This article is from a Romanian psychologist, he is not the author
of the ideas, but he researched it. I would like to post it in the
memory of my dad’s and uncle’s classmate who died in a terrorist act on
the Russian filght from Egypt. I am very sad about this Airbus A321-200
operated by Metrojet plane crash.
Death of a friend – Coping and Insight
Young men tend to have not such a good relationship with grief,
because of the masculine ideals that dictate men to be stoic in the
aftermath of loss which makes men express their sadness and despair as
anger. Because of this alignment to such masculine ideals there has been
few research in exploring young men’s grief, the way young men think
about loss, and the responses and describing of identity after a tragic
loss. For a better understanding of the processes young men go through
after a loss we will closely analyze a study made on 25 men aged 19-25
who grieved the accidental death of a male friend. The study was
conducted from April 2010 to December 2011. The causes of death were
diverse, and included motor vehicle accidents, adventure sports, drug
overdoses and fights. The results will reveal men’s predominant grief
responses as emptiness, anger, stoicism and sentimentality.
Participant’s description of their grief responses illustrated the ways
in which they struggled to reconcile feelings of vulnerability and manly
ideals of strength and stoicism. Insight into men’s grief practices
revealed the way they aligned with a post-loss masculine identity. The
result of the study offers insights to men’s grief and identity work
that may serve to affirm other men’s experiences as well as a guide to
counseling services targeted to young men. Grief is a challenging
experience that disturbs social processes and practices. There has been a
responsible attention paid to grief and its links to health and
illness, gender analyses are absent and studies examining connection
between masculinities and grief among young men. Western men grief,
invoking stoicism, anger, and rationality which is explained as flowing
from socially sanctioned masculine ideals. Emotional outpourings, such
as crying, expressed by western women in grief are conceived of as
typically feminine behaviours. In the specific context of bereavement
induced grief, review of the literature revealed that men experience
significant mental and physical health impacts following the loss of a
spouse due to accidents, lung cancer and heart disease and this is due
to the tendency for men to have fewer social support networks than women
do. In contrast it was found that many men recover from grief more
quickly than women do. Noelen-Hoeksema (1997) suggested that men’s
“problem solving” approaches to grief can reduce their potential for
developing reactive depression. Expressions of grief are deeply
gendered and are strongly policed and men who grieve in ways that do not
embody socially assigned masculine practices, like stoicism and
rationality, feel judged or alienated. Social practices around men’s
grief are contrary to crying or seeking support, and imposes a form of
toughness. This aspect is especially evident among young men who
aspire to embrace manly virtues of competitiveness and self-reliance and
risk taking following the loss of a significant other have referred to
such practices as choice disability, arguing that gender restraints can
constrain men’s expressions and perhaps experiences of death related
grief. In this article we will be exploring young men’s grief
experiences and how they express a masculine identity following the
accidental death of a male friend.
Young Men and Death: In western countries the
cause of death for most young men, between 19 and 24 years, is
accidental injury. Many young men are killed in motor vehicle accidents
of which cause is often connected to recklessness, excessive speed and
impaired driving. Other leading causes of mortality include sport
related events and workplace deaths along with unintentional substance
overdose.
There have been sex based explanations that have posited evolution,
hormones and brain physiology as biological drivers for men’s risk
taking, violence and involvement in extreme sports. There have also been
arguments that male adolescents are not developmentally mature enough
to understand the consequences of actions with a high risk factor. In
recent studies, attention has been paid to how social constructions of
gender influence a multitude of men’s health practices including
risk-taking. Masculine performances are categorized as complicit,
subordinate and marginalized, complicit masculinity sustains leadership
or hegemony by enacting social practices that approximate or reproduce
men’s leadership status in the social hierarchy. Many young men are
complicit in sustaining hegemonic masculinity by engaging in high-risk
activities and practices which result in many preventable accidents,
injuries and death within the sub-population of men. Subordinate forms
of masculinity are associated with failed leadership for example a lack
of authority, weakness and domesticity and are often associated with
femininities such as emotionality and dependency. Marginalized
masculinities are liked to de-privileged race, class and ethnic markers
and include men who are excluded because of their deviation from white
western men standards of idealized masculinity. In this current study,
subordinate masculinities may be assigned to young men who express
their grief through crying and/or who become careful and conservative
rather than risk-reliant because they fear future injury. First we
will detail men’s accounts of their grief in response to the news that a
male friend had unexpectedly died. Second, these accounts of grief are
examined in the context of how they reflect particular masculine
identities in the aftermath of that loss. Many men have described
feelings of emptiness in the time immediately following their friend’s
death. There were expressions of shock and uncertainty on how to
react so men’s emptiness emerged both as a byproduct of their male
friend’s death and an inability to be action orientated in their
immediate response. Participants in a study described an intermediary
period between hearing of the death and an emotional response in which
they experienced immobility and passivity. An example of a true story is
of a young man named Damien: “Damien and a few close friends were on
their way from a pre-party to a school sponsored grade 12 graduation
celebration. Neither wanting to pay for a taxi or drive intoxicated, the
friends opted to hitch a ride in the back of a van. When the van
stopped, Damien’s friend jumped out to run across the street to the
event. In his haste, he did not see the bus intersecting his path. The
teenager was struck and killed in front of Damien and his twin sister as
well as the other young party goers across the street. Damien recalled
being taken home in a taxi at midnight following hours of courthouse
interviews, his friend’s sister screaming hysterically beside him.” In
the study, Damien was shown some photographs and was asked to pick one
to illustrate how he felt in the days and months following the accident,
and he chose a picture of an empty bucket motivating his choice saying
that he felt empty and hollow inside and he didn’t really know what was
going on. Due to this emptiness men understand that it will make them
vulnerable to uncontrolled emotions that can emerge as un-masculine
expressions of grief such as crying and irrational thoughts and speech.
An example was that of Joe, a 22 year-old man whose friend had died
when he fell through a skylight while climbing on the roof of a house
during a party. He recalled a desire to be strong during the tragedy but
was unable to embrace such masculine ideals. Joe chose photograph 2,
an image of a house as a frame with half built walls and an open roof,
as a comparison of how he felt during his friend’s death. He stated that
he chose this photograph because he felt like a sort of protection
comes off exposing uncontrolled feelings and reactions. This
vulnerability that Joe and other participants in the study have referred
to suggests that manly virtues of strength, decisiveness and
self-regulation are disabled during sudden losses in ways that felt many
men unable to publically align with such masculine ideals. These
stories and other several highlight the dominant social ideals about how
western men grief. There have been statements, of participants in the
study, regarding hiding from society or avoiding social participation
because of concerns about being seen less of a man. In order of
regaining control as to what could be seen or judged by others this
isolation is necessary for sorting through un-masculine feelings of
sadness and despair privately. Another example is that of Shawn, a 19
year-old who had lost his friend due to a motorcycle accident. Following
a pre-graduation party, his friend boarded his brand new motorcycle
impaired and drove towards home. Hitting a patch of gravel next to the
highway, he lost control of his bike and struck a telephone pole.
Reflecting on the aftermath of the accident, Shawn went onto explain
that he, like most men, is unable to cry. He stated that he felt
something terrible inside but as terrible as it was it did not make him
cry, stating that “that’s just how guys are” Nathan, a 22 year old
man recalled hearing the news about his friend’s death. While detailing
how his friend was stabbed in a fight outside of a bar that night,
Nathan provided assurances that men’s control over a tearful response
goes beyond biological impulses. In response to this norm, most
participants in the study agreed that “manning-up” was best embodied by
taking actions towards controlling their affect. For example, Nathan
argued that men need to “fight through it” and Dylan, a 21 year-old
explained the need to “turn it down” while Damien was referring to
another photograph, photograph 4 (a tap with a valve) that made him
compelled to “turn it off”. All the men’s narratives and photographs
lead to the notion that stoicism and emotional restraint could afford
some self-protection. While masculine norms informed many men’s
responses and actions, there are concerns that feelings, felt or
expressed, could lead to dangerous levels of introspection which strays
away from strength-based masculine ideals to which they subscribed.
Some participants in the study described being enraged by the loss of
their friends and such affective reactions were contextually dependent.
An example would be one of Aiden and his group of friends which reacted
strongly to a friend being shot by police intervening in a domestic
dispute. Aiden responded violent and concludes that anger was a
legitimate masculine way of dealing with the preventable death of his
friend. Aiden had developed an interest in avenging the death of his
friend, as a form of acting out, stating that men do actually take that
course of action in the heat of the moment. Anger is a loss of control
that men are afforded as a manly expression so Aiden’s angry talk, not
aimed towards violent action, was an acceptable manly way to contest
authority and injustice in the context of losing his friend. Anger is
experienced differently from one individual to another. Ben, a 20 year
old who lost his friend in an accident, explained that his anger was not
targeted towards the situation but over the circumstances, his friend
consumed alcohol before riding his motorcycle. For Ben, anger over his
friend’s death focused on the hopelessness of a preventable death,
while Aiden’s anger was less controlled and directed towards the
perpetrators (the police). Both examples conclude that anger is an
emotion men legitimately experience and express. Sadness is also a
strong emotional response that has been described by most of the
participant men in the study and was cataloged as a site of
vulnerability. Emotional feelings expressed by men are remains of
unfinished business with the deceased person, and wishes of things that
could have been done to prevent the death of their friends. Participants
in the study were over smothered by regret, wondering what they could
have done differently. Alex, now 25 was 23 when his friend died after
driving his truck over an embankment. He heard news of the death while
he was at work and remembers going to his car and spending the night in
the parking lot, unable to drive away. He stated that he felt horrible
inside, like unable to breathe and he had been unable to shake of that
feeling. He felt that way because in the past they had a disagreement
and they both became estranged. Alex always thought that they would have
eventually repaired their friendship. The connections between
masculinities, culture and grief suggest that, among this sub-group, it
may have been more acceptable to express their sadness directly.
Statistics show that in the US and Canada there is a “dangerous
demographic” consisted of young men between 15 and 25, because of the
elevated mortality in this group, as a result of death due to car
accidents, reckless behaviors and violence. This study summarized above
displays an array of reactions and masculine identities that emerge in
and around the tragic losses that sometimes occur among young men.
There is obvious vulnerabilities flowing from their profound unexpected
losses and beside the interviews with the participants in the study,
there was also a collage of highly revealing photographs. In
conclusion, outpourings of emotion do not necessarily foster a better
experience of grief most men who participated in the study spoke of
crying, as a public outpouring of grief, as a feminine activity that
would be unacceptable to their status as men. This gender policing of
grief, socially dictated has consequences for men. Restricted options
for processing and expressing grief led men to engage in activities in
an attempt to mask feelings or make them go away. References: Archer,
J. (1999), The nature of grief: The evaluation and psychology of reactions to loss. London: Routledge Barth, W. (writer). (2001). The dangerous demographic Cobb, N. J. (2004). Adolescence: Continuity, Change and Diversity (5th
edition). New York: McGraw- Hill Connell, R.W.(1995). Masculinities.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press De Visser, R., & Smith, J. (2006), Mr.
in-betqween: a case study of masculine identity and health-related
behaviour. Journal of Health Psychology, 11, 685/695. Nolen-Hoeksema, S.
(1997). Rumination and psycological distress among bereaved partners.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Rieker, P.P., & Bird,
C.E. (2000). Sociological explanations of gender differences in mental
and physical health. The handbook of medical sociology, Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Stroebe, W., & Stroebe, M.S.(1993). The
mortality of bereavement: a review, Handbook of bereavement: Theory,
research and intervention (p 175/195) New York: Cambridge University
Press.
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