Healthy Grief: Applying Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief to the Story of Job in the Bible

Kubler-Ross, E and Kessler, D (2005). On Grief and Grieving, London: Simon & Schuster. p7-28.

Write a 750-1,000 word paper analyzing Woterstorff’s reflctions in Lament For a Son. In addition, address Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief, as they are expressed throughout Lament for a Son, and respond to the following questions:

The Death of Ivan Illych brings an excellent in-depth description of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 cycles of grief theory. In the book, it shows how Ivan Illych goes through these cycles in their own individual way. The cycles that Kubler-Ross uses in her theory are: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. To get a better understanding of these cycles, this paper will describe each cycle and provide quotations that will help develop an idea of how someone going through these cycles may react.

Since the start of time, and the preceding generations, death has impacted people and the way they act. A sudden, or even an expected death of a loved one, takes a toll on a person. It’s human nature for people to process and want to make sense of death and the loss it leaves behind. The five stages of grief reflect this process of dealing with the loss of a loved one. Through these stage of grieving, people can get lost either searching for answers or trying to get past it. In Hamlet, William Shakespeare depicts the role human nature plays in the striving for answers and justice surrounding death. Even though Hamlet was written early in the seventeenth century, the depiction of death and human nature still rings true today; people and

Theorists like Lindemann claim that there are five phases that are normal to go through in grieving: somatic disturbance, preoccupation with the deceased, guilt, hostility or anger, and difficulty with everyday tasks. Kubler-Ross identified the commonly recognized and accepted stages of grief

The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Axelrod, 2017). She stated that

The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.

With a different perspective, analyzing the author’s grief will be easier. There are five stages of grief, according to Kubler-Ross’s model (Kübler-Ross, 1972). It begins with stage of denial. This can be seen in the author’s writing, that the author cannot accept the fact that his healthy, young child has died (Kübler-Ross, 1972). The next stage to follow is Anger which is seen in the fact that the author believes no parent should bury their child. The third stage is bargaining (Kübler-Ross, 1972). The author tries to reason through his thoughts with God in the hopes of having his son back even though there is no possible way that can happen. The fourth is depression which is seen in the darkness

There are five stages to Kubler-Ross’s theory. These stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. These stages are felt both by the person who is dying, and other people who grieve the death of their loved one. She based her theory on interviews she held with dying people and the people caring for them in the hospital.

As stated by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, and a pioneer in near death experiences, and the author of the world famous book On Death and Dying, which first explores the 5 stages of grief and the key emotional reactions to them. The common stages and effects of grief are accepted as the following; Denial and isolation can be summarized as, “…helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense” Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969.After denial comes anger, which is explained as outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying, 1969, one’s anger can extent to anyone and anything in our surroundings, including God, in the sense, ‘Why did God allow this to happen?’. And under the anger is pain. The next stage in grief is bargaining, to be understood as trying to bargain with the universe or God hoping that ‘it isn’t so’. To quote

The stages of mourning and grief are universal and are experienced by people from all walks of life. Mourning occurs in response to an individual’s own terminal illness or to the death of a valued being, human or animal. There are five stages of normal grief that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying.”

Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of

In the first stage that I will discuss is denial. In this stage people may deny the reality of the situation by blocking out the words and hiding from the facts ("5 Stages of Loss & Grief | Psych Central," n.d.-a). For instance, someone could be diagnosed with some form of cancer. That person may not want to know because it might overwhelm them. So they would not want to know the reality of

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, (2014), a Swiss-born American psychiatrist, introduced concept of providing psychological counselling to the dying. In her first book, On Death and Dying (published in 1969), she write about the “five stages of grief”, they are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. based on her studies of the feelings of patients facing terminal illness, and have being generalised to other types of negative life changes and losses, such as divorce, loss of property or job, and offered strategies for treating patients and their families as they negotiate these stages.

Grief is defined as “mental suffering or distress in response to a threatened or real loss, as of loss of a body part or function, death of another person, or loss of one’s possessions, job, status, or ideals,” (Grief, 2003). While most are familiar with the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), most are unaware that there are different types of grieving. The three main types of grief are uncomplicated/normal grief, anticipatory grief, and complicated grief (Lowey, 2015). Additionally, there are four subset categories to define the type of complicated grief one is going through: chronic, delayed, masked, and exaggerated grief (Lowey, 2015). With so