Susan Anderson (psychotherapist)
While Kübler-Ross, Anderson, and others have attempted to define discrete stages of grief, such as an initial period of numbness leading to depression and finally to reorganization and recovery, most modern grief specialists recognize the variations and fluidity of grief experiences, that differ considerably in intensity and length among cultural groups and from person to person. No grief stage theory has been able to account for how people cope with loss, why they experience varying degrees and types of distress at different times, and how or when they adjust to a life without their loved one over time.
Grief
Other researchers such as Randolph Nesse have proposed that grief is a kind of psychological pain that orients the sufferer to a new existence without the deceased and creates a painful but instructive memory. If, for example, leaving an offspring alone at a watering hole led to the offspring’s death, grief creates an intensively painful memory of the event, dissuading a parent from ever again leaving an offspring alone at a watering hole. More recently, Winegard, Reynolds, Winegard, Baumeister, and Maner argued that grief might be a socially selected signal of an individual’s propensity for forming strong, committed relationships. From this social signaling perspective, grief targets old and new social partners, informing them that the griever is capable of forming strong social commitments. That is, because grief signals a person's capacity to form strong and faithful social bonds, those who displayed prolonged grief responses were preferentially chosen by alliance partners. The authors argue that throughout human evolution, grief was therefore shaped and elaborated by the social decisions of selective alliance partners.