Grief

I often use the image of a spiral with my clients to explore the emotions that we experience while grieving, and like AZBodyMindCounseling, I think that the Kubler-Ross stages make helpful labels for grief emotions instead of describing a stair-step process. We talk about moving through grief emotions in any order, and work on developing permission for grief emotions to recur throughout the progress on the spiral. I appreciate the language that the Kubler-Ross stages model provides--and I think that, with a stages model, some people may feel as though they are supposed to be "moving forward" rather than allowing themselves to experience grief emotions in multiple ways, at multiple times. It is pretty powerful to give that permission to feel whatever feelings are coming up!