Chapter 11 - Moving Through the Stages | Eden's Flaming Sword
In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book that changed how we understand grief. She identified five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Most people know these stages. What most people don’t know is that Kübler-Ross never meant them as a checklist. She didn’t say you move through them neatly, one after another, in order. That’s not how grief works.
You feel anger one day, bargaining the next, back to denial the day after. That’s normal. The nervous system is trying to find a way through the threat; and whether that threat is real or imagined, the body can’t tell the difference. What matters is this: when grief can’t complete, it doesn’t disappear. It stops moving. It gets stuck. And when grief gets stuck at a particular stage, that stage becomes your default survival pattern. The one that’s been running your life without your permission.
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Each one is grief that couldn’t finish.
We’ve already seen what these patterns look like from the outside. Now let’s look at what they feel like from the inside, and what it actually means for them to move.
Fawn is denial.
It feels like your needs, your sense of self, are disappearing. Like making yourself smaller and smaller until maybe the threat will pass. When denial is moving, something in you begins to shift. You’re starting to acknowledge that something happened, even if you can’t fully face it yet. There’s a tentative softness to it. A quiet, uncomfortable sense of; maybe I do matter. You’re beginning to feel the weight of your own right to exist. It’s uncomfortable because you’ve spent so long erasing yourself. But something is stirring.
When denial is stuck, it becomes chronic fawn. Chronic self-abandonment. You don’t just minimize what happened to you; you minimize yourself entirely. Your needs don’t register. Your anger feels illegitimate. Your boundaries are non-existent. The internal fear based voice in you tells you that if you’re small enough, good enough, selfless enough, you will be safe and the connection will stay.
What most people don’t realize is that most of us begin here. We never even admitted we matter enough to grieve. We skipped straight past acknowledging there’s a self that was lost. But to grieve, you first have to stop denying you exist. You have to admit your needs are real, your anger is valid, and your boundaries matter. Fawning never gets there. It stays in the first stage, denying the self over and over, and calling that safety and love.
You are allowed to exist fully. That’s where this begins.
Fight is anger.
It feels like heat rising. You can feel it in your face, in your chest. An energy that has been compressed for so long it feels like it could explode out of you; like something that has been sealed too tight for too long and is finally about to burst.
When anger is moving, it isn’t comfortable, but it’s clean. There’s clarity in it. You know what violated you. You know what wasn’t okay. You’re not questioning whether you have the right to feel it, you just feel it. It moves through the body in waves, in bursts. You might cry while you’re angry, or you might shake. Moving anger doesn’t look controlled, and it isn’t supposed to be.
When anger is stuck, it becomes chronic rage. It’s no longer moving through; it’s circling, looking for a target. Every interaction becomes a potential threat. The anger isn’t processing the original loss anymore. It’s protecting against the grief underneath, because if you stopped being angry, you’d have to feel how much it hurt. How powerless you actually were. Stuck anger asks how dare this happen, over and over, but never moves into the deeper truth that it did happen, and you couldn’t stop it.
Moving anger eventually softens and the heat subsides. What follows is sadness. But don’t worry, that’s how you know it’s doing its job. It’s moving you closer to what you’ve been avoiding. So let it come. Rage if you have to; not at others, but for yourself. Let your body shake with it. Your anger has been compressed for a long time. It needs space to expand, to move, to be felt without judgment or control. It will dissolve on its own when it’s ready.
Flight is bargaining.
It feels like restlessness. The constant leg shaking, the fidgeting, the analyzing and intellectualizing. You can’t stop moving. You can’t sit still with what’s happening, so you negotiate. If I just do this differently, if I manage that situation better, if I avoid this person, if I control that outcome, if I just stay one step ahead, I will be safe.
When bargaining is moving, you’re testing things. Some work, some don’t. But there’s movement. You’re learning what you can actually control and what you can’t. It’s exhausting, but it isn’t hopeless.
When bargaining is stuck, it becomes chronic flight. Endless negotiation with reality. You run because sitting with the truth feels unbearable. You lie to escape consequences. You flee relationships the moment they start to trigger something real. And somewhere in all of it, the mind becomes the primary escape route. You intellectualize. You analyze. You build elaborate frameworks for why things are the way they are. You live so far up in thought, in imagination, in abstraction, that the body and its grief become the ground that is drifting further away. You fly higher and higher until you can barely make out the ground. And after a while, you forget where the ground even is.
The bargaining mind is endlessly creative—it will find a new strategy, a new exit, a new way to stay one step ahead of the feeling.
Eventually, it exhausts itself. You run out of moves. You realize nothing you do can undo what happened; and in that exhaustion, there’s a strange relief. You stop running from reality. Instead, you stay. And you feel what is in front of you.
Freeze is depression.
You know those days. Everything feels like too much. Nothing you do matters, nothing lands, nothing works. The energy drains out of you and the world outside feels threatening in a way you can’t even name. The walls are closing in on you. You can’t get out of bed. Can’t make yourself go anywhere or face anyone. Your system just stops. Like a turtle pulling into its shell. Like a porcupine rolling into a ball, spikes out, telling the world: don’t come any closer, I can’t take it any more.
This is freeze. This is what happens when the threat has become too large to fight, too close to flee, and there is nothing left to appease. The body makes the decision your mind couldn’t. It shuts down to survive what it couldn’t survive any other way.
When depression is moving, you’re in the dark, but you’re still breathing. You’re letting yourself feel how heavy it is and how hopeless it seems. You’re not pretending it’s fine. You’re not forcing yourself to function. You’re in the valley and you’re facing that dark night. It’s painful but it isn’t permanent.
When depression is stuck, the despair that should pass through gets locked in place. The inner voice fueled by fear tells you that nothing you do matters, there’s no point to anything in life, and that this will never end. The thoughts loop, reinforcing the hopelessness, keeping the system frozen. The Ox, the beast of burden, just waits; but waiting without any container, without any rhythm or movement, can become its own kind of exile.
When depression is moving, something begins to return. A small sense that you can act, that one thing you do might actually matter. That you have some control over your own environment. And when that happens, it eventually lifts. You stay in the valley long enough to find the bottom, and once you reach the bottom, the only direction left to go is up. What remains isn’t despair but something quieter. The knowledge that this happened, and you’re still here.
What’s left is acceptance.
It may not be happiness or the relief you imagined. Something more like; the truth, standing there in front of you, and you’re finally able to look at it without collapsing. The denial moved. The anger burned through. The bargaining exhausted itself. The depression lifted. And what’s left is a quiet knowing that doesn’t need anything to be different.
You can feel the shift to acceptance in the body; the tightness in the chest loosens and your breath deepens. Something that’s been clenched for a long time finally lets go.
And here’s what makes acceptance possible: forgiveness.
Forgiveness isn’t something that arrives when you feel ready. It’s a choice made before you feel ready. In the Bible, Jesus didn’t forgive from a place of peace. He forgave from the cross, while the pain was still happening, while nothing had been resolved. That’s what makes it real.
Forgiveness creates the opening for acceptance. Nobody can make it for you, and waiting until it feels natural may mean waiting forever.
That’s where we’re heading next. Into forgiveness.