You can even get over it quickly.
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.
Kübler-Ross' stages of grief have been similarly
accepted without any rigorous testing. It's also
crucial to note that Kübler-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.
<http://www.doublex.com/section/life/there-are-no-seven-stages-grief>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/10/there-are-no-seven-stages-of-grief.htm>monochrom
at 10/31/2009 12:29:00 PM
