Sit through enough corporate change-management offsites and the slide will eventually appear. A smooth U-shaped curve labelled “the change curve,” with five stations along its descent and ascent: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The facilitator will explain that this is what happens to your employees when you reorganize a department, sunset a product line, announce a merger, replace a tool, or roll out a new performance system. The deck will attribute the framework to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, often with a sober note that “the original research was on grief, but the same pattern shows up in any significant change.” The implication is that the next slide — usually a checklist of “what to do at each stage” — is grounded in real psychology.

It is not. The five stages of grief never had the empirical grounding the popular framing implies, and the “change curve” extension of that framework into organizational life has even less. Both are extraordinarily widespread, well-meaning, and deeply persuasive as narrative scaffolds. Neither survives even a casual encounter with the modern bereavement-research literature.

This is one of the awkward cases in the replication-crisis hub, because Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (1969) was not a fraud, did not involve a famous experiment that failed to replicate, and was not the product of any scientific community’s sloppy peer review. It was a thoughtful, humane, observational book by a working clinician — a book that did more than any other single piece of writing in the twentieth century to make the dying patient visible to American medicine. The problem is not that Kübler-Ross was dishonest. The problem is that her clinical observations, derived from one informal interview series with no quantitative methodology, were treated by the professions that adopted them as if they were established findings about how human beings actually grieve. They are not.

For anyone evaluating a change-management program, designing a bereavement intervention, training pastoral or palliative-care staff, or making strategic decisions about how to roll out organizational change, this matters. The framework you almost certainly inherited from training is wrong. The contemporary evidence points somewhere quite different, and the practical implications of that shift are real.

What Kübler-Ross 1969 Actually Did

The popular framing is that the five stages came from “Kübler-Ross’s research.” It is worth being precise about what that research consisted of.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, joined the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital in 1965. She became interested — and almost alone in her interest — in the experience of dying patients, who at the time were typically managed by being kept ignorant of their prognosis and isolated from honest conversation about their situation. She began organizing weekly seminars in which a terminally ill patient was interviewed in front of medical students, residents, and clergy through a one-way mirror, with the goal of teaching the next generation of doctors that dying patients had inner lives, fears, hopes, and unfinished business worth attending to.

On Death and Dying (1969) collected what she observed in those interviews. By her own count, the book drew on her conversations with approximately 200 terminally ill patients over a span of two and a half years. The famous five stages — denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — were her synthesis of recurring emotional themes she heard those patients describe.

Several things are notable about what this study was and was not.

It was not a quantitative study. There were no coded transcripts, no inter-rater reliability checks, no counts of how many patients displayed each stage. The book offers extended verbatim excerpts of interviews — vivid, deeply humanizing material — but no tabulation of which patient said what, in what order, or with what frequency.

It was not longitudinal in any rigorous sense. Patients were typically interviewed once or twice, not tracked across the course of their illness with repeated measurement. There is no design feature that would let you distinguish “this patient is in stage X now” from “this patient mentioned a theme consistent with stage X during this conversation.”

It had no comparison group. There were no equivalent interviews with patients who were not dying, with bereaved family members of dying patients, or with patients facing other kinds of life disruption. The claim that the stages were specific to dying — let alone that they generalized to grief over the loss of others, or to organizational change — was not testable with the data Kübler-Ross collected.

It was not preregistered, blinded, or designed to disconfirm any particular hypothesis. The book is, in form and method, a work of clinical observation in the tradition of Freud’s case histories — a synthesis of what an attentive clinician noticed in many conversations, written for an audience of clinicians, with the explicit goal of changing how dying patients were treated. As that kind of work, it succeeded brilliantly and contributed an enormous amount to American medicine. As empirical evidence for a discrete-stages model of how human beings respond to mortality or loss, it is essentially silent.

Kübler-Ross herself was clear about much of this. In her later writing, particularly in the posthumously co-authored On Grief and Grieving (2005), she pushed back on the popular interpretation that the stages were a sequence everyone passes through in order. She described the stages as “responses to loss that many people have,” not as “stops on some linear timeline.” Whether that revision was always part of her view or developed in response to misappropriation is debatable; what is not debatable is that the linear-progression interpretation that the change-management industry adopted was never what she ultimately defended. (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005, Scribner)

Why The Stages-In-Sequence Model Fails Empirically

The clean empirical test of the stages-in-sequence hypothesis is straightforward in principle: follow a representative sample of bereaved people over time, measure denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance at multiple time points, and see whether the pattern across people looks like the stage theory predicts (each emotion rising and falling in the predicted order, with each successor stage replacing its predecessor as time progresses).

Until the mid-2000s, no one had run a methodologically clean version of that test. The framework was assumed correct and taught, but the predictions had not been quantitatively checked against longitudinal data from a real bereaved sample. When the test was finally run, the framework did not survive it.

The pivotal study is Maciejewski, Zhang, Block, and Prigerson’s 2007 paper in JAMA, “An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief.” The team followed 233 bereaved individuals from a community sample in Connecticut whose loved ones had died from natural causes (which the authors used as a “comparison” condition with the stage theory’s original death-and-dying focus). They measured disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance at multiple time points over 24 months post-loss, using validated grief-symptom scales.

The findings:

The stage theory’s central prediction — that each negative grief response peaks in sequence (disbelief first, then yearning, then anger, then depression), with acceptance rising last and remaining low until late — was not what the data showed. Yes, the negative responses did peak and decline over time, in roughly the order the stage theory suggests. But acceptance was the most endorsed item across the entire 24-month follow-up window, including in the first month. It did not start low and rise to dominate at the end; it dominated from the beginning and grew only modestly. The “stages” were not stages a person passed through one at a time, replacing the prior emotion with the next. They were variably present co-occurring responses, with acceptance the most consistent baseline. (Maciejewski, Zhang, Block, & Prigerson, 2007, DOI 10.1001/jama.297.7.716)

The Maciejewski study has its own limitations — it studied bereavement following natural deaths in a particular community sample, and the measurement instruments were imperfect proxies for the original five Kübler-Ross constructs. But it was specifically designed to test the stage theory’s predictions, and the prediction it most directly disconfirmed — that acceptance is the endpoint of a sequence rather than the modal baseline — is the prediction that matters for both clinical practice and the change-curve extrapolation. If acceptance is most people’s most common response even in the first month, then the framework’s narrative arc (“they will pass through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and only later reach acceptance”) describes a minority trajectory at best.

The Maciejewski paper provoked spirited methodological debate but it was not refuted. Subsequent commentary (Silver and Wortman, Holland and Neimeyer, others) raised reasonable critiques about which symptoms were measured and how stages were operationalized, but no one published a competing longitudinal dataset showing that the stages-in-sequence pattern actually does hold up in a representative bereaved sample. The closest thing to a “stage-supporting” finding in modern grief research is the observation that some symptoms do, on average, decline over time — which is not the same thing as people moving through a sequence of discrete stages.

George Bonanno’s longitudinal work, which preceded Maciejewski’s by several years and continued past it, points in the same direction by a different route. Bonanno and colleagues prospectively followed older adults who lost spouses, beginning measurement before the loss and continuing for 18 months afterward. They found that grief trajectories were highly heterogeneous, that no single time-course pattern characterized most people, and that the modal pattern — resilience — bore little resemblance to the stages story. (Bonanno, 2004, DOI 10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20) (Bonanno et al., 2007, DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.793)

The Bisconti, Bergeman, and Boker 2004 study, using daily emotional well-being measurements from recently bereaved widows, is even more pointed. Daily measurement revealed that emotional dynamics in early bereavement are not smooth trajectories at all; they are oscillating, context-dependent, and far better characterized by dynamical-systems models than by any discrete-stage progression. (Bisconti, Bergeman, & Boker, 2004, DOI 10.1093/geronb/59.4.P158)

Three independent methodological approaches — longitudinal symptom tracking, prospective trajectory analysis, and daily-diary dynamical modeling — converge on the same conclusion. The stages-in-sequence model is not what the data show. The framework can sometimes be retrofit to individual stories in ways that feel validating, but it does not describe the underlying distribution of how people actually grieve.

What The Modern Grief Research Actually Shows

If grief is not a sequence of stages, what is it?

George Bonanno’s body of work, summarized in his book The Other Side of Sadness (2009) and in the empirical papers cited above, frames the answer this way: grief is multiple distinct trajectories, with resilience the most common — not the exception.

In Bonanno’s prospective studies of bereaved older adults, four broad trajectory patterns recur across populations and loss types:

Resilience. Roughly half of bereaved adults show only mild, transient distress and stable psychological functioning across the post-loss period. This is not “they are in denial.” It is not “they have not yet started to grieve.” Repeated prospective measurement — including measurement before the loss occurred — shows that these are people who continue to function, who experience meaningful sadness but also continued positive emotion, and who do not develop persistent distress symptoms. Resilience is the modal pattern, not pathology and not avoidance.

Recovery. Another significant minority show elevated distress in the early weeks and months that gradually declines over the first one to two years, returning to pre-loss baseline functioning. This pattern matches what most clinicians and laypeople intuitively think of as “normal” grieving, but it is not the most common trajectory — recovery describes perhaps a quarter to a third of bereaved adults in Bonanno’s samples.

Chronic grief. A smaller minority — perhaps 10 to 15 percent — develop sustained distress that persists at high levels for many months or years. This is the pattern that clinicians now formalize as “prolonged grief disorder” and that warrants targeted clinical intervention.

Delayed grief or other patterns. Some bereaved individuals show initial low distress followed by a later increase, or other variant trajectories. These are rare and often associated with specific circumstances of the loss.

The proportions vary across samples, loss types, and measurement windows, but the overall finding is robust: grief responses are heterogeneous, dominated by resilience, and not well-described by any one-size-fits-all stage sequence.

The theoretical model that has substantially displaced stages in academic bereavement research is the Dual Process Model proposed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999. The Dual Process Model treats coping with bereavement as oscillation between two orientations: a “loss orientation” (focused on the deceased, the grief itself, the meaning of the loss) and a “restoration orientation” (focused on new roles, new identities, practical demands of life going forward). Healthy coping involves moving back and forth between these orientations — not staying in one indefinitely, not progressing through a fixed sequence. The model has substantial empirical support and is the framework most contemporary bereavement researchers reach for. (Stroebe & Schut, 1999, DOI 10.1080/074811899201046)

Ruth Davis Konigsberg’s The Truth About Grief (2011) — a journalistic synthesis aimed at a general audience but built on serious engagement with the academic literature — covers this terrain accessibly and makes the same case the academic papers do: the popular five-stages story is wrong, the academic field knows it is wrong, and what should replace it is a more accurate, more humane story about variability, resilience, and oscillation. (Konigsberg, 2011, Simon & Schuster)

The honest contemporary summary: grief is variable, person-specific, and dominated by resilience for the majority. There is no normative sequence to pass through. There is no “stage” anyone is required to reach. There is no schedule against which a person can be judged “behind” or “stuck.” The framework that says otherwise has been disconfirmed in every methodologically careful test that has been run.

The Change-Management Extrapolation Problem

Here is where the framework gets its second life, and where the empirical case against it gets even weaker.

Sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, organizational consultants began applying the Kübler-Ross stages to “change responses” in workplace settings — reactions to mergers, restructurings, layoffs, technology rollouts, leadership transitions, and any other significant organizational disruption. The framework was rebranded as “the Kübler-Ross change curve,” sometimes with additional stages added (commitment, integration), and was incorporated into change-management methodologies including Prosci’s ADKAR adjacencies, Kotter-style change frameworks, and the broader Organization Development (OD) practitioner toolkit.

The extrapolation has two empirical problems, one stacked on top of the other.

First, the foundational grief model was already unsupported. Applying it to organizational change inherits whatever empirical weakness the original framework had — and as the previous sections show, the original framework was not actually validated.

Second, the leap from “responses of terminally ill patients facing their own death” to “responses of employees facing a department reorganization” was not validated independently. No one ran a longitudinal study of employees experiencing organizational change to confirm that the same five emotional stages occurred in the same sequence. The framework was simply adopted by consultancies and trainers because it provided a memorable, intuitive, narratively satisfying way to talk to managers about employee reactions. Once adopted, it was repeated until it became conventional wisdom — and almost no one in the corporate-change ecosystem went back to check whether the underlying model had ever been empirically supported for its original purpose, let alone its extended one.

There is real research on how people respond to organizational change. The literature is large, heterogeneous, and theoretically rich — drawing on work on uncertainty, perceived control, procedural fairness, justice perceptions, identity disruption, job-demand-resource models, and stress-appraisal frameworks. Almost none of it supports a discrete-stages model. What it consistently shows is that responses to organizational change are highly variable across individuals and contexts, that the modal pattern is something closer to “manage and continue” than to dramatic distress, that perceived fairness of the change process is one of the strongest predictors of response, and that individual differences (personality, prior experience, perceived control, social support) explain more variance than any time-since-announcement clock would.

In other words: when organizational researchers actually study employee responses to change, the picture looks much more like Bonanno’s grief findings — resilience-dominant, variable, individual-difference-driven — than like the Kübler-Ross change curve. The change curve is not what the change literature says. It is what the change consulting industry says, repeated long enough to be mistaken for what the literature says.

Why The Framework Persists Despite Disconfirmation

A model that is empirically wrong should, in a competently functioning intellectual ecosystem, get displaced by better models over time. The five stages and the change curve have not been displaced. They are arguably more widespread now than they were in 1990. It is worth being honest about why.

Narrative satisfaction. Five labelled stages form a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The structure echoes the hero’s journey, the three-act play, the addiction-recovery arc — narrative templates that human cognition latches onto easily. A model that says “responses are heterogeneous and individual-difference-dominated, with most people showing resilience” does not produce a satisfying slide.

Post-hoc applicability. Because the stages describe a wide range of emotions that virtually anyone experiencing significant change will have at some point, the framework can be retrofit to almost any observed reaction. Did the employee push back angrily in the town hall? Anger stage. Did they go quiet for two weeks? Depression stage. Did they propose alternatives? Bargaining stage. Did they eventually accept the new system? Acceptance stage. This is the Barnum-effect quality of any framework with broad categories — it appears to explain everything because it forbids nothing. A framework that explains everything predicts nothing.

Consultant utility. The five stages and the change curve give change-management consultants a structured deliverable: a model to teach, a sequence to plan against, a checklist of “what to do at each stage” to sell. A model that says “responses will vary by individual and most people will be fine” does not generate the same consulting product. The incentives in the consulting industry favor frameworks that can be operationalized into a workshop, a worksheet, and a workflow — even when the underlying claims are not well-supported.

Pre-empirical adoption. The framework was taught in medical schools, divinity schools, nursing programs, HR certifications, and MBA programs for decades before the modern bereavement research existed to disconfirm it. By the time the Maciejewski and Bonanno results were available, the framework had been transmitted across several generations of practitioners as “what we know about grief.” Updating institutional curricula against entrenched conventional wisdom is slow under the best circumstances; for a framework that feels humanizing and is associated with the profoundly important cultural work Kübler-Ross did, it is slower still.

Cultural attachment. The five stages are, by now, embedded in everyday vocabulary. People describe themselves as being “in the bargaining stage” of a breakup, a layoff, a diagnosis. The framework offers a shared language for an experience that otherwise feels isolating. Asking people to give up that vocabulary because the underlying model has been disconfirmed is asking them to give up a tool that feels useful in the moment, even if it does not accurately describe their actual emotional dynamics. The cultural cost of displacement is real.

None of these reasons is dishonest. All of them are the kind of reasons that keep a wrong-but-comforting framework in circulation. They are also, almost exactly, the same reasons that keep Maslow’s hierarchy, Mehrabian’s 7-38-55, multiple intelligences, and the rest of the corporate-L&D canon in circulation past their empirical expiration dates.

What’s Honest To Say About Grief And Change Responses Now

The defensible contemporary summary, given what the bereavement and organizational-change literatures actually show:

  • Responses to loss and to significant change are highly variable across individuals.
  • The modal pattern is resilience — not absence of grief or denial of grief, but continued functioning alongside meaningful sadness.
  • Significant chronic distress occurs in a meaningful minority and warrants real clinical attention when it does; it is not “what everyone goes through.”
  • There is no fixed sequence of emotional stages. There are recurring themes that people often experience, in varying orders, intensities, and combinations, with substantial individual variation.
  • Acceptance is often present from very early in the process, not a distant endpoint to which people must be guided.
  • Healthy coping involves oscillation between focusing on the loss and focusing on what comes next, not progression through a fixed sequence.
  • For organizational change specifically, perceived fairness of process, individual differences, and social context predict response more than any time-since-announcement clock.

A clinician, manager, pastoral caregiver, or HR leader operating from these premises will behave differently than one operating from the five-stages framework. They will be slower to label someone “stuck” or “in denial” for not following the expected sequence. They will be more attentive to individual variation. They will not assume distress is inevitable or its absence pathological. They will not impose a normative timeline. They will, in short, treat the people in front of them as people rather than as cases of a model.

What This Means For Change-Management Programs

If you are responsible for designing, evaluating, or buying change-management programs, here are the practical implications of the empirical record.

Stop teaching the Kübler-Ross change curve as if it describes employee psychology. It does not. Continuing to teach it propagates a model that real organizational research does not support, and it primes managers to look for stages that may not exist while missing the variation that does. If a vendor or consultancy includes the change curve as a foundational element of their methodology, that is a signal worth weighing in your evaluation of the rest of their approach. It does not necessarily mean the rest is wrong, but it does mean they have not updated against widely available evidence.

Expect heterogeneous reactions. Plan for the realistic distribution of employee responses: most will be resilient (mild transient impact, continued functioning), some will adapt over weeks to months (the recovery pattern), a minority will develop sustained distress that warrants targeted support. The split is not “everyone will go through these stages in order.” It is “responses will be all over the map, dominated by resilience, with a minority requiring real attention.”

Design for variability, not stages. Change-management plans built around a single normative emotional trajectory mismatch the actual distribution of employee responses. Plans built around clear communication of rationale, perceived fairness of process, individual choice where possible, recognition that some employees will need targeted support, and ongoing two-way feedback channels match the evidence better. The shift is from a stage-based timeline (“week 2 is when employees will be angry; week 4 is when they will begin bargaining”) to a population-based plan that anticipates a range of responses simultaneously.

Train managers to recognize chronic distress rather than to label stages. The clinically useful skill is noticing when someone’s distress is not resolving, not categorizing which “stage” they are in this week. The latter is fictional; the former matters and predicts who needs additional support.

Use the procedural-fairness research, not the change curve. The single most consistent predictor of employee response to organizational change in the empirical literature is procedural justice — whether the change process is perceived as fair, transparent, and respectful of those affected. This is a much more useful lever than any stage model because it identifies an actionable design variable (process design) rather than a fictional timeline to manage against.

Distinguish grief from change response. Even if the five stages were a good model of grief — which the evidence shows they are not — the leap to organizational change is an unsupported extrapolation. Losing a parent and learning your team’s reporting structure has changed are different categories of experience. Treating them as if the same emotional template applies is not “humanizing” the workplace; it is mistaking metaphor for measurement. The respect employees deserve is to be treated as individuals with varied responses, not to have their reactions mapped onto a death-and-dying framework that does not fit even its original use case.

The general discipline here is the same as for any of the frameworks examined in this hub. Use models that are supported by the evidence, in the conditions where the evidence lives. Be skeptical of frameworks that explain everything, especially when they were imported from one domain (clinical grief observation) into another (organizational change) with no validation along the way. Calibrate your training, communication, and intervention design against the actual distribution of human responses — which is heterogeneous, resilience-dominant, and not stage-shaped.

Sources

  • Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.
  • Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2005). On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. Scribner. Publisher page
  • Maciejewski, P. K., Zhang, B., Block, S. D., & Prigerson, H. G. (2007). An empirical examination of the stage theory of grief. JAMA, 297(7), 716–723. DOI: 10.1001/jama.297.7.716
  • Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20
  • Bonanno, G. A., Boerner, K., & Wortman, C. B. (2007). Trajectories of grieving. In M. S. Stroebe, R. O. Hansson, H. Schut, & W. Stroebe (Eds.), Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: Advances in Theory and Intervention (pp. 287–307). American Psychological Association.
  • Bonanno, G. A., Wortman, C. B., Lehman, D. R., Tweed, R. G., Haring, M., Sonnega, J., Carr, D., & Nesse, R. M. (2002). Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1150–1164. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1150
  • Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. Basic Books.
  • Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. DOI: 10.1080/074811899201046
  • Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (2010). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: A decade on. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 61(4), 273–289. DOI: 10.2190/OM.61.4.b
  • Bisconti, T. L., Bergeman, C. S., & Boker, S. M. (2004). Emotional well-being in recently bereaved widows: A dynamical systems approach. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 59B(4), P158–P167. DOI: 10.1093/geronb/59.4.P158
  • Konigsberg, R. D. (2011). The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss. Simon & Schuster. Publisher page
  • Silver, R. C., & Wortman, C. B. (2007). The stage theory of grief [Letter]. JAMA, 297(24), 2692. DOI: 10.1001/jama.297.24.2692-a
  • Holland, J. M., & Neimeyer, R. A. (2010). An examination of stage theory of grief among individuals bereaved by natural and violent causes: A meaning-oriented contribution. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 61(2), 103–120. DOI: 10.2190/OM.61.2.b

FAQ

What about acceptance as a goal in grief therapy? Acceptance is a meaningful psychological construct and a reasonable focus for therapeutic work when distress is present and persistent. The empirical problem is not the concept of acceptance itself; the problem is the stages model’s claim that acceptance is the endpoint of a fixed sequence everyone must pass through in order. The Maciejewski 2007 data show that acceptance is often the modal response from very early in bereavement, not a distant goal. Modern bereavement therapies — including Complicated Grief Treatment and approaches drawing on the Dual Process Model — work with acceptance as one of many therapeutic targets, not as the final stage of a march.

What about my own grief experience? It felt like I went through the stages. Personal experience of grief that maps onto the stages is real, and nothing in the empirical literature denies that some individuals experience the emotions Kübler-Ross described in something like the order she described. The literature shows that this is not the modal pattern, not that it never happens. The problem with the framework is that it was taught as a normative sequence everyone passes through, leading clinicians, friends, family, and the bereaved themselves to judge their own experience against a template that does not fit the majority. If your experience fit the template, that is a real personal datum; it just does not generalize to “this is what grief looks like.”

What replaces the change curve in change-management practice? The most defensible replacement is a population-based plan that assumes heterogeneous responses, anchors on procedural fairness as the strongest evidence-based predictor of response quality, builds in targeted support for the minority who develop sustained distress, and abandons the stage-by-stage planning rhythm in favor of ongoing two-way feedback channels. The shift is from “what stage are they in this week” to “are we communicating clearly, treating people fairly, providing real choice where possible, and noticing when individual employees need more support.” The change-management literature has plenty of empirically supported guidance; it just does not come prepackaged as a five-stage curve.

Should I stop using Kübler-Ross in HR training programs? Yes, in any context where it is taught as a descriptive model of how employees actually respond to change. If you are committed to keeping the language in your culture as a shared vocabulary — which has real coordination value even when empirically loose — at minimum strip the linear-progression framing, present it explicitly as one possible pattern among many, and pair it with the modern evidence about resilience-dominant heterogeneous responses. Better still: replace it with a procedural-justice-based framework that has actual empirical support. The training time is not a sunk cost; the framework was wrong before you trained it and it is still wrong after.

Is it disrespectful to Kübler-Ross’s legacy to say her framework is empirically unsupported? It would be disrespectful to misrepresent what she did, claimed, or contributed. She was a working clinician whose careful attention to dying patients changed American medicine for the better, and On Death and Dying was a major humanizing contribution to a field that desperately needed humanizing. The framework she proposed was a synthesis of clinical observation, not an experimental result, and she pushed back in her later writing against the rigid linear-stage interpretation the change-management industry adopted. Calling out the empirical weakness of the framework as commonly taught is not an attack on her; it is an attempt to align practice with what we have actually learned in the 55+ years since she wrote, and to honor what she actually said rather than what the industry made of it.

What about prolonged grief disorder — isn’t that a kind of “getting stuck in a stage”? Prolonged grief disorder (formalized in ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR) is a real clinical syndrome characterized by sustained, impairing grief symptoms for many months or longer after a significant loss. It is conceptualized in the contemporary clinical literature as one of several trajectory patterns identified in Bonanno’s work — specifically the chronic-grief trajectory — not as someone being “stuck” in denial, anger, bargaining, or depression as discrete stages. The diagnostic framework draws on resilience-trajectory research, not stage theory. Conflating prolonged grief disorder with “stuck in a stage” misrepresents both.

If the five stages are empirically wrong, why are they still in clinical training programs? Mostly the same reasons frameworks generally persist past their empirical expiration: institutional momentum, narrative satisfaction, embedded curricula, vocational identity formed around them, generational transmission of “what we know about grief,” and the absence of an equally memorable replacement framework with the same narrative shape. The field is gradually updating — many contemporary palliative-care and bereavement-counseling programs now teach the Dual Process Model and Bonanno’s resilience findings alongside or instead of Kübler-Ross — but the cultural footprint of the original framework is enormous, and “stages of grief” is in the everyday vocabulary of clients, families, and journalists in a way that the academic alternatives are not. Updating the field’s frameworks faster than the surrounding culture updates is genuinely hard work.

Does any of this mean grief is “less real” than the stages model implies? No, and this is the most important point to get right. The contemporary evidence does not say grief is shallow, brief, or unimportant. It says grief is heterogeneous, individual, and dominated by resilience for most people most of the time — with a meaningful minority developing sustained distress that deserves real attention. The framework’s empirical problems are about its shape (discrete stages in sequence) and its universality (everyone passes through), not about whether grief is a real, profound, important human experience. Pushing back on the framework is not pushing back on grief. It is trying to describe grief more accurately so the people experiencing it can be supported better.

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Atticus Li

Experimentation and growth leader. CXL-certified CRO practitioner, Mindworx-certified behavioral economist (1 of ~1,000 worldwide). 200+ A/B tests across energy, SaaS, fintech, e-commerce, and marketplace verticals.

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