🌱 Six R’s Model – Overview
The Six R’s Model of Mourning (Rando, 1993) describes six processes that many people move through while grieving. These processes help explain the emotional, relational, and practical work of adapting to life after loss – from recognising what’s happened to readjusting to a changed world.
Rather than describing fixed “stages”, the model highlights that grief is an ongoing, adaptive process. People move back and forth between these R’s as needed, revisiting certain parts many times over.
In contrast to the Five Stages of Grief model, the Six R’s Model of Mourning highlights grief as a flexible, ongoing process, where people may revisit certain emotional and practical tasks multiple times rather than moving through a fixed sequence.
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What Each R Means
The Six R’s describe different kinds of emotional and practical work involved in mourning.
Recognise
Coming to terms with the reality of the loss. This can take time, and people often revisit this recognition many times as the impact deepens or shifts.
React
Feeling and expressing the wide range of emotional, physical, cognitive, and social reactions triggered by the loss – from sadness and anger to shock, yearning, or exhaustion.
Recollect and Re-experience
Remembering the person who died, talking about them, revisiting memories, and allowing yourself to feel the significance of the relationship.
Relinquish
Letting go of roles, identities, or assumptions that no longer fit. This doesn’t mean “letting go” of the person, but represents releasing what can’t continue in the same way.
Readjust
Slowly adapting to life without the person’s physical presence while building an internal connection with them through memory, meaning, or continuing bonds.
Reinvest
Beginning to direct emotional energy into new or renewed relationships, roles, commitments, or hopes – not as a replacement, but as part of living forward with the loss.
🙌 How It Helps
The model offers gentle structure without pressure or timelines.
It helps people understand why grief can feel like hard emotional work, because it involves rethinking identity, roles, routines, and relationships after loss.
It also normalises the fact that coming to terms with grief usually involves both emotional expression and practical adjustment.
🤍 May Be Helpful If…
- You’d like a framework that offers guidance without strict stages.
- You want reassurance that grief can ebb, flow, repeat, and circle back.
- You find it helpful to understand the different kinds of “work” involved in adapting to life after loss.
📌 Tips for Using This Model
- Notice which of the R’s you naturally connect with right now and how this shifts over time.
- Journalling about memories, identity, roles and daily adjustments can help you recognise which processes are active for you.
- Pay attention to small signs of readjustment – these often show up gradually and quietly.
📖 Further Reading
Therese Rando, Treatment of Complicated Mourning (1993)
Remember: this model is simply one way of understanding grief. You are the expert in your own experience, and you never need to fit yourself into any single model.
Take what’s helpful and leave the rest.
Explore more models over on our Grief Models Hub 👉
❓Six R’s Model of Mourning FAQs
The Six R’s model of grief explains the six processes people often experience after a loss: Recognise, React, Recollect, Relinquish, Readjust, and Reinvest. It highlights that grief is a personal journey of adapting to change and rebuilding life after loss.
Kübler-Ross’s theory of grief has been criticised for suggesting grief follows a fixed sequence of stages. Research shows grief is often more complex, individual, and non-linear, with people experiencing emotions in different ways and orders.
The 6 stages of grief and loss are often described as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and meaning-making. Unlike the five-stage model of grief shown below, which focuses on denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, six-stage models often add an extra stage to reflect how people adjust and find meaning after loss.
Over time, the five-stage model has inspired many expanded or simplified versions, each offering a different way to describe the emotional shifts people experience after a loss. These include the 4 Stages of Grief, 6 Stages of Grief, Seven Stages of Grief, 8 Stages of Grief, and more detailed frameworks such as the 9, 10 and 12 Stages of Grief. While each model outlines the grieving process in its own way, they all aim to capture the varied and often non-linear nature of grief.
