Dual process model of coping with bereavement (Stroebe and Schut)
Coping with a death means dealing with two kinds of stress: the loss itself (missing the person, looking at photos, crying) and the changes it brings (bills, new tasks, a new identity, time off from grief). The model says people move back and forth between the two, and that this movement, including stretches of not grieving, is part of coping.
What drives it
It makes room for both halves: the afternoon spent sorting the pension and the night spent playing old voicemails. For identification it helps tell normal swinging from being held at one end, either never touching the loss or never leaving it.
How it shows
Work
A widower goes back to work after two weeks and is efficient all day, then sits in the car park for twenty minutes before driving home. Someone takes on the probate, the house sale and the thank-you cards, and feels guilty about how practical they have become.
Relationships
One partner wants to talk about the child who died every evening, the other wants to plan a holiday. Each may read the other as cold or as wallowing, when they may be at different points of the same swing.
Self
Notice the hours in a day spent with the loss and the hours spent on everything else. A day of laughing with friends followed by a night of crying may be the pattern working.
What tells it apart
Five stages of grief (Kübler-Ross): The stages put grief in an order. The dual process model has none, and a person who keeps returning to raw grief after good weeks is more likely oscillating than going backwards.
Experiential avoidance: Restoration time is a break from grief that the person can come back from. If every reminder is avoided for months and any mention of the person brings panic or shutdown, experiential avoidance may be the better fit.
Rumination and worry: Loss-oriented time includes remembering and missing the person. Going over the same questions about the death for hours without relief, and without stepping out into daily life, is more likely rumination.
A test
Ask the person to mark, for one week, the times they were with the loss and the times they were busy with life. Movement between both may be oscillation, while a week spent almost entirely on one side could point to avoidance or to prolonged grief.
Questions to carry
- When I stepped away from the grief today, what did I step into?
- Which side do I feel guilty about when I am on it?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
- Watch: 3 secrets of resilient people, Lucy Hone, TEDxChristchurch, 2019. A resilience researcher on the months after her 12-year-old daughter Abi was killed in a car crash, and the three habits she leaned on. She describes the five-stage leaflets she was handed. One family's account, free to watch.
How strong the research is
clinical. Stroebe and Schut’s own review a decade on (Omega, 2010) found mostly indirect support and said the model still needed stringent testing by independent teams. Studies of widowed people (Caserta and Lund, 2007) linked both loss and restoration stressors to outcomes, and a study of bereaved parents (Wijngaards-de Meij and colleagues, 2008) found mothers leaned more to loss and fathers more to restoration. The authors noted that questionnaires capture oscillation poorly, and their review cited no study that had tracked the back-and-forth directly, for example with diaries.
Where it comes from
Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description, Death Studies 23, 1999. Updated by the same authors in Omega, 2010
On the family tree: Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut