Fathers, Sons, and the Grief Men Are Not Allowed to Show
There can be a kind of grief that goes unspoken in so many families, and it belongs to the men.
Fathers who lose someone and keep working. Sons who cope in their own quiet, internalised ways. Men who love fiercely and cannot find a single word for what they feel.
I have been thinking about this a great deal lately, and I want to write about it with tenderness, because the silence of grieving men is so often mistaken for coldness, or for something being wrong, when it is neither.
The parts that were taught not to feel
In IFS or parts work, we understand that our parts take on their jobs in response to the world around them. And the world hands boys a very particular set of instructions from very early on:
Stay strong.
Do not cry.
Do not make a fuss.
Be the steady one.
Over the years these messages harden into protective parts whose whole job is to keep being the contained, strong one, because somewhere along the way that felt like the only safe option.
So when a man grieves and shows nothing, it is rarely because he feels nothing. It is because a lifetime of conditioning has built a wall between the feeling and its expression.
The grief is there, often deeply so. It simply has nowhere it is allowed to go.
The cost of the stoic part
We tend to praise men for their stoicism, for holding it together, for being strong. But that strength has a price, and it is often paid in isolation, in physical tension, in a loneliness that has no outlet. A man holding his grief entirely alone, with a protective part working overtime to keep it all in, is not coping. He is enduring. And enduring, held too long, wears the body and the spirit down.
Children feel this too. A father's contained grief can leave a son believing that his own feelings are also to be hidden, and so the silence passes quietly down the generations.
Making room without forcing
If you love a man who grieves in silence, you cannot and should not force the wall down. But you can make it safer for the feeling to come, in its own time and its own way.
You can do this by offering…
Presence without demand.
Shared activity rather than face to face interrogation.
A quiet signal that his feelings, whenever and however they come, will be met without judgement.
Sometimes the most healing thing to do is simply sit beside a grieving man and let the silence be companionable rather than expectant. To let him know, without words, that he does not have to be strong here.
This is the very heart of my new novella, Under The Willows, out in December. It is a story about a father and son undone by loss, about the silence that grows where words used to be, and about the slow, wordless ways love finds its way through. If it calls to you, you can pre-order it now.
