For anyone who has followed me for any length of time, you know how much I detest the whole idea of 'stages of grief'. At best the 5 stages describe states people who are grieving may or may not go through. They certainly do not offer a linear roadmap for grief.
To top off this very bad idea, 'stages of grief' have become a laughable cultural cliche´. Here's the one that put me over the edge today from The Motley Fool from whom I expect better...The 5 Stages of Investment Grief
And as the election season winds down in November and December, we will undoubtedly be inundated with articles about every political candidate's stages of grief. We'll get an onslaught for the loser in the World Series followed by the football and basketball losers. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Then there are all the television shows making a point about the stages. All of which does such a disservice to people who are actually in the midst of real life grieving.
The bottomline is that grief does not follow any sort of linear path. There are typical patterns which have nothing whatever to do with denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but even within those patterns there is a huge amount of variation. Grief is unique to each individual and each relationship and cannot be categorized in this way. It just can't.
This article was written before the cultural cliché phenomenon hit, but the points I make about why this does such a disservice to the grieving are as true today as they were then...
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