Dr. Connie Omari:
Hi, I’m Dr. Connie Omari. And today I’m here to talk to you about the five stages of grief. This is a very important topic to me because, as you may or may not know, on October 8, 2019, I lost my dad to congestive heart failure, who died of cardiac arrest. So, Daddy, this one’s for you. All right, the stages of grief according to Kubler Ross The first one is denial and isolation. What that looks like is a person not willing to accept what’s going on and almost trying to convince themselves that what’s going on is not really true and that the person that they care about is not really dead. But maybe it’s just a mistake, or, you know, someone misunderstood what’s going on as a dream that they’re going to wake up from.
Next is anger. Okay, a person sometimes finds themselves angry with the person whose disease they have, or they can be angry with God, or whoever their god is, for being responsible for the deceased or for bringing up the death of the deceased. Or they can be angry at the condition—you know, in my case, maybe congestive heart failure or cardiac arrest. And then there’s depression. And we know what that looks like: sadness, crying, withdrawal from people, places, and things you’d have normally been attached to, maybe anger, rage, extreme disappointment and displeasure, and everyday activities and the ability to concentrate over eating. Just really anything that causes you to feel sad or be extra sad. When thinking about the deceastheperson, bargaining is the next stage. A lot of times, people will want to bargain with their God. And what this looks like is, you know, Dear God, if we could just bring my dad back, I’ll never curse again, or something like that. It’s not a pretty place to be, for sure. But it’s a real place where people are just so desperate to have their old lives back and whatever it is, whoever it is that they’re grieving for, that they will go to extreme measures to try to just bargain with you if you could just bring that person back and give them some level of normalcy.
And then, of course, there’s the final stage of acceptance, and in the acceptance stage, basically, they become at peace and comfortable with what their new normal is. All right. So if you are dealing with grief or if you know someone who’s dealing with grief, I hope that this vlog has been helpful and has given you a little bit of foundation about what the five stages of grief are. If you are looking for more help or if you or a loved one could use some additional assistance here.