Grief Just Might Have A Type

Intuitive vs Instrumental Grieving

Recently I facilitated a support group for families who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy or had a baby who has died. A newly bereaved mom attended and disclosed that her husband had not been grieving at all. Between heavy sobs she told us she was crushed because he had already gone back to his regular routines and he wasn’t showing any signs of sadness, meanwhile she could not stop thinking about the loss.

“Oh sweet mama, I see you. I’ve been you” I told her. “I have sat in this exact same place and have had those exact same thoughts. But I didn’t know then what I know now, and that is this: there are actually different types of grief. There are different ways to express grief. There are many ways to grieve. And none are right or wrong.”

I told her my story of when we came home from the hospital where my son Declan had been stillborn. My husband and I had barely spoken a word to one another in three damn days. When I was able to get myself out of bed I sat alone at my kitchen table feeling completely numb. My baby had died, Christmas was coming later that week and I had two little boys filled with mixed emotions who needed me . I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t feel anything at all. I was in a trance.

I heard some rustling coming from outside so I looked through the window to see my husband on a ladder, scraping the paint off the window sill. I watched him in deep concentration as he pulled out a sheet of sandpaper, then minutes later a brush and a bucket of paint. He was painting the outside window panes of our house. Painting, while I sat on the inside in need of connection with him, to know that he was sad too. I needed to see he was as heartbroken as I was, but instead what I saw was he had already moved on. Something I couldn’t fathom at the time.

That moment weighed on me for years. I have never been able to forget how it felt to see him working on home improvements at a time when we should have been grieving together. That was, until I began to do some work on grief and learned there are various types of grief. He was grieving I later learned, just not in the way that I was grieving.

I waited for this heartbroken mama to catch her breath and shared what I knew about the grief types. Although there are many, I related most with Intuitive Grieving after losing my son. My husband, at the time, was an Instrumental Griever.

“An Intuitive Griever internalizes” I told her. “We want to talk about what happened and we fear that if we don’t speak of our babies then we may be dishonouring their legacies. Does that resonate with you?” She nodded. “An Instrumental Griever needs to grieve in more of a “doing” way though. They dive into projects, they work, they keep busy and they try to fix things. Is it possible your husband may be experiencing grief this way?”

She looked up with what might have been a glimmer of wonder in her eyes.

I continued. “I needed support groups like this one to mourn and heal. My husband needed projects and tasks to fix whatever he could fix, because he couldn’t fix what we had lost. Because I had grieved in a more Intuitive way after my losses, I didn’t fully understand Instrumental grieving until years later. We experienced a sudden death of an adult family member and I found myself being the doer - making the funeral arrangements, cooking casseroles to feed everyone and driving family members around who were too numb to function at the time. I stepped into go mode and found myself grieving in a more instrumental way.” I went on to share more about the differences and gave her some examples of both types.

This mama’s crying slowed as she listened and she nodded along as I spoke. When I finished talking, what my heart heard her say was “I now feel less alone” - but what she actually said was “This changes everything” and through her teary eyes, she smiled.