Understanding the 5 Stages of Grief: DABDA
I suffered my first heartbreak during my senior year of high school. I was 17 years old and had just broken up with my first boyfriend. I never knew it was possible to feel so much pain. For weeks I called my friend Julia multiple times a day, crying, I sat in my car in the school parking lot, crying, and went to bed and woke up, crying. I had never really lost anything before, and grief wasn’t yet something I had encountered much in my life.
My mom, also a therapist, noticing me in my pain, told me about the Stages of Grief as described by Swiss-American Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. For the first time in weeks, I was able to name the different waves of grief I was going through, and through this was able to experience some relief and stop crying every. damn. day.
Little did I know that I would return to the Stages Of Grief over and over again throughout my life as I moved through teenage heartbreak into adult heartbreak, and deaths of pets, friends, and family. The awareness of the stages of grieving helped soothe my aching heart throughout these different losses, and also helped me provide support to clients and friends alike to cope with grief at any stage.
The Stages of Grief are popularly described with the acronym DABDA.
D= Denial:
Denial can look like an inability to admit to the truth of what happened, and can be characterized by a refusal to discuss the loss and isolating oneself from others who have accepted it. For example, a wife finds out that her husband has cancer and is unwilling to discuss the diagnosis with him even though he wants to talk to her about it. Another form of denial is where we have not integrated the reality of the loss yet. Oftentimes when people have lost a loved one, they talk about how they still find themselves expecting their loved one to arrive home from work, or call them on the phone.
A=Anger:
In the anger phase, you might look to someone to blame— ourselves, others, even a higher power. Questions such as “Why me?” “Who is to blame for this?” “Why/How could this happen?”. A person might start lashing out at people close to them, such as a close family or friend, medical personnel, or a close loved one. Anger has a lot more energy to it than Depression, for example, and can propel us into action as well. (FYI, if you are experiencing feelings of anger we have some really great resources on the website.
B=Bargaining:
This stage involves a bereaved person hoping to avoid the cause of grief. This may look like a negotiation with a higher power “I promise I will never gossip again if you make it so that Bob’s cancer goes away” or wracking your brain with thoughts like “Maybe if I had just called him a minute earlier, he would have forgiven me and not left me”. “If I had just….” indicates that bargaining could be happening. Bargaining is like attempting to negotiate ourselves out of the loss.
D=Depression:
This is the one you are probably most familiar with. Feeling down, depressed, and hopeless, lethargic and low energy, experiencing an inability to focus, and even having thoughts that we’d be better off dead, can all be facets of depression. A sense of “what’s the point” and a loss in interest in activities that you once found pleasurable. This is the “sad” part of grief where it's hard to get out of bed or get yourself to do anything.
A= Acceptance :
The final stage, acceptance, is where you are able to acknowledge the loss and integrate the reality into our life. This typically comes with a sense of calm or peace, and a stable condition of emotions. The thought, “I’m really in pain, but it’s going to be okay” might characterize this stage.
At first it was thought that these were linear steps, meaning first you go through Denial, then once you complete that you move on to Anger, and once complete with Anger, you move on to Bargaining, then Depression, and end with Acceptance. However, it’s now thought that the stages are cyclical with no clear linear direction— meaning we can cycle back and forth through the stages, jumping all around, and even skipping some. One day you might be in denial of the loss, while the next day you might feel a lot of acceptance around it. Then you wake up the day after and find yourself angry at the world, angry at yourself, angry at the person or situation that left you.
Kubler-Ross first developed the stages to describe the process that patients with terminal illness go through as they come to terms with their own death. But later on, it was applied to grieving friends and family as well, who seemed to go through similar processes. She later expanded her model to include anyone experiencing loss- including death of a loved one, loss of a major relationship or divorce, loss of a job or income or other major rejection, the onset of a major disease or infertility diagnoses, and even minor losses like losing one’s health insurance.
Interestingly, David Kessler in 2020 applied these Stages of Grief to the pandemic as follows:
“There's denial, which we saw a lot of early on: This virus won't affect us. There's anger: You're making me stay home and taking away my activities. There's bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right? There's sadness: I don't know when this will end. And finally there's acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed. Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.”
As you can see, the Stages are broadly applicable. There is some controversy as to the helpfulness of the Stages of Grief. Arguments include that the Stages have been interpreted over the years as prescriptive rather than descriptive, and so if a person is not going through the stages quickly enough or the right way, they may be pathologized for it or made to feel that they are grieving incorrectly. Remember that there is no wrong way to grieve, it is unique to everyone and there is no prescription for how to do it “right.” Additionally, a 6th and final stage of DABDA has also been proposed in recent years, which is the stage of Meaning.
I personally find the DABDA framework very helpful, as a way of helping identify and name feelings and stages. I don’t interpret it as a prescription of what I should do, but rather a way of helping me name with specificity the emotional experiences I’m going through. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy, explains that when we are able to name our emotions with specificity, it is inherently soothing for our nervous system, providing some grounding in an otherwise emotionally amorphous fog. That said, if DABDA is not for you that is completely understandable—there are other forms of grief support out there such as Grief Recognition and Resolution and The Grief Recovery Handbook. The most important thing is to get support if you need it.
Next time you or someone you know is suffering a loss, consider DABDA and how you might apply it. If you need help working through your grief, the therapists at Root to Rise Therapy can help. Contact our Client Care Coordinator today to find out which therapist would be the best suited to help with your situation.
Warmly,
Becky White, LMFT
