The following is an adaptation of an email I sent to one of my physician clients after I had sent him a poem by Li-Young Lee called “The Gift.” First the poem and then the reply to his reaction:
Here is the edited email to my physician client in response to his reaction:
I’m happy the poem resonated with you.
I keep harping on about the late poet Robert Bly and his teachings, but they are very worth harping on some more. A part of his brilliance was to articulate the subject of men and grief. Bly understood that many men carry grief and they pathologize it, fear it, and try to push it away. Grief is an energy that (as you know), like other emotional energies, gets putrid if it doesn’t flow, gets worse if it gets pathologized unexpressed. Bly noted that men don’t create the space to express grief anymore, to embrace it.
Before the advent of GPS there was an old cliché about the stubbornness of men. We used to joke about how a man would rather drive around for hours than ask directions. Unfortunately, female physicians are suffering from a form of this dogged self-reliance now, too. (The suicide rates of women doctors are catching up to the men, and both are reporting similar experiences with burnout.)
Basically, there are three levels of grief expression: First, the solitary individual who denies his or her grief and tries to push it away, expressing it only when it gets too powerful to contain. Second, the reluctant individual who accepts grief as an inevitable fact of life and reluctantly expresses grief because he or she knows it must happen. And finally, there are those who embrace or even celebrate grief. We think of this third kind of grief expression when we consider the Sufi mystics, all sitting around, rocking back and forth, crying together. (Then they have tea and smoke hookahs.). The Irish funeral, or the old Greeks and the Whirling Dervishes dancing and singing in their grief.
Bly belonged in the third group, and he taught me and other younger people that there is nothing wrong with us for these feelings. Isolation and silence are the evil twins that are the problem, not how we feel. Physicians are especially susceptible to getting got by the evil twins of silence and isolation, and developmental coaching is a great way to crush the evil twins.
In addition to accepting grief in general, Bly posited that modern men have endured great wounds from physical and emotional separation from their fathers. I think this may be true for women, as well. These wounds can bring longing for connection with our specific fathers, but they can also bring, as Bly strongly advocated, a longing for connection with the archetypical father.
This may be why Li-Young Lee’s poem moves me, but I can’t be sure. (Glad you liked it.)
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Brad Fern is an owner and the principal consultant for Fern EPC, an organization specializing in supporting physicians, physician leaders, and healthcare executives.