Stages of Grief

I (Becca) haven’t posted in awhile, mostly due to the fact that we’ve been busy with kids coming and going for foster care and just dealing with our normal crazy (fun) life. But lots has been going on that I want to share. I started to attempt to write up the most recent revelation God’s been giving me and found that I have to write a couple other posts first so that it will make sense when we get there. So please bear with me while I do a little ‘xplaning’.

I was telling a friend about the stages of grief the other day and found out that she had never heard about them before. So, let’s talk about that. Just like the Love Languages, or personality tests, or doing a little psychology, understanding the stages of grief is sometimes beneficial as we can learn to understand ourselves or other people just a little bit better. Not everyone fits into all the categories (it doesn’t work to try to shove yourself into the stage if it isn’t true), but they help us understand others and help us move through a very difficult process – grief.

Here’s a link to good article that discusses each stage in more depth

“The five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief’s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss.”

Once you understand the basic concepts of each stage, you start to see how you personally grieve. When I say grieve I mean any form of processing loss or trauma, not just to deaths. For example, we learn how our foster children process their trauma of being removed from everything they know and love even if they were aware that it wasn’t the best situation and how they ‘grieve’ this loss even if a person didn’t die. They definitely follow these steps more often than not.

I find that I like to sit in the denial stage (in some cases, I’ve been there for years). It is the easiest for me because I seem to be proficient at pretending – some might call it lying. I act like something didn’t happen, or that I don’t know that something happened, and everything is just fine. I think I like to stay in this stage because I really don’t like being in the angry stage. I also don’t like confrontations or conflict and usually grief requires me to have to talk to other people about what caused the loss or hurt (unless it was a death). I feel out of control and ‘angry’ and it wears me out. Maybe I just need to figure out how to get through that stage more quickly. Once I’ve progressed through the angry stage, I don’t think I spend much time in barganing or depression. Might need to run that by Nate to see what he thinks, it could be that I do the anger/bargaining/depression all together in one big mess (and that could be why I feel like I’m stuck in it). After that, I just kinda scoot on to acceptance and then finally I’m done!

Something else we need to learn about grief is that sometimes we have to go through the process again. This is most true in cases where the loss occured as a child. When you are little, you might not always have the understanding/knowledge to process an event the same way that an adult does. So you process it the best way that you can at the time (or in my case you sit in denial until you are older). Then when some new piece of information or understanding of what happened comes along, you have to process it again. We see this with our kiddos in the system or that have been adopted. At some point they realize what mom or dad really did (abandon them) instead of what their perception of it was or what they were told about it at the time (maybe they think the police took them away) and they need to re-process.

Anyway, I think understanding some of this information is helpful for me personally and helpful for me to work with the kids we have in our home. Hope it helps you too.