As a counsellor and as a pastor, I guess none of you would be surprised if I told you that women and men tend to experience and process grief differently. The default thought is that men avoid the process of grieving, whereas women are much more open to their emotions, and therefore grieve more easily. I’m not sure if it’s that cut and dried, but this article attempts to briefly unpack the nuances between gendered responses to loss.
You may have noticed that I have used the words ‘experience’ and ‘process’ in terms of grief recovery. I believe they are two quite separate things. Anyone who experiences loss will experience grief, but not everybody processes the grief, and where it can be avoided, at times it is avoided for years, until, on occasion, a person recognises they are years down the track and still no better off. There is the pungency of regret for having not done the hard yards earlier.
In terms of gendered responses to loss, I’m not sure if it’s helpful to see that men are less willing to grieve than women are. Certainly, there are many men who find it difficult to talk about their emotions. But there are many women who don’t feel safe to go there either. And the perennial issue for both genders is the phenomenon of busyness and work. I know elite athletes I’ve had the privilege of working with particularly find it very hard, because they are forced to focus so hard on their sporting prowess. Others who commute to faraway places for extended periods for work. There are so many people who, for reasons beyond themselves, must find a way through loss without grieving, or who must delay their grieving, which has the effect of interrupting it, which is a very sad reality. But such is this modern-day life, the pace of which is quite unforgiving.
Men definitely have been raised typically, within this patriarchal world, to be ‘men’, which is to be leaders of their families, to have the answers, to earn the income, to be the fathers and providers in this life — to ‘man up’. There wouldn’t be too many men who wouldn’t remember the ‘toughen up princess’ age that prevailed in our society quite a bit until not long ago (and perhaps still does!). I’m talking 10 perhaps 15 years ago, it was still very much the norm. So we have generations of men who have been brought up in a culture that is toxic to their emotionality. Where it was frowned upon for men to talk about their feelings. This is akin to what happened for our aboriginal brothers and sisters long traumatised by connection to the stolen generations.
Certainly, the world wars, Vietnam, etc, have contributed to many of these outcomes, where for every man who served in the battlefield, there are 30 human lives (on average) affected from that traumatised ex-service person (ref. Dr Bessel van der Kolk). This is not to say that the person who comes back from war intentionally comes back to traumatise others, but trauma can breed trauma, or at least disconnection, just as many of them have trauma in them from war. Relational disconnection breeds relational disconnection, and if there’s no way back to honest vulnerability to call feelings for what they are, there’s no process available to grieve. It is very hard for a man who has been brought up to be tough and to not cry to grieve his losses, or to punish him for his anger (which is part of the grief process). He must find another way, and there is no other way. It is agony for this man’s wife, sister and mother to watch him not be able to go there.
For women, there are other unique challenges that might prevent them from truly experiencing and processing their grief. There may not be enough room, for instance. There may be a myriad of factors that prevent them from experiencing their full emotions, and some of this might come from the key man or men in their life. Perhaps it’s her work and overload, and this is true for so many women, as well as parental responsibilities, so we find that the energy taken to grieve is avoided because it’s too much. In other words, the avoidance isn’t because of fear, it’s because of the practical impossibilities that work against her in really going deep into the opportunities of grief recovery. And of course, there’s trauma for abuse in many women that hinders grieving processes. I am just scratching the tip of the iceberg here.
Anyone who is broken to the point where they do not have a choice whether they process the grief or not is blessed in my view, as long as the brokenness isn’t utterly crushing — if there’s support around the person. This might still sound barbaric. It is just my personal experience. I believe there is such an opportunity for growth in truly experiencing and therefore needing to process the suffering in loss, in order to make meaning for life. This generally opens the door to God, when one’s own strength and answers no longer work; when the inner world has suffered cataclysmic collapse which forces inner reckoning. Taken to a place where we have basically nothing left, where we are reduced to the point where we have nothing left to grasp on except God, such a crisis is so often the crucial impetus to faith.
Both men and women are capable of being broken to such a point where the crisis gets them bent from their knees looking heavenward to God. From the very worst of experiences, from a place where life opens the way to death, where hope becomes despair, paradoxically becomes the place where death (of the old self) opens the way to resurrection (to new creation), and from despair comes the only true hope, where the previous hope is seen for what it was; a cavernous mirage that was always destined to eventually falter and fail.
From a counsellor’s perspective, people, whether men or women, self-select themselves for either a journey where they enter their grief or where they resist it. Counsellors, pastors, and other helpers don’t really get much of a choice. They get to work with those who want to be worked with. Sad as that is. And yet, of all the maladies of psychology, grief most of all requires less therapeutic intervention, because if a person is honest and they have support, they can eventually find the new life they’re being invited into.
Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash
