Intuitive and instrumental grieving (Martin and Doka)
Two ends of a range of ways to grieve: intuitive grievers feel it as waves of emotion, cry and want to talk, while instrumental grievers experience it more as thought and restlessness and put it into doing, such as fixing, building or organizing. Most people blend both with one leading, and the pattern is linked to gender without being set by it.
What drives it
It explains how one person can grieve hard while dry-eyed and busy. For identification it helps couples and families see that a partner who builds a memorial bench instead of talking may be grieving as much as the one who cries, and that support groups built on talk may suit one style only.
How it shows
Work
Throwing themselves into a project after a death and being told by HR they ‘haven’t processed it’. A colleague who cries easily and is moved off client work without being asked.
Relationships
After a child dies, the mother wants to talk every night and the father spends weekends rebuilding the garden. Each may read the other as unfeeling or as falling apart.
Self
Notice what you reach for when the loss hits: a person to talk to, or a task to do. Notice if you feel judged for the way you grieve.
What tells it apart
Expressive suppression: Expressive suppression is holding back feelings that are there and pushing to get out. An instrumental griever may feel less raw emotion to begin with, and suppression is more likely when the person says they are holding it in and it costs them.
Alexithymia: Alexithymia is difficulty naming feelings in any part of life. An instrumental griever can usually name what they feel and prefers to act on it.
Covert depression in men (Terry Real): Covert depression in men hides low mood behind work, drink or irritability. If the busy grief comes with numbness, drinking or anger that grows over months, covert depression may fit better than a grieving style.
A test
Ask what the person did in the week after the loss that helped most. If the answer is a task, such as clearing the house or building something, and they felt calmer afterwards, an instrumental style may be leading.
Questions to carry
- When the loss hit me this week, what did my hands want to do?
- Whose way of grieving have I been judging as wrong, mine included?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
clinical. The styles come from clinical observation and have had little testing. Martin published a pilot of a measure in Omega in 2006, and Doughty (Death Studies, 2009) refined the idea with a panel of grief experts, a Delphi method that gathers expert agreement and does not test whether the styles exist in bereaved people. A study of bereaved parents (Wijngaards-de Meij and colleagues, 2008) found mothers more loss-oriented and fathers more restoration-oriented, close to the gender link Martin and Doka describe as common and not fixed.
Where it comes from
Terry Martin and Kenneth Doka, Men Don’t Cry, Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief, Brunner/Mazel, 2000. Revised as Grieving Beyond Gender: Understanding the Ways Men and Women Mourn, Routledge, 2010. Their earlier labels, masculine and feminine grief, were dropped because readers tied them to sex