The Grief Stages Myth: What Research Actually Says About How We Heal
I lost my cat Penuche this past Tuesday. He was sixteen years old — a ragamuffin who had been with me through more chapters of my life than most people have. He was diagnosed with severe kidney disease and 5 days later, we said goodbye. At home, in my husband's lap with me holding his beautiful little paw. I felt the moment his soul ascended and it was a wonderful thing to witness.
It's been really hard. And it's also been complicated in a way. I've caught myself feeling like I shouldn't grieve her as much as I would a person. Like the size of my grief needs to be proportional to where a cat ranks on some hierarchy of loss.
That's not fair. Penuche was my family. He was sixteen years of mornings, of him sitting on the bathroom sink while I showered — which he loved and my husband Josh never experienced with him, because that was our thing, not theirs. He's grieving her too, but differently. He had a different relationship with him, a different rhythm with Penuche in his daily life. Neither of our grief is more valid than the other. Neither of us will fully understand what the other is carrying. And that's one of the loneliest truths about grief. We grieve alone, even when we're grieving the same loss together.
I've been thinking about all of this in the context of what the research actually says about how grief works — because it's not what most people have been told.
The Five Stages Were Never About Bereavement
The cultural script most of us were handed goes like this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages, from her 1969 book On Death and Dying, became the dominant framework for what grief is supposed to look like. If you're not moving through those stages in roughly that order, something has gone wrong.
Here's the problem: Kübler-Ross developed those stages by studying people who were dying — terminally ill patients responding to their own impending death. The five stages described their psychological experience. They were never derived from research on bereaved survivors, and Kübler-Ross herself later clarified she never intended them as a rigid sequence.
Grief researchers have spent three decades trying to correct the record.
What the Research Actually Shows
A 2007 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, led by Paul Maciejewski and Holly Prigerson at Yale, actually tested the stage model empirically by following 233 bereaved adults over time. The results partially supported the idea that different emotional experiences peak at different points — but yearning, not denial, was consistently the most prominent feature of early grief. And acceptance was present even in the earliest interviews.
I saw this exact acceptance early on in my mom's grief journey with her father, my grandfather. It's not something you see often depicted in media. Just the quiet acceptance of a life well lived. And an understanding that letting go is a great act of love.
George Bonanno at Columbia University has identified several distinct grief trajectories, none of which looks like the stage model. Most people — roughly half or more — show resilience: they experience distress but return to baseline functioning relatively quickly.
A smaller proportion show chronic grief that persists at elevated levels for years. A third group shows delayed grief, with distress rising after an initial period of apparent stability.
Bonanno's work also challenges the idea that intense early distress is required for healthy grief — what researchers call the "grief work" hypothesis. His research found that people who showed resilience weren't suppressing emotion or in denial. They were genuinely adapting. And they didn't later show the delayed distress that the suppression theory would predict.
Which is exactly what I have experienced in my own grief journeys. Whether that was losing a grandparent, a cousin, or my pets. I grieve, I cry, and then I'm....good. And that makes me feel guilty sometimes. I think knowing that life continues on after physical death makes a difference. But I also think just accepting that death is part of life is something I inherently understand as well.
The bottom line: if you feel worse than expected, you're not broken. If you feel better than expected, you're not suppressing. If it resurfaces years later in a moment you didn't see coming, that's within the normal range. The variation in grief experiences is wider than any stage model can hold.
Secondary Grief: The Losses Underneath the Loss
Something we talked about on the Soul Signals podcast that I keep coming back to: when one loss is in front of us, it has a way of summoning everything else. Every loss we haven't fully processed. Every version of ourselves we've had to say goodbye to. Every ending we didn't get to grieve properly because life kept moving.
Secondary grief is what happens around the edges of the obvious loss. When someone dies, you lose the person — but you also lose the future you were building toward, the relationship you thought you'd eventually repair, the version of yourself that existed inside that relationship. You lose the daily structure that person anchored. The community. The identity.
And subconsciously, one loss reminds us that things end. All things. Every time we lose something, some part of us is processing not just this loss but the cumulative weight of every loss before it.
Callie shared on that episode that she grieved having a hysterectomy — even though she'd made the decision, even though she didn't regret it. She sat in the bath beforehand and thanked her uterus, and found herself emotional in a way she hadn't expected. That's secondary grief doing what it does: showing up in the places you didn't know were tender.
Michele had a moment years ago in a doctor's office when she was told a procedure would make her infertile. She never wanted children. She looked at the doctor and said "that's okay" — and then burst into tears. She had no idea that grief was in her. The doctor looked at Michele and said: every woman mourns this, regardless of what she wanted. She was right. Michele was grieving a version of herself she'd never intended to become but apparently had been carrying anyway.
Secondary grief is the grief nobody validates because the thing you're mourning doesn't always have an obvious name.
We Grieve Alone — And That's Okay
Josh is grieving Penuche. But he's not grieving the bathroom sink. He didn't have that. I can't explain to him why I get sad in the shower because he doesn't have the reference point — that was mine and Penuche's, not his. Neither of us is grieving incorrectly. We're just grieving differently, because we had different relationships with the same animal.
This is true of every shared loss. Two siblings can lose the same parent and have almost nothing in common in their grief, because they each had a different parent. Grief is personal in a way that makes it isolating even when you're surrounded by people who loved the same person.
I said this on the podcast and I'll say it here: we can't expect others to understand our grief journey because no one else has walked it. Going through it alone is okay. It's not a judgment in any direction. It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong and it doesn't mean the people around you don't care. It means grief is specific to the relationship, and the relationship was yours.
When Grief Needs Professional Support
In 2022, the DSM-5-TR added a diagnosis called Prolonged Grief Disorder — characterized by persistent yearning and clinically significant symptoms for at least twelve months after a loss. This reflects a genuine clinical reality: for some bereaved people, grief doesn't move and they need support.
What this diagnosis is not is a threshold that anyone still grieving after a year has crossed. The difference between prolonged grief disorder and normal extended grief lies in functional impairment and the intensity and persistence of specific symptoms — not in the simple fact that sadness persists. Grief that resurfaces years later on anniversaries or significant dates is part of the normal range.
If your grief feels unmanageable — if you cannot function, maintain relationships, sleep, or eat, and that persists beyond several months without movement — a grief therapist is the right starting point. Not because something has gone wrong with your process. Because the right support makes a genuine difference.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Kübler-Ross say grief has five stages? She described five stages in the context of dying patients, not bereaved survivors. She later clarified they were never meant to be linear or universal, and regretted how rigidly the model came to be applied. Her co-author David Kessler introduced a sixth stage — finding meaning — in a 2019 book that revisits her original work.
How long does grief normally last? There's no universal answer. Research by Bonanno and others shows grief trajectories vary significantly. Most people return to baseline functioning within months. Some experience extended grief. A minority meet the clinical threshold for Prolonged Grief Disorder. Duration alone doesn't determine whether grief is normal or disordered.
Is it normal to feel fine shortly after a loss? Yes. Bonanno's resilience research shows a large proportion of bereaved people don't experience prolonged impairment — and that this is genuine resilience, not suppression or denial. Cultural pressure to perform distress is not supported by what healthy grief actually looks like in the data.
What about grieving a pet? Exactly the same. The grief is proportional to the relationship, not to what category the being falls into. Sixteen years with an animal who was part of your daily life is a real loss. Don't let anyone — including yourself — minimize it.
When should grief lead someone to seek professional help? When it becomes functionally impairing and that impairment persists beyond several months without movement. Any grief that feels unmanageable is worth discussing with a therapist or grief counselor.
Grief — in all its forms, named and unnamed — is something I work with constantly in readings, on the Soul Signals Podcast, and inside the Soul Alignment Collective. If you want support in understanding your own grief journey, that's work we can do together.
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