Men's Work and Grief | The Men's Work Directory

What men lose and how they carry it

Men grieve the obvious losses: death of a parent, death of a child, divorce, miscarriage. They also grieve losses that don't have language: the father who was never there, the childhood that was taken, the version of themselves that was crushed before it had a chance. Grief without a name is harder to work with, but it is still grief, and it still needs somewhere to go.

Terry Real, in I Don't Want to Talk About It, describes how unprocessed grief in men becomes fuel for covert depression — the numbing, the anger, the absence. Bessel van der Kolk's research adds the body: grief that has not been mourned is held in the nervous system as bracing against the loss. The body is still not finished.

David Whyte's Consolations describes grief as a natural response to being human, and argues that the avoidance of grief is itself a kind of death — the decision to live at less than full contact with experience in order to not feel what would break through if you let it.

Men's work as a container for grief

Men's work offers something that grief typically lacks: a container. A men's group where real things can be said. A retreat where there is time and space. A facilitator who has grieved himself and knows how to hold it for others.

Michael Meade's work, rooted in mythology, takes grief seriously as a rite of passage in its own right. His community grief rituals, drawing on West African and indigenous traditions, create public space for mourning — the thing most modern contexts systematically deny.

Richard Rohr, in the contemplative tradition, describes grief as the beginning of wisdom. The man who has not grieved what he has lost still believes he can have everything back. The man who has grieved knows what is real.

What comes after

Men who have moved through genuine grief consistently describe what follows as a kind of clarity. The things that mattered superficially matter less. The things that were being postponed until conditions were better become more urgent. Grief burns off the provisional life. What it leaves is often more real than anything that was there before.

Common Questions

Is it normal for men to cry during men's work?

Yes, though not all men do and it's not a metric of depth. What matters is whether grief is actually moving through rather than being performed or suppressed. Men who have never cried in adult life sometimes find it happens for the first time in a container built for it.

I feel like I should be over my grief by now.

Grief doesn't follow the timeline social expectations set for it. Men carrying unprocessed grief from childhood are often still carrying it at fifty. The 'should' is itself part of what suppresses it. There is no correct pace.