| Stage | Purpose | Behavior |
|---|
| Rando’s Stages of Adapting to Loss |
| Avoidance phase | | - Acknowledge loss (intellectually first, then emotionally)
|
| Confirmation phase | - React to separation
- Recollect and reexperience the deceased
- Relinquish old attachments to deceased and
| - Experience pain of loss—it will impact all areas of functioning
- Make changes in one’s life to adapt to life without person
- Change old habits, find new support systems
|
| Accommodation phase | - Readjust to move adaptively into new world without forgetting old
- Reinvest
| - New relationship with deceased
- Form new identity
- Emotional energy into new things
|
| Kübler-Ross’s Stages: Adapting to a Loss of Self |
| Denial | - Unconscious avoidance to protect self from painful reality
| |
| Anger | - Attempt to take control when feeling out of control by attacking, blaming other
| - Lack of expected reaction; using unproved treatment methods; doctor shopping to avoid confronting diagnosis
|
| Bargaining | - Attempting to change reality by making agreement, bargains for more time
- Indicates beginning acceptance
| - “Why me?”
- Irrational demands; criticizing staff; hostile behavior
|
| Depression | - Work of grief as realization hits
- Involves despair, the pain of experiencing loss
| - “It’s me, but …”
- “I want to live til my son’s wedding, then I’ll accept death.”
|
| Acceptance | - Resolution of feelings about death
- Neither happy nor sad
- Acceptance of reality, sense of peace and letting go
| - Making bargains with God to change if can have more time, change reality
- “It’s me.”
- Sad, tearful, life review
- Comforting others to accept impending death; remembering the past with fondness but without fighting to hang on to life
|
Source: Adapted from Rando T. (1993). Treatment of complicated mourning. Champaign, IL: Research Press; and Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. New York: MacMillan.