Chula Vista Counseling Blog
Insights from a Trauma Therapist in Chula Vista
The Five Stages of Grief Were Never a Roadmap — Here's What Grief Actually Looks Like
The five stages of grief are so embedded in our cultural understanding of loss that people use them to evaluate themselves. Am I in the anger stage? I thought I was past bargaining. I had a good week — does that mean I started over?
Here's what you need to know: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross never intended the five stages as a linear roadmap through grief. She developed them through her work with dying patients — not bereaved ones — and later said she regretted how rigidly the model had been applied.
Grief doesn't move in five neat stages. In this blog post, San Diego Grief Counselor, Christy Garcia, explores what grief actually looks like.
When Grief Becomes Trauma: What Happens When Loss Is Too Much for the Mind and Body to Process Alone
Most people understand that grief is hard. What they don't expect is the way grief can become something more than sadness — something that takes up residence in the body, floods the mind with images you didn't choose and can't turn off, and makes it impossible to think about the person you lost without being pulled back into the worst moment of losing them.
If that sounds familiar, you're not grieving wrong. You may be experiencing traumatic grief — and there is help specifically designed for it. Explore what treatment looks like in this post written by a grief and trauma therapist in San Diego.