- The five stages of grief were developed from Kübler-Ross's work with terminally ill patients — not bereaved people. The application to grief was a misreading that became cultural gospel. Real grief doesn't move linearly, and the model that implies you should be "further along" is not based in evidence.
- Contemporary grief research has shifted from a "letting go" model to continuing bonds theory — the finding that maintaining an ongoing relationship with what you've lost is not stuck grief. It's a normal, healthy part of integration.
- Grief isn't only about death. You can grieve a relationship, a version of yourself, a childhood, a life you believed you were going to have. Much of the low-grade mourning people carry is grief that was never named as grief. Naming it changes how you relate to it.
We've inherited a model of grief that implies it ends.
That there are stages, and if you move through them correctly, you arrive at acceptance — and then you move on. Most people who have experienced real loss know this model doesn't match the experience. And contemporary grief research confirms: it was never accurate to begin with.
The five stages were never meant to be a checklist
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed the five stages from her work with terminally ill patients — not from bereaved people processing loss. The stages described what dying people experienced as they confronted their own mortality.
The application of those stages to grief was a misreading that became cultural gospel. And it did real harm — by creating a model that implies grief moves in sequence, that there's a correct order, that you should be "further along" by now.
Real grief doesn't move linearly. Some days feel like progress. Others feel like starting from the beginning. Both are normal. The model that implies you're doing grief wrong is not based in evidence.
You don't "move on." You integrate.
Contemporary grief research has shifted fundamentally from the older "letting go" model to something called continuing bonds theory — now the standard in serious grief research.
The finding: maintaining an ongoing relationship with what you've lost is not a sign of stuck grief. It's a normal, healthy part of the process.
Talking to someone who's gone. Keeping their photo. Asking yourself what they would have said. Carrying them forward with you. These are forms of integration, not pathology. The goal isn't to stop loving what you've lost. It's to find a way to carry it that allows you to also be present in your life.
Carrying grief that hasn't been named? The Really Not That Deep podcast goes into loss, processing, and what integration actually looks like — in plain language, without the platitudes.
Healthy grief moves back and forth — not forward
The Dual Process Model of Grief (Stroebe and Schut, 1999) offers the most empirically supported framework for understanding how people actually move through loss. The model describes adaptive grieving as oscillating between two orientations:
Loss orientation: actively confronting and processing the grief, letting it be present. Restoration orientation: attending to life without what was lost, managing daily demands, adjusting to the new reality.
Healthy grieving means moving back and forth between these, not completing one before moving to the other. Spending a morning sorting through someone's things and an afternoon making dinner plans is not inconsistency. It's integration in action.
Grief isn't just about death
This might be the single most important thing to understand about grief, because so much unprocessed emotion lives in this gap.
You can grieve a relationship that ended. A version of yourself that didn't survive something. A life you believed you were going to have. A childhood that wasn't what it should have been. A friendship that quietly dissolved. A dream you finally had to release.
Grief is the response to any significant loss — not only literal death. And a lot of the heaviness people carry, the sadness that doesn't have a clear reason, the low-grade mourning that runs underneath daily life — much of that is grief that was never named as grief.
Naming it matters. It changes how you relate to it.
The question isn't when you'll be over it
The cultural script around grief tends to have a timeline. People check in for a while, and then at some point the implication becomes: shouldn't you be moving on?
The research says: there is no correct timeline. Loss changes over time — it doesn't disappear. The weight shifts. The sharp edges soften. It becomes something you carry differently. Some losses stay present for a lifetime, and that's not pathology — that's the cost of having loved something.
The goal isn't to stop loving what you've lost. It's to find a way to carry it that allows you to also be present in your life.
Psychology of grief, loss, and what healing actually looks like
The podcast goes deeper on loss, emotional processing, and the research behind what integration really means — in plain language, without the cultural scripts.
Sources
- Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.
- Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.
- Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor & Francis.
- Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience. American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.
- Shear, M. K. (2015). Complicated grief. New England Journal of Medicine, 372(2), 153–160.
- Worden, J. W. (2018). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy (5th ed.). Springer.