In Other Words... When Grief Moves — and When It Doesn't

What grief actually is

Most people have heard the idea that grief moves through stages. The five-stage model has been around since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross put it forward in 1969, and it has never quite gone away. It shows up in medical training, in counselling, and in everyday conversation about loss. It feels like it makes sense. The five stages are:

• Denial — not being able to take in that the loss has really happened
• Anger — directed at the situation, at other people, or at the person who has died
• Bargaining — getting caught up in "what if" thinking, trying to find a way the loss could have been avoided
• Depression — deep sadness as the reality of the loss sinks in
• Acceptance — coming to terms with what has happened

The problem is that this was never meant to describe a fixed order. Kübler-Ross built the model from her work with people who were terminally ill, and she was clear that people moved through these states in different ways and at the same time. She later said she regretted how the model had been taken up. What she meant as an observation had turned into a prescription — a shape that people felt grief was supposed to follow.

Grief rarely follows a shape. And the most helpful research has moved in a different direction.

A map, not a route

Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist who worked alongside John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London, developed a different way of thinking about grief — one built on attachment theory and on years of careful research with bereaved adults.

Parkes described four phases of bereavement. He was deliberate about calling them phases rather than stages, and clear that they were not a sequence. People move between phases, experience more than one at the same time, go back to earlier ones, and spend very different amounts of time in each. The framework is a map of what grief looks like — not a path that everyone walks in the same order.

The four phases are:

Why attachment theory matters here

The reason Parkes's framework has held up across decades of research is that it is built on something deeper than watching how adults grieve. It connects to John Bowlby's work on attachment — the discovery, drawn from watching children separated from their caregivers, that the need for close bonds with other people is not something learned. It is built in.

When a child is separated from the person they are attached to, the response is predictable: protest, despair, and eventually a kind of settling or rebuilding. Bowlby watched this in children in hospitals, in residential care, and in wartime — children who, at the time, were simply expected to get on with it. What they were showing was one of the most basic human drives working exactly as it was designed to.

Parkes argued that grief in adults follows the same logic. The yearning and searching of bereavement is separation anxiety — the same drive, working in the same way, but now pointed at a loss that cannot be undone. The person who looks for a lost partner in a crowd, or who finds themselves listening out for someone who will never come home, is not being irrational. They are experiencing exactly what Bowlby described. The difference is that there is no reunion.

Knowing this does not make grief easier. But it makes it easier to understand — and that understanding matters, both for the person grieving and for the people around them.

Where grief gets stuck

Cruse Bereavement Care — one of the earliest and most straightforward bereavement support services in Britain — worked on a simple principle that fits the Parkes framework well: find where the movement has stopped, and help the person move again.

Grief has its own momentum. It moves when the conditions are right. It stalls when something gets in the way — sometimes the nature of the death, sometimes a lack of support, sometimes the way a person's life and relationships make it hard to grieve openly.

The Parkes framework is useful here because it shows where that stalling tends to happen. Someone who stays in shock and numbness long after the loss may be holding back from something painful the grief is trying to reach. Someone stuck in yearning and searching may not yet have been able to fully accept that the loss is permanent. Someone who stays in disorientation without finding a way forward may be finding it hard to build a sense of self that includes, rather than is only about, what has been lost.

None of this is a failure. These are points where grief has met an obstacle — and where patient, steady support can help it find a way through.

What this means for families

Grief does not stay with one person. It moves through a household, and it looks different in different people.

A seven-year-old does not grieve the way a surviving parent does. A teenager may show their loss through their behaviour rather than through words. A young child may seem untouched — and then show signs of grief months or even years later, in ways that do not obviously connect to what happened. This is not unusual. A child's age and stage of development shapes how grief is felt and shown, and the family as a whole carries loss in ways that cannot always be seen clearly by looking at one person at a time.

Dora Black, a child psychiatrist who worked at the Tavistock Clinic, was one of the first to make this plain. When bereaved parents were being helped, she noticed, their children were largely being missed. The grief of children was either not seen or not recognised as grief. She brought the family into the picture — not as a group that grieves as one, but as a set of individuals at different points in their lives, each holding their share of the loss, all having to continue living together.

The Parkes phases do not describe children's grief in quite the same way they describe adult bereavement. But the basic point holds: grief moves when the right conditions exist. Children need the same things as adults — a clear and honest acknowledgement of what has happened, a steady adult presence that is not undone by the child's distress, and enough room to grieve in their own way and at their own pace.

The picture the research leaves us with

What Bowlby, Parkes, and the researchers who followed them established is not a system for managing grief. It is an account of what grief actually is — what it is doing, and why.

Grief is the attachment system responding to the permanent loss of a bond it was built to look after. It is rooted in biology, felt emotionally, and shaped by who was lost, how they were lost, and the life the bereaved person is left with. It does not run to a timetable. It does not move through phases in a set order. It does not arrive at acceptance on any fixed schedule.

What it does, when the conditions are right, is move. Slowly and painfully, life reorganises itself around what has been lost. It goes on in a different shape — changed, not ended.

Research on bereavement points consistently to what those conditions look like: an honest recognition of how big the loss is, a calm human presence that can stay close without needing to fix things or hurry them along, and enough time and space for grief to find its own way through.

Families who have a clear picture of what grief is doing — and why it shows up the way it does — are better placed to offer each other those things.

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Topics: #InOtherWords #Bereavement #Grief #ColinMurrayParkes #AttachmentTheory #JohnBowlby #GriefPhases #FamilyLoss #ChildhoodBereavement #DoraBlack #Loss #FamilySupport #YoungFamilyLife

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Related YFL Content

In Other Words: Attachment Styles — The foundational IOW piece on Bowlby's attachment framework; the theory behind the Parkes model sits here in plain form.

In Other Words: Brain Time — How the brain handles time differently under stress and loss; a connected perspective on why grief does not follow a timeline.

Natural Healing — Covers therapeutic approaches in more depth, including environmental and generational factors; places the Freudian framework within which Bowlby and Parkes worked in a wider context.

A Conversation with Bowlby — The fuller picture of Bowlby's attachment framework; the foundation on which everything Parkes built about grief rests.