The pattern has a name

Since it happened, you may have been busy. Fixing things around the house. Working longer. Sorting the accounts, the car, the paperwork. Maybe someone has told you that you are not dealing with it, or that you need to talk about it, or that you are bottling it up.

Here is what the research actually says.

Two patterns

In 2000, Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka published a book about how men and women grieve. They argued that the usual picture of grief, waves of feeling worked through by talking and crying, describes one pattern, not the only one. They called it intuitive.

They described a second pattern and called it instrumental. In this pattern, a loss is experienced more as thought and physical energy than as waves of emotion. And it is worked through by doing: solving problems, building, fixing, taking action, staying on task.

Most people are a mix

Doka and Martin were clear that most people sit somewhere between the two patterns, and many move between them. They also argued that the pattern is shaped by how people are raised, which is part of why more men lean instrumental, but that it is not determined by gender.

The way you are doing this is not wrong. It has a name, and people have studied it for decades.

Why nobody told you

A lot of bereavement help is built around the intuitive pattern. Groups that go around the circle sharing feelings. The question how does that make you feel. If that is the only model on offer, a man whose way of coping is to rebuild the fence looks like he is not coping. He is often told so.

Doka and Martin's point was that this is a measurement problem, not a man problem. The instrumental pattern is a legitimate way of carrying a loss.

What this module does not say

It does not say which pattern you have. Only you know how this is going for you, and nobody should sort you into a type. It also does not say that doing is always enough. The next two modules cover what the instrumental pattern does well, and where it can leave things unattended.