Applying Neurographics to Five Stages of Grief (ePub)

Over the past several decades, Kübler-Ross' concept has evolved and gained popularity when applied to almost anything that a person perceives as tragic, whether it is something that has already happened or something that will happen, and there is no other way to deal with it but accept it. We seem to go through the same five stages when we not only lose a loved one but also when we lose a job or a house, when our car breaks down, or when we have an incident in our everyday life. The difference is that the event has happened - unlike in the original idea of something coming up - and that the stages are often gone through rather quickly. For example, when a car breaks down, we go through all five stages in the matter of 10 to 30 minutes. We may still perceive the event as tragic but we arrive at acceptance and moving on quickly enough and often fail to realize that we went through grief.

Depending on what the source of your grief is, you may need additional support in form of therapy and/or medications. I would like for you to treat these algorithms as a supplemental form of help and not the main treatment: I am not a doctor or a therapist, nor can I replace one with a handful of neurographic pictures.

One more thing to keep in mind is that you may need to repeat the same algorithm more than once before moving on to the one for the next stage. I worked on cases where I repeated the same algorithm five times before I felt ready to proceed any further. This is completely normal, and your approach will depend on the source of grief and the duration of each stage.

Kübler-Ross herself stated that grief is not linear. This means that a person going through the stages does not necessarily follow them one after another: being in the anger stage, for instance, one can still slide back into denial or tap into bargaining.

When creating the algorithms, I put them into the five stages but that does not mean that you cannot go back and forth between them when working through your grief. It is a very personal thing, and if you need to go back to the previous stage and make another picture, then, by all means, do that if that helps gain some form of closure.

When you work on the pictures, take note of how they change in color and overall look. You may notice that you start with paler colors and proceed to use the brighter ones or that your bright first picture leads to the earthier last one. This is normal: in the process, we change and build different neural pathways, and it shows in how we treat our pictures.

If you feel like taking a break between working on two stages - for example, after working on the stage of depression, you are still not ready to move on to acceptance but you do not feel like making another depression stage picture - give yourself permission to step aside and put the paper and pencils down. This may be your brain's signal that it needs to regroup and recharge. When the time comes, you will go back to neurographics.