Bargaining- Stages of Grief Series
Bargaining is, in my opinion, the saddest of the Five Stages of Grief, and one that many grievers seem to come back to again and again.
Bargaining is the third in Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s five stages. Like anger, it stems from an overwhelming desire to be in control of something that’s uncontrollable. Your mind isn’t yet ready to accept that your loss is real; it tries to push off the overwhelming sadness that’s coming by asking for the impossible.
The bargaining stage leads us to make deals – with ourselves, or with a higher power if we believe in one. We long to switch places with our loved one, or change the events of what happened, or leading up to what happened, so that there will be a different result.
The key is, though, that a different result isn’t possible –which is why, for me, bargaining is the saddest stage. It’s like a last ditch, hopeless effort that you know won’t work, but you have the thoughts anyway.
Some people stay stuck in the bargaining phase for a long time, spiraling downward into a sea of “What ifs, and I should haves.”
I’m going to share an example from my own grief. My daughter died in a car accident. Her brother had picked her up from dance and was driving her to their dad’s house where they visited on Wednesday evenings.
For a while, it was very easy to slide into a “What if I had driven her myself? All the way to, “If we hadn’t gotten divorced and living in separate houses, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Along with these “What if’s…” come what I think is the most primary emotion during the bargaining stage – GUILT.
Guilt could be its own separate post, but I can sum it up by saying it’s the main thing that keeps people mired in this stage. The feelings of, “I should’ve done more,” “I should’ve spent more time with this person,” “I could’ve done things differently” can leave people beating themselves up mentally for years.
Here’s the realization that is needed to move past this stage, and it’s a difficult truth: None of these things make a difference. I think psychologically, deep down, we know this. But it takes us accepting that no matter what we do, we can’t go back and change things to help us keep moving on our grief journey. Our person is never coming back, so there’s no point in going over and over what could’ve been or what we could’ve done differently.
It takes this realization to move us to the next stage… and this realization HURTS, so it makes sense that the next stage is depression, where reality finally kicks in and completely knocks the wind out of us.
