The six “R” Processes of Mourning in Relation to the Three Phases of Grief and Mourning
Avoidance phase
- Recognize the loss
- Acknowledge the death
- Understand the death
Confrontation phase
- React to the separation
- Experience the pain
- Feel, identify, accept, and give some form of expression to all the psychological reactions to the loss
- Identify and mourn secondary losses
- Recollect and re-experience the deceased and the relationship
- Review and remember realistically
- Revive and re-experience the feelings
- Relinquish the old attachments to the deceased and the old assumptive world
Accommodation phase
- Readjust to move adaptively into the new world without forgetting the old
- Revise the assumptive world
- Develop a new relationship with the deceased
- Adopt new ways of being in the world
- Form a new identity
- Reinvest
From Rando (1993). Copyright 1993 by Therese A. Rando.