On an otherwise ordinary afternoon, college student Julia Martinez heard her mother answer the phone and then cry out in distress: Julia's father had been hit by a car. The two women rushed to the hospital, but Julia's father died within minutes of their arrival. It was a shocking, untimely death, and, as Julia told George Bonanno, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, the following weeks were full of sadness, anxiety, and just "crying a lot." Eventually, she returned to college. She had bad days, but she tried not to think too much about her father's death. Over the summer, she got an exciting newspaper internship and felt herself looking forward to the future. Julia’s upbeat attitude made her mother really anxious. Was Julia grieving enough? Would it hit her at some point in the future? Had Julia forgotten her father?
The idea that grief is work that we must do began with Freud. He believed that if you didn't labor at it, you would never recover the psychic energy you had invested in a person who was no longer there. Over time, psychologists developed ways to describe the various stages of this “work.” Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages are the most familiar: Stage 1, denial—“This cannot be!” Stage 2, anger, followed by bargaining, then depression, then acceptance. The stages have great intuitive appeal, but, according to Bonanno, both Freud and Kübler-Ross were wrong. The way that grief unfolds for most people is almost nothing like the old model says it should. It is not work, and it doesn't occur in stages. It can be short-lived for some people and never-ending for others. Like breathing and consciousness and almost everything else about us, grief fluctuates. Our biggest mistake when describing grief, Bonanno writes in his deep and intelligent book, The Other Side of Sadness, is that we underestimate the resilience of the bereaved.
Modern scientists have by now thoroughly picked apart Freud and his idiosyncracies, but Bonanno says that Freud's pronouncements about grief were particularly incomplete. The father of psychoanalysis never really explained how “work” turned “grief” into “recovery.” His statements were brief and preliminary, and he himself qualified them as pretty speculative. Kubler-Ross' stages of grief have been similarly accepted without any rigorous testing. It’s also crucial to note that Kubler-Ross came up with her stages after observing people's reactions to the news that they themselves were going to die—not to the news that someone else had. Only later did she and colleagues apply “the five steps” to grief resulting from another person's death or to some other great disappointment.
Bonanno’s innovation is to apply more rigorous scientific methods/tools to understanding grief. For more than 15 years, he has given thousands of mourning people standard psychological tests in order to better understand how they feel. As Bonanno interviewed the grief-stricken, he counted the number of times they referenced their loss. He recorded their facial expressions and monitored the activity of their autonomic nervous system (which controls things like heart rate, digestion, breathing, sweating), and crucially, he submitted his results for peer review.
Bonanno and his colleagues found that there are at least three common patterns of grief. Some people find the experience deeply distressing and disorienting but then slowly heal. Some become completely dominated by their sadness, perhaps never to recover. This type is extremely rare. Then there are people who experience some initial shock and distress but who pretty quickly bounce back into the competent execution of their daily lives. Most people, says Bonanno, fit into the third category.
Christine Kenneally has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and New Scientist. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
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Comments
Not everyone is different
By: Whinestein | Fri, 11/06/2009 - 12:10
To say that everyone is different is to make a general rule to say there are no general rules and that gets us nowhere.
I have worked with perhaps 200 people using the "5 Stages of Grief" model (mostly divorced, separated, widowed or people in addiction recovery) and as anyone who has done anything similar knows, the model is a fluid tool with variation for individuals though wonderfully useful for each person. I do like the word "phases" better but even then it suggests a linear pattern, a direct timeline, that I've never understood to be part of the tools offered.
The commentator who said this is a Straw Man Theory is correct. It's like a Creationist saying "But there is no intermediary between frogs and donkeys so Evolution is wrong." Such people have missed the point altogether or never wanted to understand and looking for exceptions because they believe all theories to mimic their own house of cards.
My observation is that people are mostly alike - 2 arms, 2 legs, etc - and so are our thinking processes and the mechanics of our brains. The K-R toolbox offers some easily understood guidelines that assist people in diagnosing where they might be hung up in letting go and tells them that they are just like other people and grants hope and strength to look outside of themselves for growth instead of focusing on the loss inside. By saying merely, "everyone is different," is to isolate people in a fabricated uniqueness; to say that K-R says that "everyone is the same and must do it their way or fail" is basically a lie by the author.
I'm glad to see that many of the commentators were not fooled.
No Stages Because Most People Resilient
By: PollyXX | Sat, 10/31/2009 - 14:56
I read the book! What the book says is that there are no stages of grief because most people are naturally resilient. This sounds simplistic, maybe, but not so obvious after all, when you consider that for about a hundred years or so, whatever Freud DID say about stages or not, and whatever Kubler-Ross and Barbara Raphael and so on said about stages or not, it's been taken for granted that grief was something that you had to work at to get through. Someone who doesn't cry "enough" was thought to be repressing grief and would sort of pay for it in the end. It would creep up and get them when they were least prepared! So, basically, resilience means there is no grief to go through, so there are no stages to go through. The trajectories (or patterns) that the other commenter found suspiciously simple, are in fact based on twenty years of studies (about) and (my estimate) thousands of subjects in many cultures. So the trajectories, as Bonanno calls them, seem pretty solid to me. Oh, and the stages and working through grief ideas that are so taken for granted? They are what public policy is based on. What does that mean? That our public policy is based on falsehoods, is expensive for us to keep funding, and the professionals acting in line with the policy are causing harm. This is what's in the book. Pretty provocative, no? It was a great read. Highly recommended. Oh, and it's as compelling as a novel too.
This article really
By: susangpyp | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 22:50
This article really misinterprets both Freud and Kubler-Ross. The 7 stages, as described by Kubler-Ross were in relation to dying people and the process they go through in coming to grips with their own death. Other people applied it to grief but that didn't come from Kubler-Ross or Freud. It was a lay person's interpretation of what grief was.
Although there are similarities between the emotions of the dying and the emotions of the bereaved, it is not the same. Kubler-Ross who worked with hospice patients tried to build a framework to understand what the dying go through, to explain it to hospice workers, NOT to write about the process of the bereaved. It was others who mistook her work and applied the "7 Stages of Grief" to the bereaved instead of the dying. And Kubler-Ross, like all good researchers, evolved her work as time went on. She cannot be studied in a vacuum of her first seminal work.
Freud's writing on mourning started as correspondence in an effort to understand depressed patients. He, too, evolved his theories over the years and never thought his own work was conclusive.
Others came later to study Freud, to disagree, to agree, to amplify and to apply the theories to different groups at different times (Erich Lindemann applied it to returning war veterans, Colin Murray Parkes to widows). Others such as John Bowlby, Beverely Raphael and Therese Rando (to name a few) continued to study grief and its effects in general and in relation to specific events in life and different populations. Bowlby studied attachment, separation and loss to decipher how attachment affects feelings of separation and loss. His is probably THE most important body of work on mourning to date.
Beverley Raphael said many years ago that grief does not happen in "stages" (again that was a bastardization of Kubler-Ross's works and Freud never mentioned stages), but rather "phases" that are fluid and that you move back and forth through.
Further, most researchers believe that there are many factors that go into a person's response to death or loss. Too many variants to discuss here.
I do find it interesting that an article that takes "stages" to task will then turn around and group grieving people into 3 distinct groups. This not only does a disservice to the volumes of research on grief but also to grieving people.
The article says that "more scientific methods" were used to study grief and comes up with 3 patterns. What exactly would be the "more scientific methods" and how could they be better than decades of work when they result in grouping people into 3 groups?
To me this is nonsense. No one can generalize grief so neatly as to package everyone into 3 patterns. In my experience over the years, there is no way to group people into these 3 groups and I find the description of the 3 groups to be very lacking in depth or validity.
The article could do a real disservice to people who are grieving and can't fit into these groups or who are really struggling because they are not "over" it. To ridicule the "working through" that Freud suggested, is to be completely out of touch with the research.
Grief and loss is something our society deals with very badly. Articles like this contribute to the problem, and don't help matters at all.
Next time spend a few years researching the body of work that is "mourning theory," get your facts straight and quote a researcher who doesn't try to take the human process known as grief and quantify it scientifically. Then, perhaps you will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Susan J. Elliott, J.D., M.Ed.
Author: "Getting Past Your Breakup: How To Turn A Devastating Loss Into The Best Thing That Ever Happened To You."
misunderstood
By: jpdhuffpo | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 21:51
I have to agree with the comments above. Seems like you really mis-characterized her theories in order to get an article out. This is really disappointing work for a doublex-er -- I've generally been enjoying the quality of work here.
Freud's views remain useful
By: pgm8693 | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 17:00
As Bonanno notes, Freud did not present a detailed formulation on the mourning process. And over time, his ideas changed. For example, in later writings Freud said that rather than being unhealthy, it was probably healthy to allow the departed to remain to some extent as part of one's identity.
What Freud basically said was that over time, you have to let go and to adjust, and that over time, this happens by detaching your feelings from the memories and attaching them instead to the realities of life. Bonanno writes that it is unfortunate that Freud used the word "work" to describe what is instead a process. Others would later emphasize the term "work," as if the quality and effectiveness of the mourning could be measured by whether enough "work" was done.
The criticisms of Freud's work in this area notwithstanding, Freud's ideas on the bereavement process remain relevant. He provides a useful way to understand mourning. Most importantly, Freud indicated that people usually do live through it successfully. I don't think Freud was wrong when he said it is a difficult process or that it takes time.
My discussion of the mourning process is at everydaypsychology.com: How is mourning possible?
I think that what is most important about Bonanno's work is his assertion that different people grieve in different ways and on different schedules.
paul g. mattiuzzi, ph.d.
right on
By: DoctorDeath | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 11:39
This bit really spoke to me:
"One of Bonanno’s most counterintuitive observations is that friends and family of the bereaved often find resilience deeply unsettling. “Countless” people interviewed by Bonanno describe being pushed by concerned loved ones to try to “get in touch” with their lurking, hidden grief."
After my father lost his wife to a long illness, a year later family members and my dad's friends were still pulling me aside asking "How is he doing?" When I replied that he was truly okay, they usually said, "No, REALLY." It does seem hard to understand why someone could stay positive and go on living and being happy after they've lost their best friend and mate, but people need to believe what they see in people.
Taking it a step further, I was shocked at how many of Dad's friends were hypercritical of his new girlfriend, when he finally started dating again about two years after he lost his wife. As his child, I only want Dad to be happy and have everything he wants out of life. He was still quite young when he lost his wife and I HOPED he would start dating again and maybe even marry. But again, his friends would pull me aside at the Christmas party, asking what I thought of her, with a sour expression. One of them totally jumped down my throat when I said his girlfriend sort of reminded me of my stepmother in a way, practically yelling, "She is NOTHING like her." Ouch. Sorry you can't deal with your loss, but we're doing just great.
By far, the reactions of OTHERS, not our own grief, have been the most difficult part of losing my dear stepmom.
Straw man argument
By: MrJM | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 10:41
While beating up Elizabeth Kübler-Ross for popular misconceptions about her theory of grief may make good copy, it is intellectually dishonest.
MrJM
http://twitter.com/misterjayem
Missing Kubler's Point
By: carring1 | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 10:03
If you read Kubler Ross' materials she never says that the stages are set in stone, nor do they take a certain prescribed amount of time. In fact she says we move at our own pace through the stages and we may have to revisit certain stages. If anything these new studies seem to be somewhat complimentary to what she has written and an extension into better understanding what she began to write about 30 years ago. I don't like the "disproving" aspect of this article in order to get more readers. It seems more like an attempt to draw a reader in, instead of speaking truth and truly reflecting on what these studies say about Kubler's writings. It does her and her work a disservice. Grief is personal and experienced differently by us all.
Finally -
By: Demelza | Fri, 10/30/2009 - 00:51
someone telling it like it is. I was widowed 10 1/2 years ago, and whilst I mourned my loss, grieved for him, I did not go through the so called seven stages of grief.
Grief cannot be compartmentalized, ordered, precise, logical, patterned, whatever - just to suit others. It is what it is, no one size fits all, we all grieve differently and ALL need the support of others, whilst being allowed to grieve in a way that suits us, nobody else.
One of the things I learned
By: falk | Thu, 10/29/2009 - 14:56
One of the things I learned after my mother died: Never tell someone else how to grieve.