7 stages of grief

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with; Nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”

~ Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

I have never studied psychology during my education, but I have become increasingly aware of the importance of an understanding of this subject. Plenty of things can be analysed academically or theoretically, but often times what stands between an academic theory and the actuality is an element of psychology. Take finance as an example, there are all sorts of theories that explain how the capital market should function, at the end of the day – however – it the human behaviours that drive all the cycles. Same for personal relationships: there are many different frameworks to explain how relationship works, but at the end of the day relationships take a lot of work because each individual is different or each person has a somewhat different psychology.

As much as we do not want to admit, bad things are an integral part to life, and this post looks into a related topic: the 7 stages of grief. The 7 stages of grief is a framework studying how human beings react to a traumatic event such as an imminent death or a significant loss. The framework explains that after a traumatic event, people go through 7 different emotional stages as follow:

1. Disbelief and Denial: essentially a self-defense mechanism, giving the time to adjust to the new reality.
2. Pain and guilt: after the initial shock and disbelief, the pain is coming to the surface. People may be guilty about what they did or did not do.
3. Anger and bargaining: anger can be a complex emotion and is a normal reaction to grief with no specific timeline associated with its stage. People can get stuck in an angry phase of grief if they don’t understand how to deal with these feelings.
4. Depression: realising the true magnitude of one’s losses, thereby resulting a depression of various magnitude. It is important to actually go through the emotion and not skipping this stage of the grief process / ignoring the sadness.
5. Upward turn: things finally getting better, it’s like seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
6. Reconstruction and working through: the next step after the “upward turn”, as one seeks more realistic solutions to rebuild and improvement his / her life after the traumatic event.
7. Acceptance and hope: emerging as a stronger self

According to experts, this 7 stages of grief process varies in time for different people, from weeks to months to years. Nevertheless, I think it is a good framework to keep ourselves in check through tough times and layout a pathway to become a better person.

Share with us any thought process you may have in the comment section below.