dalin
11-11-2006, 04:19 AM
Tom Golden at his son's elementary school. As a beginning grief therapist in the late 1970's I can remember the difference I felt when a new client I would receive was a man or a woman. Somehow a woman seemed easier to work with, requiring less effort in helping her to do her work. A man, on the other hand, many times meant trouble. Somehow men didn't seem to fit our program. Being the only male therapist, I would tend to get most of the male referrals.
Swallowed by a Snake
by Thomas R. Golden
Review
Audio tape
Tape review
Click here to order book or tape direct from MenWeb. The reaction of the female therapists to male clients was somewhat stronger than my own, with some staff members even refusing to work with men. Various criticisms were heard about the way men grieved or didn't grieve.
It took me some time to realize that the type of therapy I had been taught to do was designed for women. The vast majority of clients who visit therapists' offices are female, and due to this, therapy is shaped accordingly to fit and be effective with women. I slowly began to realize that there wasn't something wrong with the men--there was something wrong with the therapy. This series of booklets will take you on a journey that parallels my own struggle in finding out what does and doesn't help men in healing their grief.
Through my years of experience in working with men and grief I have found that men need grief defined in a different manner. In this article I will begin by defining grief in terms that men will understand. Terms like chaos and desire will supplant the usual definitions of grief in terms of feelings. Most grief is healed through ritual. The last part of this article provides a practical guide to the mechanics of ritual in order to allow each man to evaluate and understand his own way of healing.
Grief is a problem without an easy solution. When anyone confronts a problem that has no solution he or she will often feel lost. When a woman feels lost, she tends to ask for help. When a man feels lost, he looks for maps. This series of booklets is intended to be those maps. This first booklet defines the problem and surveys the ground of grief. The second booklet will discuss gender differences in grieving and self-help ideas for men who are working with their grief. The third booklet will examine the grief rituals of our culture and compare them to those of indigenous cultures around the world. These practices will give us some sense of our cultural poverty in dealing with grief and will show us how other cultures have honored gender differences in the grieving process. I hope you find this material helpful.
What Is Grief?
Grief is a part of life. We are familiar with our responses to gain and celebration, and grief is the other side of that coin. Grief, simply put, is the physical, emotional, and mental responses we have to a loss of any kind. We expect grief to flow from a major loss such as the death of a friend or family member, but it can also flow in smaller amounts from ordinary, everyday losses. Such losses might be the conclusion of your favorite time of year a holiday or being in a traffic jam and late for an important meeting. These smaller losses are examples of what is termed micro-grief. Grief can be related to losses of childhood, such as the loss of seeing the world as a safe place, or all of the unmet expectations, thwarted intentions, or unspoken communications we might have stored inside us. When looked at in this way, we begin to see that grief is an integral part of being alive, a part of our daily living. It is woven into the fabric of life.
Grief and Desire
Grief is related to desire. Desire is the source of both grief and happiness; if you have desires of any kind you will undoubtedly have grief. If your desire is met, you may find joy, and if it isn't, there is grief. Joy and grief are brothers in a way, and if you experience one fully you will probably experience the other in its fullness. If you deny either one, you will limit the other to the same degree. If you deny your grief, you limit your joy; if you deny your joy, you limit your grief.
A man I worked with named Phil immediately saw how this related to his own life. He said, "You know, that's why I had all those upsetting feelings at my mid-life period. I was dealing with all my unmet desires for success at work." He remembered his fantasies of huge success, at being top in his field, and realized that when he reached mid-life he experienced the loss of the possibility of his dreams coming to fruition.
From Micro Grief to Major Grief
The way we respond to very small losses is many times similar to the way we will handle big losses. Our response could be sadness, anger, helplessness, or many others. When a person we love dies, we are flooded with a torrent of unmet desire. We have strong desires to have that person with us still. There are desires to re-experience some of the positive ways we may have connected with that person in the past. We have a variety of unmet desires relating to the person who died. This is the more familiar form of grief, but it differs from micro-grief only in its intensity and duration.
There is no recipe that can predict a man's emotional response to his lost desire. It is a very personal and individual response. Some people have thought that grief followed a specific and linear path, that grief had well defined, additive stages. These ideas have pretty much gone by the wayside. We have come to realize that the so-called five stages--denial, anger, sadness, bargaining, and acceptance--are really only experiences that have no particular order, except that denial is almost always first. Most people think of denial as something to be avoided, that it is somehow bad. What they don't realize is that denial works in both directions; it filters out the excessively wonderful things that happen to us as surely as it filters out the trauma. The first thing a lottery winner says is "I can't believe it." Denial acts as a shock absorber for our ego for both the good and the bad. In a computer, when data is changed the effect is immediate. But our brains and egos are not binary like a computer. It is as if our brains are "wetware," not hardware. In our situation the data change is not immediate, and denial spares us the jolting nature of receiving an extreme message.
In working with people who are grieving I have noticed that many people can go through all of the "five stages" in a single day. A man named Jeff came to me due to the death of his sister and mother. The deaths were fairly recent, and Jeff described a day in which he found himself first denying that the deaths had occurred, then a short time later remembering the truth of the loss. He next found himself angry and sad, and shortly thereafter, felt a more accepting attitude toward the deaths. It is not uncommon to cycle through many different responses in a short period of time. This doesn't mean that Jeff had resolved the loss; it is a normal part of grief to zoom up and down with feelings.
Reactions to Grief
:sad:
Swallowed by a Snake
by Thomas R. Golden
Review
Audio tape
Tape review
Click here to order book or tape direct from MenWeb. The reaction of the female therapists to male clients was somewhat stronger than my own, with some staff members even refusing to work with men. Various criticisms were heard about the way men grieved or didn't grieve.
It took me some time to realize that the type of therapy I had been taught to do was designed for women. The vast majority of clients who visit therapists' offices are female, and due to this, therapy is shaped accordingly to fit and be effective with women. I slowly began to realize that there wasn't something wrong with the men--there was something wrong with the therapy. This series of booklets will take you on a journey that parallels my own struggle in finding out what does and doesn't help men in healing their grief.
Through my years of experience in working with men and grief I have found that men need grief defined in a different manner. In this article I will begin by defining grief in terms that men will understand. Terms like chaos and desire will supplant the usual definitions of grief in terms of feelings. Most grief is healed through ritual. The last part of this article provides a practical guide to the mechanics of ritual in order to allow each man to evaluate and understand his own way of healing.
Grief is a problem without an easy solution. When anyone confronts a problem that has no solution he or she will often feel lost. When a woman feels lost, she tends to ask for help. When a man feels lost, he looks for maps. This series of booklets is intended to be those maps. This first booklet defines the problem and surveys the ground of grief. The second booklet will discuss gender differences in grieving and self-help ideas for men who are working with their grief. The third booklet will examine the grief rituals of our culture and compare them to those of indigenous cultures around the world. These practices will give us some sense of our cultural poverty in dealing with grief and will show us how other cultures have honored gender differences in the grieving process. I hope you find this material helpful.
What Is Grief?
Grief is a part of life. We are familiar with our responses to gain and celebration, and grief is the other side of that coin. Grief, simply put, is the physical, emotional, and mental responses we have to a loss of any kind. We expect grief to flow from a major loss such as the death of a friend or family member, but it can also flow in smaller amounts from ordinary, everyday losses. Such losses might be the conclusion of your favorite time of year a holiday or being in a traffic jam and late for an important meeting. These smaller losses are examples of what is termed micro-grief. Grief can be related to losses of childhood, such as the loss of seeing the world as a safe place, or all of the unmet expectations, thwarted intentions, or unspoken communications we might have stored inside us. When looked at in this way, we begin to see that grief is an integral part of being alive, a part of our daily living. It is woven into the fabric of life.
Grief and Desire
Grief is related to desire. Desire is the source of both grief and happiness; if you have desires of any kind you will undoubtedly have grief. If your desire is met, you may find joy, and if it isn't, there is grief. Joy and grief are brothers in a way, and if you experience one fully you will probably experience the other in its fullness. If you deny either one, you will limit the other to the same degree. If you deny your grief, you limit your joy; if you deny your joy, you limit your grief.
A man I worked with named Phil immediately saw how this related to his own life. He said, "You know, that's why I had all those upsetting feelings at my mid-life period. I was dealing with all my unmet desires for success at work." He remembered his fantasies of huge success, at being top in his field, and realized that when he reached mid-life he experienced the loss of the possibility of his dreams coming to fruition.
From Micro Grief to Major Grief
The way we respond to very small losses is many times similar to the way we will handle big losses. Our response could be sadness, anger, helplessness, or many others. When a person we love dies, we are flooded with a torrent of unmet desire. We have strong desires to have that person with us still. There are desires to re-experience some of the positive ways we may have connected with that person in the past. We have a variety of unmet desires relating to the person who died. This is the more familiar form of grief, but it differs from micro-grief only in its intensity and duration.
There is no recipe that can predict a man's emotional response to his lost desire. It is a very personal and individual response. Some people have thought that grief followed a specific and linear path, that grief had well defined, additive stages. These ideas have pretty much gone by the wayside. We have come to realize that the so-called five stages--denial, anger, sadness, bargaining, and acceptance--are really only experiences that have no particular order, except that denial is almost always first. Most people think of denial as something to be avoided, that it is somehow bad. What they don't realize is that denial works in both directions; it filters out the excessively wonderful things that happen to us as surely as it filters out the trauma. The first thing a lottery winner says is "I can't believe it." Denial acts as a shock absorber for our ego for both the good and the bad. In a computer, when data is changed the effect is immediate. But our brains and egos are not binary like a computer. It is as if our brains are "wetware," not hardware. In our situation the data change is not immediate, and denial spares us the jolting nature of receiving an extreme message.
In working with people who are grieving I have noticed that many people can go through all of the "five stages" in a single day. A man named Jeff came to me due to the death of his sister and mother. The deaths were fairly recent, and Jeff described a day in which he found himself first denying that the deaths had occurred, then a short time later remembering the truth of the loss. He next found himself angry and sad, and shortly thereafter, felt a more accepting attitude toward the deaths. It is not uncommon to cycle through many different responses in a short period of time. This doesn't mean that Jeff had resolved the loss; it is a normal part of grief to zoom up and down with feelings.
Reactions to Grief
:sad: