on God. Often, under it, is the hurt.

Bargaining

Bargaining is the "if only" and "what if" voice. It replays the past looking for the moment things could have gone differently, and it can bring guilt along with it.

Depression

Here the word means deep sadness and pulling back from life: the weight of a big loss settling in. For a while, plans, food and friends might all feel pointless.

Acceptance

Acceptance means knowing the loss is real and slowly building a life that has room for it. Being fine with the loss was never part of it.

Laughing at breakfast, angry by lunch

The feelings rarely take turns. You might laugh at a memory over breakfast, be furious by lunch, and then feel guilty about the hour you felt okay, as if a good moment were disloyal to the person you lost.

Grief lives in the body too. The NHS lists shock, numbness, sadness, tiredness, anger and guilt, and says these feelings come and go and can hit without warning.⁵

A song in a shop can undo a good week. You haven't gone backwards.

What 233 bereaved people in Connecticut showed

The stages are the best known idea about grief, and the evidence for them is thin. They make useful words and a poor map.

No sound evidence supports a set order, according to three bereavement researchers who reviewed the stage idea in 2017 and argued that professionals and grieving people alike should drop it.²

The one large test came from Yale. The Yale Bereavement Study followed 233 people in Connecticut for 1 to 24 months after a family member died of natural causes.⁶ Three of its results cut against the stages. Disbelief was neither the first nor the strongest response, acceptance was the most common response from the first month on, and the strongest painful feeling the whole way through was yearning, which isn't one of the five.⁶

Then the twist. Rescaled, each feeling did peak in the stage order: disbelief first, then yearning at about 4 months, anger at 5 and depression at 6.⁶ Other researchers questioned those methods in letters to the journal, and the authors later described the results as grief "states" rather than stages.²

Steady grief turns out to be common. Psychologist George Bonanno reviewed the evidence and found that resilient grief happens more than experts long believed, and that it isn't a sign of denial.⁷

Expecting stages can do harm. Some people have sought help because they never felt a stage, or felt them in the "wrong" order, and friends and professionals who expect a sequence can end up giving poor support.²

A map that fits grief better: back and forth

Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut's dual process model, from 1999, describes two kinds of coping in place of five steps.⁸ One kind faces the loss itself: crying, looking at photos, missing the person. The other handles what the loss changed, from the bills and the new routines to the moments of rest from grief. A grieving person switches between them, sometimes from one moment to the next within a single day, and the switching is part of coping.⁹

The model allows something the stages don't. A morning on paperwork counts as grieving, and so does an evening of TV with no tears.

Using the stages without letting them grade you

1. Keep the names and drop the order. If a stage names what you feel today, use it. If none fits, you've learned something about your own grief.²
2. Say the yearning plainly. Missing the person was the strongest painful feeling in the Yale data.⁶ "I miss him," said to a friend or written on a page, is often truer than any stage label.
3. Let the breaks count. Stroebe and Schut treat rest from grief as coping in its own right.⁸ Plan one ordinary thing a day and let it be guilt-free.
4. Write the "if only" down. Bargaining thoughts can loop for hours. Write the sentence, then under it write what you knew back then, before you knew how it ended.
5. Write to the person. An unsent letter gives the feelings somewhere to go. The grief page has the steps.

When the yearning is still there a year on

For most people, grief slowly loses its intensity, though it can still flare.⁵ For some it doesn't. It stays fierce and gets in the way of daily life.

When it stays that way for a year or more, a clinician may look at prolonged grief disorder, which the American Psychiatric Association added to the DSM-5-TR in 2022.¹⁰ The core sign is intense yearning for the person, or preoccupation with them, nearly every day at least a year after a death (6 months for children).¹⁰ At least three other symptoms come with it, such as feeling part of yourself has died, intense emotional pain or feeling life is meaningless.¹⁰

Pooling 14 studies, one review put the rate at about 1 in 10 among adults bereaved by non-violent deaths.¹¹

Leave the scoring to someone trained. If your grief feels stuck, see your doctor or a grief counselor and let them do the assessing. There is treatment for it: therapies built on cognitive behavioral therapy have reduced its symptoms.¹⁰

One source of help is easy to miss. If there was a hospice, call it. Medicare-certified hospices have to offer the family bereavement support for as long as a year after the death.¹²

Joyful is an AI journaling companion, not therapy or a grief counselor.

Questions people ask

What are the five stages of grief in order?

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.¹ The initials spell DABDA, which makes the list easy to remember. Treat it as her listing order; nobody has shown that grieving people follow it.²

Are there 5 or 7 stages of grief?

Kübler-Ross described five. Seven-stage versions online usually add shock and a stage of testing or rebuilding. They don't come from her work, and the research cautions above apply to them too.

Do the stages of grief apply to a breakup?

People use them that way, and grief follows plenty of losses besides a death. But the stage model was built from people who were dying. Nobody tested it on breakups. Losses that other people don't count as grief get their own section on the grief page.

How long does grief last?

There is no set timeline. For most people the intensity eases gradually.⁵ Anniversaries, birthdays and other dates can bring it back, and a 2025 review of 58 articles describes these anniversary reactions.¹³ The 12 months in the prolonged grief criteria tell a clinician when to look closer. They set no deadline for you.¹⁰

What shouldn't you do while grieving?

The NHS suggests not trying to do everything at once and not using alcohol, drugs or gambling to cope.⁵ It also suggests setting small, doable goals.