The Grieving Man

The Grieving Man

In the Spring of 1994 I began working at a job as a grief coordinator at a very large Hospice in the American 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.

Four years earlier 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 as well.

By early 1995 I began to see the beginnings of a dramatic shift in my caseload numbers in the practice. 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.

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 information. I began to understand this as one of the principal underlying reasons why women disproportionately go into therapy. 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 mens primary and in many cases lifelong grief experience is deeply connected to their relationship (or lack thereof) with their fathers. This is true even if the man has/had a wonderful relationship with the father (or father figure). I suspect however, the vast majority of men, at least in western cultures, have not had a good relationship with their fathers. 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, mostly 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.

So the grieving man is grieving in my view, largely because of a disconnect from at least a perceived loving and supportive relationship with the father or the primary male father figure in the young boy's life. And so a primary result of this particular disconnect is a propensity for men to then look to women to teach us how to love, regardless of the man's sexual orientation. Women are surreptitiously given this job. I don't know too many women who seek out men with an active desire to also teach them how to love. Most women I believe, find themselves in this situation mostly by surprise. The job is a huge one indeed. It is a job that would seem to be almost impossible to succeed at. Still, many women seem to have pretty fair success at this even though it is a job most did not ask for nor are seeking plus it is quite a daunting task indeed.

I know there are and have always been men who have had very loving and supportive fathers who were able to competently be guide, mentor and Zen Master to their sons or the young males in their charge who may not have been their biological sons. While this is not insignificant, I do not believe such men--men who had these loving, guiding and Zen Master type men around them--necessarily learn however, how to love other males. A big reason for this is that even if they were guided by such a loving male mentor from an early age they also had to live and interact in a world filled with young boys and men who model something quite different. The sheer numbers of such men and their direct and indirect, conscious and unconscious influence becomes a very large barrier to overcome.

My mother and father were divorced when I was very young. I hardly remember my father. I grew up living in a home with my mother, my maternal grandmother, my maternal grandfather and my sister who was 22 months older. To this day I thank God for the important foundation this has turned out to be. My grandfather was an exceptional man and an exceptional human being. I have studied with both male and female world renowned spiritual teachers who are known for their gentleness, compassion and inner beauty. Still, to this day, 21 years after my grandfather's passing, my grandfather is the most positively influential person in my life.

As I just stated, my grandfather is not just the most positively influential man in my life. He is the most positively influential person in my life. Growing up under the wings and tutelage of this man was wonderful and a good balance to the strong African American female presence that was all around me growing up. My mother was an only child. Her mother was an only child. Her mother was an only child. I was in my mid-twenties before the first of these women made their transition. They were always around and when they weren't around, their presence could still be strongly felt. It was a pretty good home to grow up in. It was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It however, was good and every single day I am thankful for growing up in that home.

Still, with the excellent role modeling I had from my grandfather, I also consider myself to be a grieving man in virtually identical ways I view other grieving men to be grieving who had no father or father figure or who had a father figure who was not truly emotionally present or was completely invisible.

When I began to look at all of this more deeply there seemed to be a strong societal or cultural element to this phenomenon I am calling, the grieving man. There seemed to be something beyond the confines of the home life of young boys or even the relationship to the present or absent father figure. That inner knowing led me on a search to find something or someone who could say something about what I suspected was either innate, cultural or societal about the parts of the male experience that made it such an experience of grief.

I found many answers. I mostly found them in the form of books. I also found many people who had something to say about this, mostly writers of the so called men's movement. Among that group, the person and the book that resonated with me the most was Warren Farrell's, The Myth of Male Power. In this book I found many of the answers to questions about what I had by then come to call, the grieving man archetype. After reading this book I felt called to a specific type of healing work, a healing work between and among the genders. I continue in this work today. I have discovered much in the process.

Back when I was a therapist, I saw hundreds of younger and older adolescents and grown men in many different forms of counseling and group work. These males ranged in age from 12 to the mid- to late 80's. They came from almost every cultural background and socio-economic group imaginable. Some had and had always had a good relationship with their fathers. The vast majority had not. One thing I noticed was whether the relationship had been good, bad or non-existent, all the men had been profoundly impacted by this relationship. It took up a disproportionate amount of their psyche. The majority admitted, after feeling safe with me as a confidant, that it was the most influential relationship in their lives. And again, it did not matter if the relationship was good, bad or non-existent.

The relationship with mother, wife or significant other may have been the most important or positive or loving relationship. The relationship with father however, was often self reported as the most influential. And it was often the most conflicted as well. This was a profound discovery for me. One that eventually changed the entire focus of my life. What, I wondered, could compel men to make the effort to distinguish between the most important person in their lives and the most influential. The answer I came up with was grief. And grief, I also have learned, can eventually heal.

Farrell, W. (1993)  The Myth of Male Power, Hardcover, New York: Simon and Schuster.

© Raven/Sage Mahosadha

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