Most famous for her work on death and dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined the seven stages of grief as\n<\/p>\n
As mental and other health professionals began to pay more attention to the grief process they realized that not only does the terminally ill patient go through these stages but so does the patient’s family and, indeed, anyone who is experiencing a loss that she perceives to merit grief – losing a job, moving, breaking up with someone, dissolution of a friendship – all of these situations trigger this cycle of emotions.<\/p>\n
These stages are perceived, at least in popular culture and certainly by some mental health professionals, as discrete periods of time. Indeed, mental health professionals view cycling among the stages as a form of avoidance in coping with the reality of the new situation. My perspective is a little different.<\/p>\n
See, just because you find a way forward, whether that way forward is finally deleting the deceased’s office phone number from your cell phone contacts list or figuring out where you’re going to have the family dinner that was traditionally hosted by the deceased, doesn’t mean that you stop feeling any of the shock that the person is gone or any of the anger over the unfairness of it or any of the sadness that goes with the lack of that person in your life. I think you still feel them, you just feel them less acutely in the same way you learn to live with the chronic, low-grade pain of a torqued out joint or a pinched nerve that’s taking way too long to heal. It hurts, just not as much all the time.<\/p>\n
My uncle Chuck would have been 60 today. So, discrete stages be damned. Yeah, I’ve accepted that he’s gone but that doesn’t mean I’m any less pissed off about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most famous for her work on death and dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined the seven stages of grief as Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news. Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable. Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion. Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out. Depression stage: Final realization of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-nablopomo2006","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}