Grief & Loss
Grief Doesn’t Follow the Stages
If you’ve been quietly checking yourself against the five stages and feeling like you’re doing it wrong — you’re not. The stages were never a schedule.
No — grief doesn’t move through five tidy stages. Kübler-Ross described what dying people experience, not what the bereaved go through, and grief is not linear, ordered, or on a schedule. It tends to arrive in waves, often shows up physically first, and looks different for everyone — including children. Shannon Wyzkoski, LPC, GC-C, the practice’s only grief-certified counselor, works with grief and loss in South Hills and by telehealth across Pennsylvania.
The question I hear most isn’t really a question about grief. It’s “is this normal, and shouldn’t I be further along by now?” It’s the person who is six months out and still can’t drive past the hospital. It’s the person who felt genuinely okay for three weeks and then came apart in the cereal aisle for no reason they could name. Almost everyone grieving is quietly measuring themselves against some timeline and deciding they’re failing at it. I want to take that measuring stick away, because it’s doing you harm.
Where the Stages Actually Came From
The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — come from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and here’s the part that got lost: she was describing what dying people go through as they face their own deaths. She was not describing bereavement, and she never meant the stages as a sequence to complete. Somewhere along the way the model got borrowed for grief and then hardened into a checklist nobody intended it to be. So let me say it plainly: grief is not linear, it is not ordered, and it does not end on a schedule. If your experience doesn’t match the list, the list is wrong, not you.
What Grief Actually Looks Like
In practice, grief comes in waves, not stages. A wave hits, recedes, and for a while you’re functional again — and then another one comes. What usually changes first isn’t the size of the waves but the gaps between them; they get longer before the waves themselves get smaller. For a lot of people it’s physical before it’s emotional — sleep goes, appetite goes, you can’t concentrate — and they don’t connect it to the loss at first.
Grief for a complicated relationship is harder, not easier, and it often arrives tangled up with guilt — for feeling relief, or for not feeling what you assumed you would. There’s ambush grief, too: eighteen months out, a song comes on in a shop and you’re undone in public. And children grieve differently — in bursts, crying hard one minute and back to playing the next. Adults routinely misread that as a child not caring, when it’s just how a younger nervous system metabolizes something too big to hold all at once. I work with kids, teens, adults, and whole families, and almost no grief writing accounts for how differently it moves across ages.
What Actually Helps
I’m a believer that therapy has to leave you with something usable, so here’s the practical half:
- Name the wave as a wave. When one hits, calling it “a wave” instead of “I’m back to square one” changes what it means — it’s weather passing through, not a relapse.
- Lean on routine when motivation is gone. Structure holds you up on the days feeling won’t. You don’t have to want to; you just follow the routine.
- Have an answer ready for “how are you?” Deciding in advance what you’ll say — honest or deflecting, your choice — is a real skill that saves you from being ambushed by a kind question.
- Give yourself permission to not be fine on the day everyone expects you to be — the holiday, the anniversary, the “you should be better by now” date.
- Notice when “staying busy” stops working. It’s a fine bridge for a while, and then it isn’t — and that’s usually the point where the actual grieving starts.
When It’s Worth Talking to Someone
Grief is not a disorder, and most people don’t need therapy to get through it — I want to be clear about that. It’s worth talking to a professional when the grief seems to have stopped moving at all, when daily functioning hasn’t come back over a long stretch of months, or when the relationship was complicated enough that the grief is knotted together with other things that are hard to untangle alone. If any of that is where you are, reaching out isn’t a sign you’re grieving wrong — it’s just getting a hand with something heavy.
The Only Rule
I believe therapy is client-driven, and in grief that belief has teeth: nobody — not a book, not a model, not even a therapist — gets to tell you what you should be feeling by now. There’s no stage you’re behind on. There’s just your loss, and your own way through it, at your own pace.
About Shannon Wyzkoski
Shannon Wyzkoski, MSCP, LPC, GC-C is a therapist at CPA Counseling’s South Hills office and the practice’s only grief-certified counselor. Client-driven and straightforward, she works with children, adolescents, adults, and families across every level of care, and offers telehealth across Pennsylvania.