Question by ivone v: The Four Stages of Grief?
When someone close to us dies, grief grabs us by the throat and shatters our world into a million pieces. Some days it numbs us to the bone and turns us into walking zombies. Other days it pierces our hearts and forces a scream so loud it scares us into silence. Often in our society, painful losses go ungrieved. A divorce, a job, our youth, an empty nest, even our own painful childhoods are never grieved because we believe we must get on with life. We believe we have no right to mourn the loss of an alcoholic parent or an abusive spouse. We may experience deep sorrow for the family we never really had or the siblings we did not connect with. But these losses need to be grieved before we can heal and move forward. In coming to grips with any type of loss we must pass through the Four Stages of Grief. We must move through them all, sometimes more than once, if we are to come out of the tunnel of loss, whole again.

Stage 1: Numbness

The loss comes as such a shock, it seems impossible to accept what has happened.
When the shock starts to wear off, the horror of reality steps in.
We find ourselves longing for the way things used to be.
Some days we appear normal on the outside because we do no grieve outwardly.
Consequences of Not Working Through This Stage:
We shut down, we cannot identify what we feel or communicate it to another person.

Stage 2: Yearning and Searching

The future we envisioned is gone, along with our expectations for the life we planned.
Often the very person that we rely on, the one we turn to for comfort is now gone and we have no one to comfort us.
We continue to identify with the person we have lost.
We don’t know what to do with the void created by the loss.
Consequences of Not Working Through This Stage:
We spend our lives searching to replace what we have lost and looking for love.

Stage 3: Disorganization and Despair

Life is no longer the same; everything has changed.
We feel angry; life seems unfair and we fear nothing will ever be good again.
We ask “why” and “what if.”
As one father put it “this is the bleeding stage of grief.”
Consequences of Not Working Through This Stage:
We may have inappropriate displays of anger, or turn our anger inward and become depressed. We may develop a negative attitude toward life.

Stage 4: Reorganization

You begin to adapt and rebuild your inner world.
Step by step you begin to trust again.
Your faith in life’s ability to renew and repair itself is restored.
Consequences of Not Working Through this Stage:
The loss does not get fully resolved. Personal history is lost and old losses are banished to hidden regions of the mind and heart. What was bad does not get released and what was good does not get preserved.

Best answer:

Answer by takeoutgirl
This is exactly what happens, at different times and in different ways for people. Its intersting – looking back – that grief is almost “predicatble”. A terrible time though.

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