My brother Philip was murdered. In the years since, I have not moved through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance in any order a chart would recognize. Some days I hit four of them before lunch.
People handed me the stages anyway. Friends, the internet, one guy at a wake who I'm pretty sure had just googled it in the parking lot. The stages are the only grief education most people ever get, which is a problem, because the model wasn't built for grieving people. It wasn't built for you at all.
Where the five stages actually came from
In 1969, a psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book called On Death and Dying. The five stages in that book came from her interviews with terminally ill patients. People who were dying. The model described how patients came to terms with their own deaths, and in that context it did real good. Doctors in the 1960s had almost no training in talking to dying people, and her work forced the medical world to start.
Then the model jumped the fence. Somewhere between 1969 and your high school health class, a framework about facing your own death got rebranded as a map for the people left behind. Nobody validated that move. It just happened, the way things happen when an idea is tidy enough to fit on a poster.
Do the five stages of grief happen in order?
No. Kübler-Ross spent her later years saying the stages were never meant to be a fixed sequence, that not everyone experiences all of them, and that they don't arrive in a set order. Most people never hear that part.
Researchers have been blunter. Bereavement scientists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, who study how people actually cope with loss, have warned clinicians that stage thinking misleads grieving people. There is no published evidence that the bereaved pass through five stages in sequence, and decades of studies have failed to find one. George Bonanno at Columbia followed people from before a loss to long after it, and found the most common response wasn't a five-act drama at all. It was resilience. A lot of grievers stay functional, keep working, keep laughing at things, and still love the person they lost. The stages have no slot for those people, so those people conclude they're grieving wrong.
What grief actually does
Grief comes in waves, and the waves don't take requests.
The closest thing science has to an accurate picture is what Stroebe and Schut call the dual process model. You swing between two modes: facing the loss head-on (crying, remembering, sitting in it) and getting on with life (paying bills, making dinner, watching something dumb). The swinging back and forth is not avoidance or failure. The swinging is the coping. A griever who laughs at a party three weeks after the funeral and falls apart folding laundry eight years later is not doing it backwards. That's the actual shape of the thing.
After a murder, I'd add one more correction. Grief doesn't have stages. It has ambushes. A song. A car like his. A kid with his walk. You don't progress past ambushes. You just get better at standing back up.
Why the stage model hurts grieving people
Because people grade themselves with it.
I hear from grievers every day, and a startling number of them are worried they skipped a stage. They never got angry, so something must be brewing. They felt acceptance early, so they must be in denial about their denial. The model turns grief into homework with a due date, and grievers, who are already exhausted, start auditing their own pain for compliance. Bargaining is the clearest example of how badly the model translates, and I wrote about that one separately: What Is the Bargaining Stage of Grief (And Why It Probably Wasn't Designed for You).
Worse, other people grade you with it. "You're still in the anger phase." "You haven't accepted it yet." The stages give everyone around you a license to assess your grief like a project timeline. Nobody gets to do that. There is no timeline. There never was.
What to do with this
Drop the rubric. If you felt acceptance in week one and rage in year six, you are not broken and you are not behind. You're grieving like an actual human instead of a diagram.
Let the swinging count as progress. The day you spent distracted and functional was grief work. So was the day you couldn't get off the floor. The dual process model's whole point is that both are doing the job. And if the missing never fully stops, that's not the model failing either. Grief is love with nowhere to go, and love doesn't run on a schedule.
And when someone tells you what stage you're in, you have my permission to tell them the stages were written for dying patients in 1969 and were never about you. Say it politely. Or don't.
Philip deserved better than a five-step flowchart. So does whoever you're missing.