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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication.
There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order. According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif. (www.grief-recovery.com), and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998), “no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss.... No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”
Friedman’s assessment comes from daily encounters with people experiencing grief in his practice. University of Memphis psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer confirms this analysis. He concluded in his scholarly book Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001): “At the most obvious level, scientific studies have failed to support any discernible sequence of emotional phases of adaptation to loss or to identify any clear end point to grieving that would designate a state of ‘recovery.’”
Nevertheless, the urge to compress the complexities of life into neat and tidy stages is irresistible. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud insisted that we moved through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson countered with eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (infant); autonomy vs. doubt (toddler); initiative vs. guilt (preschooler); industry vs. inferiority (school-age period); identity vs. role confusion (adolescent); intimacy vs. isolation (young adult); generativity vs. stagnation (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (older adult). Harvard University psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg postulated that our moral development progresses through six stages: parental punishment, selfish hedonism, peer pressure, law and order, social contract and principled conscience.
Why stages? We are pattern-seeking, storytelling primates trying to make sense of an often chaotic and unpredictable world. A stage theory works in a manner similar to a species-classification heuristic or an evolutionary-sequence schema. Stages also fit well into a chronological sequence where stories have set narrative patterns. Stage theories “impose order on chaos, offer predictability over uncertainty, and optimism over despair,” explained social psychologist Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Woman (Touchstone, 1993) and co-author, with Elliot Aronson, of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007), in an interview with me. “One appeal of stage theories is that they tell a story—they give us a narrative to live by (‘you feel this now, but soon ...’). In cognitive psychology and also in ‘narrative psychotherapy,’ there has been a lot of work on the importance of storytelling. Some therapists now make this idea explicit, helping clients change a negative, self-defeating narrative (‘look at all I suffered’) into a positive one (‘I not only survived but triumphed’).”
What’s wrong with stages? First, Tavris noted, “in developmental psychology, the notion of predictable life stages is toast. Those stage theories reflected a time when most people marched through life predictably: marrying at an early age; then having children when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife crisis; then retirement; then death. Those ‘passages’ theories evaporated with changing social and economic conditions that blew the predictability of our lives to hell.”
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8 Comments
Add CommentIf I didn't think I was going to die one day, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndeed. It's time to stop believing everyone is like everyone else and be made to 'conform' to an idelistic textbook theory. Isn't possible. Wheter people like individuality or not, it's a fact of life. Deal with it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSounds like what the Republicans are going through.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLOL! Ya, I think they are going thru denial from the articles of theirs I have been reading....but I figured that was a regular state of mind for them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this: People may understand moral dilemmas in different ways depending on their stage of development, as shown by their preferences for interpretations. We used The Model of Hierarchical Complexity, which provides a framework for scoring reasoning stages in any domain as well as in any cultural setting, to analyze the relationship between stage of development and understanding moral dilemma interpretations. Specifically, we analyzed items from the following instruments to help determine this relationship: 1) The Helper-Person Problem 2) The Politician Voter Instrument 3) The Anti Death Penalty Case 4) The Not Report Incest Dilemma and 5) The Stoning Case. Portuguese versions of the Helper-Person Problem and Stoning Case were also used. The Model of Hierarchical Complexity is useful for this cross-cultural application. The model offers a singular mathematical method of measuring stages in any domain because the tasks presented can contain any kind of information. The model thus allows for a standard quantitative analysis of developmental complexity in any cultural setting. Data obtained from these Portuguese versions was coordinated with data from all other English instruments. The instruments consisted of five vignettes, each one representing one of the adult stages from order 8 to 12 (concrete, abstract, formal, systematic, and metasystematic). Participants rated the quality of arguments on a 1 to 6 scale. A Rasch analysis produced stage scores for each of the stories, which were regressed against the hierarchical complexity of each of the stories. The relationship between Rasch scaled scores for each item for each of the 2 or 3 rating questions and order of hierarchical complexity was: 1) The Helper-Person, r =.982, r = .990, r = .975 2) The Politician Voter, r = .911, r = .912, r = .863 3) The Anti Death Penalty Case, r = .854, r = .807 4) The Not Report Incest Dilemma, r = .896, r = .852, r = .841 5) The Stoning Case, r= .879, r = . A factor analysis was then conducted to determine if the scales loaded and their various implications.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo Rasch and regression for second question in stoning case or do I leave it out because it was a bad question.
Paper 2:
Jonas Gensaku Miller, B.A.
Dare Institute
234 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Telephone: (617) 497-5270
jonasmill@gmail.com
William Joseph Harrigan
Dare Institute
234 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Telephone: (978) 793-0694
williamjosephharrigan@gmail.com
Michael Lamport Commons, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School
234 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Telephone:
This reminds me of my wife's list of "three things not to say to someone in grief":
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://lyrasmamma.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/tre-saker-att-inte-saga-till-nagon-i-sorg/
It's in Swedish and I'm sure automatic translation will mess it up so here's the gist (using my words):
"You are so strong!" Nor my wife neither I feel strong in any sense of the word. It _might_ look like that, but it's only because we have to somehow keep going. We're weak, soft, vulnerable and so sad that you wouldn't want to feel even a fraction of it.
"Are you through the worst part now?" There's no worst part. We've lost our child! It'll be a big hurting, bleeding wound for the rest of our lives.
"Would you say it's moving forward?" That question assumes grief is a linear process. It's not. At least not to us. It's much more like chaos. Sometimes ripping our hearts out. Sometimes feeling more manageable. Always reminding us of the importance of cherishing what we have. Always reinforcing the meaning of the word "love".
I bought a manual called save a breakup system from
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.saveabreakup.com and I gotta admit it helped me a
lot, this manual teaches you tricks how to get your ex
back, how to heal a broken heart, and how to breakup if
you want to..I love it and it works great.
Grieving the loss of a loved one should not be compounded by the fallacy that at some magical point one will experience a sense of closure. The reality is that a long, hard grieving process may be ahead. Hopefully, with the passage of time, assimilation of feelings of loss and integration of the grieving experience will occur, the trauma will be mitigated, and a renewed sense of purpose in life will prevail.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.griefout.com/