Denial - Stages of Grief Series)
You’ve heard about the 5 Stages of Grief, right? Well today I’m starting a series exploring these five stages in depth, from the perspective of someone who is currently grieving.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross created the five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance – after studying the thought patterns of terminally ill patients in the 60s. They caught on and became widely known throughout the world as the “gold standard” of grieving.
What Kubler-Ross later admitted is that the “stages” shouldn’t be looked at as a road map, going from one stage to the next in a linear path.
Instead, they should be used as a loose guide of the many common thoughts that grievers have at various points in their grief. The path is long and windy, often circling back on itself. No two people grieve the same way. Some people might zoom through certain stages or miss them altogether.
Personally, I feel like my “stage” depends on the day. The stages never seemed to last for prolonged periods, but there were definite days when I experienced anger, or I found myself bargaining, or when MONTHS after my 10 year-old daughter died in a car accident I caught myself thinking, “This can’t really be happening.”
Today we’re going to dive in depth into the first stage of grief – Denial.
The denial stage of grief typically happens directly after the death. However, like I mentioned earlier, people can still have thoughts of denial long after they’ve left the “official” stage behind. I know I still find myself saying, “How is this happening? How is this my life?”
These questions seem to be the hallmarks of the denial stage. After the death occurs, it’s difficult for our mind to process what just happened. We question it, thinking “This can’t be real.” We might know, in our hearts, that it IS real, but we’re not ready to deal with the reality of the loss.
In the denial stage, typically people go into shock mode or become numb. I know for myself, this is what happened. Immediately after my daughter died, there were SO many things to take care of that I just plunged myself into all of the work that needed to be done … making phone calls, sending emails, planning the funeral, creating a slideshow of photos.
When I think back to those first days, I’m not even sure how I survived. I didn’t think about eating. I couldn’t sleep. I just … worked. And I took my kids to the movies, trying to distract us from the reality our lives had become. At the movie theater. In the middle of the daytime. Distract, distract, distract.
Focusing on other things besides the death, or not feeling much of anything at all besides empty, is our brain’s way of protecting itself. It instinctively knows that if it lets all of that reality and emotion in, it will destroy us. So it allows us only what we can handle.
For me, it was like I knew that my Libby was no longer there, but it still felt like, even though I was planning her funeral service, she could come bounding in the door at any moment and tell me it was all a bad dream. I could pretend she was away at a friend’s house, or camp, and not gone forever.
This is denial. Shock. Numbness. Feeling like it’s not real. Distracting ourselves from the pain.
But man, when that shock starts to wear off, THAT is a whole different ball game. In my next post, things get ugly – or angry, actually – and we explore the second stage of grief – Anger.
If you’d like to watch the video version of this blog, click HERE.
