Published Jan 16, 2026
TL;DR: The Five Stages are out(ish). The Dual Process model is in. You’ve heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages model of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
There are references to this model everywhere in pop culture, whenever a character experiences a significant loss: Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, Friends, The Sopranos, Groundhog Day. There’s even a Scottish synth/industrial band named Kubler-Ross!
What you may not realize is that our understanding of the bereavement process has evolved beyond the Five Stages model.
How did we get here?
The Five Stages model was popularized in Kubler-Ross’ seminal 1969 work On Death and Dying.
Kubler-Ross’ research consisted of interviewing patients who were dying, and the Five Stages model was created to describe the process that a person goes through at the end of their own life, not the loss of someone else.
But the model didn’t stay contained within that original context.
In the 1970s, the Five Stages model was widely adopted as a general framework for bereavement. This cultural jump was the result of having an accessible, easy-to-understand, easy-to-teach model paired with an unusually effective storyteller and public intellectual. Kubler-Ross was featured in major magazines like Time and Life and discussed the Five Stages model on national broadcast television.
By the time that On Grief and Grieving was published in 2005, formally extending and adapting the model to the experience of losing a loved one, the Five Stages had already been used that way for decades. In practice, the culture made the leap long before the theory did.
Is the model accurate?
Kinda, but there’s more to it.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are all emotions someone might experience after the loss of a loved one.
But not all bereaved people feel all of these things. And they typically don’t experience them in a clean, linear process like the model posits.
One problem with the popularity of the Five Stages model is that it led some people to believe that they were somehow doing grief wrong, adding stress to an already profoundly difficult experience.
A new(er) way to think about grieving
In 1999 we got a new model, introduced by Stroebe and Schut. Pointing out that stage-based models of grief lacked strong empirical support and didn’t reflect how people actually grieve, S&S introduced the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement.
The Dual Process Model posits that grieving involves moving between “loss-oriented” coping—confronting and processing the loss—and “restoration-oriented” coping—adapting to life without the loved one.
Practitioners and academics have embraced this model, in part, because it’s backed up by empirical studies and clinical observation. In follow-up research, Stroebe and Schut found that oscillating between looking back and looking ahead in this way is associated with better adjustment over time, perhaps because the bereaved don’t feel pressure to grieve constantly or in a particular way.
Source: https://www.selfloverainbow.com/dual-process-model-of-coping-with-bereavement/
So if you have experienced a loss, know that there’s nothing wrong if you aren’t progressing through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That’s how it works on TV. In real life, the grieving process, like any learning process, is messy and deeply individual.
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