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July 2010, Inter Growth & Awareness
The Grieving Man
"The grieving Man" is not just something that just affects men. It affects us all. It affects all our relationships. It affects all aspects of our lives
By Raven Mahosadha
In the Spring of 1994 I began working at a job as a grief coordinator at a very large Hospice in the southeast. I stayed at that job for about 4 years. It was not as difficult as most imagined. By the time I left the hospice however, I was a changed man. In 1990 I had begun working in a psychotherapy private practice. I stayed in this practice for 10 years. I had been invited into the practice by my major professor in graduate school. From the beginning of my time in the practice roughly 75%-85% of my therapy clients were female. This was also consistent with the caseloads of the other 5 therapists in the practice. When I began the job at the hospice I reduced my hours in the private practice though continued to be highly involved in both seeing clients and the administrative aspects of the practice. By early 1995 I began to see the beginnings of a dramatic shift in my caseload numbers. Previously, as I have mentioned, the female/male split in my caseload was approximately 80/20. By mid-1995 approximately 90% of my caseload consisted of males. This 90/10 male-female split lasted until my very last day in the practice. What, you may wonder, could have possibly brought on such a dramatic and sustained shift in my caseload numbers and, not to mention, numbers that are completely inconsistent with the conventional wisdom and statistical analysis about, "who goes into therapy?" It was never a mystery to me. Because of my work at the hospice I was able to tap into what I viewed then and what I view now as the single largest mental health issue facing men--grief and grieving. And once I tapped into this I became the rare psychotherapist who understood how to work with men in therapy and how to address the issues of male grief and grieving. I eventually realized the vast majority of what I and my fellow students had learned in our clinical psychology graduate program was designed to relate to and address the way women think and process things. Almost nothing was geared toward the average man's thinking process. And that very expensive time in graduate school had taught me absolutely nothing about male grief and grieving. So what are most men grieving? Most men's primary and in many cases lifelong grief experience is deeply connected to their relationship (or lack thereof) with their father. This is true even if the man has/had a wonderful relationship with the father (or father figure). Though however, the vast majority of men, at least in western cultures, have not had a good relationship with their fathers I suspect. This is not to say women do not also have grief around the relationship with father. Many women do. It's very different however and beyond the scope of what I can address here. Men are essentially grieving because we do not know how to love men, half the world's human population. And we need to know how to love men to lead fully productive lives. This is all directly related to the experience of not feeling loved by the father or feeling abandoned or not understood or not accepted by the father, etc. Most men realize this on some level, most subconsciously. So many of us then seek out women to teach us how to love. And in many cases these women we seek out (including our mothers) variously succeed at this task. I have found this desire for men to be taught to love by women, by the way, is just as true for gay men as for men who identify as heterosexual. Do not be fooled by the appearances many gay men give that we are wanting men to teach us how to love or that we even truly know how to love men ourselves. Most gay men are afraid of men on some basic levels. This is because we had the same real or perceived distant and grieving fathers as our straight counterparts. I have found both as an out gay man and a therapist who has worked with hundreds of gay men, gay men in general, do not know more about how to truly love men than straight men and in many cases, we know less. Not knowing how to love men isn't an isolated case, unfortunately. Not knowing how to love men also means not truly knowing how to love women either, the other half of the human population. And like the burden many women have of often having to be both the mother and father to their children when they are younger, women are often also put in the position of consciously or unconsciously having to teach men how to love them throughout their adult female lives. Both are monumental tasks. So you see, "The grieving Man" is not just something that just affects men. It affects us all. It affects all our relationships. It affects all aspects of our lives. to be continued --
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Grieving men
Saturday, July 31, 2010 Carol
