The five stages were never a model of bereavement. This is the one that actually matches what grieving people report — and it is far more forgiving.
Where it came from
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut published the dual process model in Death Studies in 1999. They were responding to a problem: the dominant grief-work theories assumed that recovery required sustained confrontation with the loss, and that avoiding it was pathological. That did not match what bereaved people actually did, and it did not match the outcomes.
What people actually did was move back and forth. Some of the time they faced the loss directly. Some of the time they got on with things. Rather than treating the second as avoidance, Stroebe and Schut proposed that both were necessary and that the movement between them was the coping process itself.
Loss-orientation
This is the part everyone recognizes as grief. Thinking about the person. Crying. Going over the last conversation, the diagnosis, the phone call. Looking at photographs. Missing them. Yearning. Breaking down.
It also includes the difficult, less romantic material: the anger, the guilt, the ruminating on what should have been done differently.
Loss-orientation is not indulgence. It is the part of the process where the reality of the death gets absorbed rather than held at arm’s length.
Restoration-orientation
This is the half people misunderstand, usually because ‘restoration’ sounds like getting over it. It is not about the person at all. It is about everything the death has forced you to rebuild.
Attending to life changes. Doing new things. Taking on roles the person used to hold — the finances, the driving, the family organizing. Working out who you are without them. Managing the practical fallout. And, crucially, taking time off from grieving.
Stroebe and Schut were explicit that this includes distraction, and that distraction is not denial. The person watching a film and briefly not thinking about it is coping, not avoiding.
Why the oscillation is the point
The model’s real contribution is the movement itself. Grieving people swing between the two orientations, sometimes over weeks and sometimes over minutes — laughing at something and then, five minutes later, undone by it.
That flip-flopping feels to most people like instability, and they interpret it as evidence that they are not coping. The model says the opposite: the swinging is the mechanism. Full-time loss-orientation is unbearable and leads to burnout. Full-time restoration-orientation leaves the loss unprocessed and tends to collapse later.
There is no correct ratio, and it changes over time. Early on, most of the day is loss-oriented. Later, most of it is not, with occasional deep returns.
What is worth attention is a total absence of one side over a long period — weeks with no restoration at all, or months with no contact with the loss whatsoever.
What it changes in practice
It removes the audit. If both directions are legitimate, then a day spent working and laughing is not a betrayal, and a day spent crying is not a relapse. Most of the secondary suffering people carry in grief comes from grading themselves against a standard the evidence does not support.
It gives you something to notice rather than something to achieve. Asking ‘which way am I facing right now?’ a few times a day, with no judgment attached to the answer, is a genuinely useful practice — and people are usually surprised by how much more movement there is than they thought.
And it explains why grief has no finish line. There is no final stage in this model. What changes over years is not that you arrive somewhere but that the oscillation slows and widens, with longer stretches of restoration and less frequent, though not necessarily gentler, returns to the loss.
The Dual Process Model of Grief, in Plain English: frequently asked questions
What is the dual process model of grief?
A model published by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999 describing grieving as oscillation between two orientations: facing the loss, and facing the practical rebuilding of life. The movement between them is the coping process rather than a sign of instability.
What are loss-orientation and restoration-orientation?
Loss-orientation is direct engagement with the death — remembering, crying, yearning, ruminating. Restoration-orientation is dealing with everything the death has changed: new roles, new routines, new identity, and taking breaks from grieving.
Is the dual process model better than the five stages?
It fits the evidence considerably better. The five stages came from Kübler-Ross’s work with dying patients rather than bereaved people and were never intended as a sequence for the bereaved. The dual process model was developed specifically from bereavement research.
Is distraction avoidance in the dual process model?
No, and that is one of the model’s central claims. Time off from grieving is treated as a necessary part of coping rather than as denial. Full-time confrontation with a loss leads to burnout.
Is there a correct balance between the two orientations?
No fixed ratio, and it shifts over time — heavily loss-oriented early on, increasingly restoration-oriented later. What is worth noticing is the prolonged absence of one side altogether, in either direction.
Does the dual process model have an end point?
No. There is no final stage and no acceptance to arrive at. Over time the oscillation slows and the intervals widen, but the model does not describe a destination.
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