Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pioneered methods in the support and counselling of personal trauma, grief and grieving, associated with death and dying. She also dramatically improved the understanding and practices in relation to bereavement and hospice care.
Her ideas, notably the five stages of grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), are also transferable to personal change and emotional upset resulting from factors other than death and dying.
We can clearly observe similar reactions to those explained by Kübler-Ross’s grief model in people confronted with far less serious traumas than death and bereavement, such as by work redundancy, enforced relocation, crime and punishment, disability and injury, relationship break-up, financial despair and bankruptcy, etc.
This makes the model worthy of study and reference far outside of death and bereavement. The ‘grief cycle’ is actually a ‘change model’ for helping to understand and deal with (and counsel) personal reaction to trauma. It’s not just for death and dying.
This is because trauma and emotional shock are relative in terms of effect on people. While death and dying are for many people the ultimate trauma, people can experience similar emotional upsets when dealing with many of life’s challenges, especially if confronting something difficult for the first time, and/or if the challenge happens to threaten an area of psychological weakness, which we all possess in different ways. One person’s despair (a job-change, or exposure to risk or phobia, etc) is to another person not threatening at all. Some people love snakes and climbing mountains, whereas to others these are intensely scary things. Emotional response, and trauma, must be seen in relative not absolute terms. The model helps remind us that the other person’s perspective is different to our own, whether we are the one in shock, or the one helping another to deal with their upset.
The study of death and dying is actually known as thanatology (from the Greek word ‘thanatos’ meaning death). Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is accordingly sometimes referred to as a thanatologist, and she is considered to have contributed significantly to the creation of the genre of thanatology itself.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s seminal book was On Death & Dying, published in 1969, in which she explained her now classically regarded ‘five stages of grief’. The book and its ideas were quite revolutionary at the time, reflecting Kübler-Ross’s outspoken and bold approach, which is paradoxical given the sensitivity and compassion of her concepts.
Kübler-Ross was a catalyst. She opened up and challenged previously conservative (sweep it under the carpet, don’t discuss it, etc) theories and practices relating to death and bereavement, and received an enormously favourable response among carers, the dying and the bereaved, which perhaps indicates the level of denial and suppression that had earlier characterised conventional views about the subject – particularly in the western world, where death is more of a taboo than in certain other cultures.
As stated, and important to emphasise, Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief model was developed initially as a model for helping dying patients to cope with death and bereavement, however the concept also provides insight and guidance for coming to terms with personal trauma and change, and for helping others with emotional adjustment and coping, whatever the cause. This has probably helped her ideas to spread and to enter ‘mainstream’ thinking.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her ideas have now become synonymous with emotional response to trauma, and to grief support and counselling, much like Maslow is fundamentally associated with motivational theory; Kolb with learning styles, and Gardnerwith multiple intelligence.
As with much other brilliant pioneering work, the Kübler-Ross model is elegantly simple. The five stages of grief model is summarised and interpreted below.
The Kübler-Ross five stages and terminology are featured here with permission from the Elisabeth Kübler Ross Foundation, which is gratefully acknowledged. Please look at the website www.ekrfoundation.org, which enables and sustains Dr Kübler-Ross’s values and mission, and extends help to those who need it. (Separate reference was made here previously to thewww.elisabthkublerross.com website, which sometime after 2008 now re-directs to the EKR Foundation website.)
Please be aware that the interpretation and contextual material on this webpage represents my own thoughts on the subject. I would encourage you to develop your own ideas too – this is a deeply significant area and one that can be interpreted in many ways. My interpretation and associations are not an attempt to reproduce Kübler-Ross’s thinking, they seek to provide a modern context, and to relate the basic model to the philosophies of this website.
Use of and reference to the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross five stages for commercial purposes, and publication of EKR quotations, require permission from the EKR Foundation. You can use freely the other aspects of this page subject to the normal terms for using this website, briefly summarised at the foot of this page.
Also known as the ‘grief cycle’, it is important to bear in mind that Kübler-Ross did not intend this to be a rigid series of sequential or uniformly timed steps. It’s not a process as such, it’s a model or a framework. There is a subtle difference: a process implies something quite fixed and consistent; a model is less specific – more of a shape or guide. By way of example, people do not always experience all of the five ‘grief cycle’ stages. Some stages might be revisited. Some stages might not be experienced at all. Transition between stages can be more of an ebb and flow, rather than a progression. The five stages are not linear; neither are they equal in their experience. People’s grief, and other reactions to emotional trauma, are as individual as a fingerprint.
In this sense you might wonder what the purpose of the model is if it can vary so much from person to person. An answer is that the model acknowledges there to be an individual pattern of reactive emotional responses which people feel when coming to terms with death, bereavement, and great loss or trauma, etc. The model recognises that people have to pass through their own individual journey of coming to terms with death and bereavement, etc., after which there is generally an acceptance of reality, which then enables the person to cope.
The model is perhaps a way of explaining how and why ‘time heals’, or how ‘life goes on’. And as with any aspect of our own or other people’s emotions, when we know more about what is happening, then dealing with it is usually made a little easier.
Again, while Kübler-Ross’s focus was on death and bereavement, the grief cycle model is a useful perspective for understanding our own and other people’s emotional reaction to personal trauma and change, irrespective of cause.
