the Grief Cycle

I always have so much to learn about life. I've been watching someone precious go through parts of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle. Which I thought I understood: y'know, denial, anger, negotiation, depression, acceptance, ta-da and some forward rolls to end. But it's more complex than that.

The notes in changing minds describe an 8-stage process, not the 5-stage one I thought I knew. And it has a lovely (clickable) graph of this, which I've unceremoniously copied onto here. So, the 8 stages are (I've pegged these to an event, but it could be a state of being, e.g. illness instead):
* Stability: the status quo before the event
* Shock: immediate, apparent disbelief that the event has happened; emotional paralysis often with no outward reaction, twinned with classic physical shock symptoms
* Denial: longer-term evasion, pretending the event hasn't happened, regardless of evidence.
* Anger: the big explosion (or more usually the series of explosions) about the event or even vaguely-related events or circumstances, often with blame (of self, others etc), sometimes with classic grief
* Bargaining: trying (through actions etc) to make the event or its consequences go away... false hope, if you will.
* Depression: accepting the event has happened, but not having the resources (yet) to deal with it. Often desperate loneliness twinned with refusal to be helped.
* Testing: first tentative steps towards resolving responses to the event; trying small parts of possible solutions and accepting that they might help.
* Acceptance: knowing and accepting that the event has happened, and moving on from it.

Changing minds is good in that its pages contain notes not only on the cycle, but also on how to support people going through the cycle. The cycle itself is a construct to help understand the processes of grief. Everyone goes through it differently, but the stages are broadly right; some people go through some of them very quickly, others slowly; some people get stuck in cycles (e.g. anger-denial-anger); others get stuck at single stages (e.g. anger), but mostly, 99% of the time, the stages above are how it happens.

Other useful posts on the grief cycle include businessballs. The post on gettingpastyourpast is a real cracker on relationship breakdown, in language we can probably all associate with.