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IN 1969 THE PSYCHIATRIST ELIZABETH KÜBLER-ROSS wrote one of the most influential books in the history of psychology, On Death and Dying. It exposed the heartless treatment of terminally-ill patients prevalent at the time. On the positive side, it altered the care and treatment of dying people. On the negative side, it postulated the now-infamous five stages of dying-Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance (DABDA), so annealed in culture that most people can recite them by heart. The stages allegedly represent what a dying person might experience upon learning he or she had a terminal illness. "Might" is the operative word, because Kubler-Ross repeatedly stipulated that a dying person might not go through all five stages, nor would they necessarily go through them in sequence. It would be reasonable to ask: if these conditions are this arbitrary, can they truly be called stages?
Many people have contested the validity of the stages of dying, but here we are more concerned with the supposed stages of grief which derived from the stages of dying. As professional grief recovery specialists, we contend that the theory of the stages of grief has done more harm than good to grieving people. Having co-authored three books on the impact of death, divorce, and other losses, and having worked directly with over 100,000 grieving people during the past 30 years, our reasons for disputing the stages of grief theory are predicated on the horror stories we've heard from thousands of grieving people who've told us how they'd been harmed by them.
From Dying to Grief
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was a fearless pioneer who openly took the medical profession to task for its callous disregard for the feelings of dying people. The subtitle of On Death and Dying explains the book's primary focus: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families. The lessons Kübler-Ross learned from those dying people, coupled with her compassionate regard for them, became a focal point of the emergent Hospice movement. Somehow, over the years, the real virtues inspired by her work have been subordinated to the inaccurately named, largely imaginary stages.
During the 1970s, the DABDA model of stages of dying morphed into stages of grief, mostly because of their prominence in college-level...