The 7 Stages of Grief:
Grieving Loss Of Health

These articles on the 7 stages of grief in chronic illness are NOW available as a free ebook, including additional information.
Knowing about the stages of grief helps you to be gentle with yourself in a time of illness.

The link above and the cover below take you to visit my healing website where you can collect the book.

Contents List for this article on the 7 Stages of Grief:

"I’ve Lost My Health And I've Lost So Much"

We go through the stages of grief when we suffer loss of any kind.

I lived with very severe chronic illness for 17 years, and continue to live with a milder form of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis /CFS today.

The FREE ebook focuses on how to grieve a loss of health when we live with chronic illness.

When we lose our health, we often lose and grieve many other things too:

• We can lose our identity as mother, father, worker, happy person, busy person, creative person.
  The illness may take away our ability to perform the family role that feels most comfortable to us.
• We can lose relationships as those unable to accept the illness fall away.
• We may lose our job
• We may have to move from where we live to somewhere adapted for the illness.

What Are The 7 Stages Of Grief?

I am so happy to offer you a FREE ebook on chronic illness as there really isn't enough information available to guide us through grieving loss of health.

The 7 stages of grief I look at in the FREE ebook are as follows: 

Where appropriate I link to articles available on this or my other website. Please know that ALL these articles are included in the FREE ebook.

1a. Shock and Denial

Includes:

• Whilst We Are In Denial It Can Be Difficult To Move Through The Stages

• Tears Can Be A Sign That Denial Is Shifting

1b. They Dont Believe I Have An Illness - Other People Deny Illness (opens a window on another website)

2. Anger

Includes: 

• I Felt Angry About Being Ill
• "What Are The Benefits Of Feeling Anger?"

3. Bargaining

• Includes: Bargaining Gives A Useful Temporary Sense Of Control

4. Guilt

Includes:

• How Do We Move From Bargaining To Acceptance, And From Guilt To Humility?

5. Depression/Grief

Includes:

• Depression as a Stage in Grieving Loss of Health
• We Stop Pretending We Are Not Ill. We Feel Our Feelings.
• We May Receive More Belief Or Understanding From Others
• How Can I Learn To Feel My Feelings?

6. Reconstruction (see the FREE ebook)

7. Acceptance

• Spiritual beliefs that help us move towards acceptance of illness
• My journey through the 7 stages of acceptance of illness.

These grief articles also include:

• poems about illness, written whilst I lived with chronic illness for 17 years
• spiritual quotes

Books About The 5 Stages of Grief Or Grieving
Who developed the Stages of Grief?

Elizabeth Kubler Ross worked with the terminally ill. This led her to develop the five stages of grief documented in her book "On Death And Dying".

She found that many people who were facing death were glad to be asked questions about how they felt. Their experience was that most people were not able to allow them to talk about death.
Looking up the book to recommend it here, I see Kubler Ross also wrote a book called "On Grief and Grieving" which may be more appropriate to living with chronic illness.

We Go Through The 7 Stages Of Grief With Any Loss

It was soon realised that these 5 stages of grief apply to any area of our life where we experience loss. Since Kubler Ross, others have expanded on the steps to give 7 stages of grief. These can include "shock" (I include this in denial), "guilt" and "reconstruction of one’s life".

You will find the 7 stages of grief are listed a little differently wherever you look.

They can also be named the 7 stages of acceptance of illness.
And I have also seen these steps referred to as the Change Cycle.

How To Cope With Bad Advice When Ill

Going by my personal experience, you are likely to receive a great deal of bad advice when ill.

Some of the people you love will be going through their own journey with your illness. They may be in the same phase of grief as yourself and speak to you from a place of fear or anger. They may move away and simply deny that you are ill.

Others who do not know you well may not have the knowledge or experience to advise you, but will advise you anyway!

When you identify which of the 7 stages of grief you are at, you are better able to decide which is good advice and which is bad advice.

• The next article on grieving loss of health is the stage of Denying an Illness

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