Anti-Seven Stages of Grief

When people talk about grief, they often reach for the “Seven Stages” like they’re reading off a script: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and everything in between. It’s the model that shows up in movies, therapy worksheets, and even casual conversations. Society has turned the Seven Stages into a kind of emotional checklist, as if mourning were a staircase we climb: one step, then the next, until we eventually reach the top and ring the bell of “acceptance.”

But anyone who has actually lost someone knows grief doesn’t care about your charts.

It doesn’t follow an order. It doesn’t arrive in clean categories. You don’t “finish” anger and then move into sadness like you’re switching classes. You can feel all seven “stages” in one day, or none of them, or a new emotion that doesn’t appear on the list at all. The Seven Stages give the illusion of structure, but grief is not structured. It’s chaotic. It loops, repeats, crashes into you unexpectedly, and sometimes disappears long enough that you think you’re okay—until you’re not.

In that way, I think the Seven Stages oversimplify something that is inherently messy. They make people think there is a right way to grieve, a correct emotional sequence, and that if you don’t cry in the beginning or if you’re angry “too late,” then you’re doing grief wrong. I don’t believe that. And I don’t think anyone who has lived with grief believes it either.

This is why Worden’s Four Tasks feel so much more truthful.

Worden doesn’t pretend that grief is linear. Instead, he describes mourning as a set of tasks, things we return to over and over throughout our lives:

1. Accept the reality of the loss.

2. Process the pain of grief.

3. Adjust to a world without the person.

4. Find an enduring connection while continuing with life.

These tasks don’t expire. You don’t complete Task 1 and never revisit it again. Reality hits you at random moments: at the airport, at graduation, in a song, in the silence of your room. Pain doesn’t move in a single direction either—you can feel okay for months and suddenly collapse on your kitchen floor because some memory decided to show up uninvited.

Task 3—adjusting to life without them—isn’t a stage. It’s a lifelong adaptation. It’s learning to do things they aren’t here to witness. It’s becoming new versions of yourself they never got to meet. It’s the birthdays, the milestones, and the ordinary Tuesdays that remind you of their absence in the smallest, quietest ways.

And Task 4 might be the most honest of all: you don’t “get over” someone. You don’t close the book. You carry them with you—through memory, through love, through the ways they shaped you. Worden makes room for that. The Seven Stages don’t.

Grief isn’t an emotional ladder. It’s a landscape you learn to navigate. Worden gives you a map—not a perfect one, but one that at least acknowledges how unpredictable the terrain really is.

So yes, I’m anti-Seven Stages. Not because they’re useless, but because they’ve become the default, the cultural shorthand, the model that makes people feel broken when their emotions don’t fit the pattern. Worden’s tasks feel real. They feel human. They honor the complexity of what loss actually is: ongoing, nonlinear, and woven into every version of ourselves that comes after.