Five Stages of Grief

Grief is something that most people experience throughout their lives in one form or another. A varied range of contexts and situations manifest loss experiences including the death of a loved one, divorce or end of a relationship, the death of a pet, immigration, amongst many other kinds of loss.

Counsellors, therefore, need skills and knowledge in grief counselling as clients will inevitably present with issues related to grief and loss. The aim is to help clients process grief, both current grief issues and unresolved historical losses that may still be impacting their lives in some way. Counselling clients effectively includes helping them to understand and manage the wide range of emotions they may experience, and to support them in finding ways to live with the loss(es).

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ popular “Five Stages of Grief” model pioneered a new understanding of death, near-death experiences and the needs of the dying person and their loved ones. It provided a workable baseline for grief work and her teachings still remain one of the most useable and powerful approaches to loss and bereavement. Since then, many other models and theories have emerged that build on Kubler-Ross’ primary theory. Upskilling in these theories is a necessary undertaking if counsellors wish to integrate grief work into their practice, and in fact, is our responsibility: we cannot escape the fact that loss is embedded in the very nature of our work as counsellors.

UNBOXING THE STAGES

All the models discuss the normality and necessary presence of the following grief symptoms:

• Shock and disbelief, feeling numb, even denial that the loss occurred
• Sadness, despair, loneliness, feeling empty
• Guilt, regret, shame
• Anger, feeling resentful
• Anxiety, helplessness, insecurity, fear
• Physical symptoms like fatigue, nausea, sickness, weight loss or gain, aches and pains, night sweats, heart palpitations, feeling faint or lightheaded, insomnia (Therapy Tribe, n.d.)

Complicated or complex grief occurs when these symptoms do not abate and recur with a level of intensity and frequency that interferes with the individual’s regular daily life. In this case, grief therapy becomes important. Grief therapy will help the client process the historically painful and traumatic issues that have been resurfaced as a result of the current loss experience. This is done while supporting them through their present-day grief.

In as much as developing greater skills and knowledge is part of our responsibility as therapists and counsellors, so is dealing with our own grief and losses. When we sit eyeball to eyeball with our bereft clients and hold space for them to process their pain, our own unresolved “stuff” is often triggered. If we haven’t done the necessary work with our own conscious and/or unconscious issues, we will not be able to effectively hold our clients’ pain. For many months after the death of both my parents, I purposefully chose not to see clients who presented with bereavement issues as my loss was too raw. Self-awareness is a critical aspect of being a therapist, and we need to have the courage to work with our own pain, and do the work to upskill in these areas in order to separate ourselves from our clients pain while providing the holding space for their healing.