Grief Doesn’t Follow a Timeline: Understanding Prolonged Grief

Most of us grew up with a version of grief that moves in stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — as if sorrow were a checklist to work through in order, arriving somewhere clean and finished on the other side. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also not how grief actually works.

Where the “stages” idea came from — and why it doesn’t hold up

The five-stage model of grief was developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the late 1960s, based on her conversations with dying patients — not on grief in the bereaved at all. Researchers have since found no good evidence that people move through these stages in order, or that everyone experiences them. Later in her own career, Kübler-Ross clarified that the stages “are not stops on some linear timeline in grief” — but the simplified version had already taken hold in public understanding. When grief is treated as a fixed sequence, people who don’t feel “on track” can end up feeling like they’re doing it wrong, on top of already grieving.

The reality, backed by decades of bereavement research, is messier and more individual: grief tends to come in waves rather than stages, can resurface unexpectedly years later, and looks different from person to person and loss to loss.

Prolonged grief needs more support

For most people, grief eases gradually over time, even while it never fully disappears. But for a meaningful minority, grief remains intense, persistent, and functionally disabling well beyond what’s expected. This is now a recognised clinical condition — prolonged grief disorder — added to the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 in 2018 and to the DSM-5-TR (the diagnostic manual used in Australia and internationally) in 2022.

The hallmark features are an intense, persistent yearning for the person who died and preoccupation with them, along with symptoms such as difficulty accepting the loss, emotional numbness, a sense that life is meaningless, or avoidance of reminders — present most days, causing real difficulty functioning, and lasting at least 12 months after the loss for adults. It’s a distinct experience from ordinary grief and from depression, and it’s treatable.

What actually helps

Evidence-based grief-focused therapies — including cognitive behavioural approaches adapted for grief and meaning-centred grief therapy — have shown real benefit for people experiencing prolonged or complicated grief, helping process the loss, work with avoidance, and rebuild a sense of meaning without needing to “get over” the person who died. Support doesn’t require you to meet formal diagnostic criteria first — if grief is significantly disrupting your sleep, relationships, or ability to function, that’s reason enough to seek support, whether it’s been three months or three years.

A note on timing

There’s no correct or expected timeline for grief, and no deadline after which you should be “over it.” What’s worth paying attention to is not how much time has passed, but whether the grief is easing at all, even slowly — or whether it feels as acute today as it did at the start.

If you’re supporting yourself or someone else through loss, know that reaching out isn’t jumping the gun, and it isn’t a sign that something is wrong with how you’re grieving. At Sunny Coast Counselling, we offer individual counselling for grief and loss in person on the Sunshine Coast, and via Zoom or phone for clients across Australia and New Zealand — which can make it easier to access support without adding travel or scheduling pressure on top of an already difficult time.

If you’d like to book a grief counselling session, click here.

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