Grief is a family affair. When one member of a family dies, the entire family is affected, as each person mourns their own personal loss in their own unique way. Roles and responsibilities shift; relationships change; communication and mutual support among family members may suffer. Over time, the family must identify what the roles and functions of the lost member were, decide whose job it will be to execute those duties now, and learn how to compensate for their absence.

Men, women and children are very different from one another, not just in personality patterns that affect how they think, feel and behave, but also in how they mourn. When someone dies, they will not experience or express their reactions in the same way. Failure to understand and accept these different ways of mourning can result in hurt feelings and conflict between partners and among family members during a very difficult time.

Personality patterns differ within a family. Differing personality patterns among family members will affect how each one individually expresses, experiences and deals with grief.  While we all have the capacity to think and to feel, personality research shows that typically a person trusts and prefers one pattern of response over the other. 

Thinkers experience and speak of their grief intellectually and physically.  They are most comfortable with seeking accurate information, analyzing facts, making informed decisions and taking action to solve problems.  Remaining strong, dispassionate and detached in the face of powerful emotions , they may speak of their grief in an intellectual way, thus appearing to others as cold and uncaring, or as having no feelings at all. 

Feelers experience a full, rich range of emotions in response to grief.  Comfortable with strong emotions and tears, they are sensitive to their own feelings and to the feelings of others as well.  Since they feel strong emotions so deeply, they’re less able to rationalize and intellectualize the pain of grief, and more likely to appear overwhelmed and devastated by it.

Still others may encounter a conflict between the way they experience their grief internally and how they express it outwardly, which produces a persistent discomfort and lack of harmony.  The "dissonance" or conflict may be due to family, cultural, or social traditions.  Although their grief may be profound and strongly felt, they struggle to hide their true feelings, in order to preserve the image they wish to project to the public.  Others may condemn themselves and feel very guilty for not feeling whatever they think is expected of them to feel.

In general, when men suffer the loss of a loved one they tend to put their feelings into action, experiencing their grief physically rather than emotionally.  They deal with their loss by focusing on goal-oriented activities which activate thinking, doing and acting. Rather than endlessly  talking about or crying over the person who died, for example, a man may throw himself into time-limited tasks such as planting a memorial garden or writing a poem or a eulogy. Such activities give a man not only a sense of potency and accomplishment as he enters his grief, but also a means of escaping it when the task is done. If a man relates the details of his loss to his closest male friends, it’s likely to be around activities like hunting, fishing, sporting events and card games. Although a man may let himself cry in his grief, he’ll usually do it alone, in secret or in the dark — which may lead some to conclude that he must not be grieving at all.