3rd Edition

Grieving Beyond Gender Understanding Diverse Grieving Styles

By Kenneth J. Doka, Terry L. Martin Copyright 2025
    280 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    280 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The third edition of Grieving Beyond Gender explores the different ways that individuals grieve, noting that gender is only one factor that affects an individual’s style or pattern of grief.

    Inherent in the concept of grieving styles is a notion that gender is fluid and that traditional binary views of gender are belied by the concept of grieving styles, and this is highlighted and explored in more depth in the new edition. Doka and Martin present a model firmly grounded in social science theory and research, and place special emphasis on the model’s clinical implications. Clinicians will come away from this book with concrete tools for supporting different types of grievers through individual counseling or group support.

    Part One: Definitions and Overview  1. Introduction and Plan of the Book  2. Definitions: Understanding Grief  3. Patterns of Grief and Intuitive Grief  4. Instrumental Grief  5. Dissonant Responses  Part Two: Pathways to Patterns  6. Personality as a Shaper of Patterns  7. The Role of Gender  8. Culture as a Shaping Agent  Part Three: Implications and Interventions  9. Adaptive Strategies: Implication for Counselors  10. Strategies for Self-Help and Intervention: The Need for Interventive Intentionality  11. Conclusion

    Biography

    Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, is professor emeritus in the graduate school of the College of New Rochelle and senior vice president of the Hospice Foundation of America. He has written or edited more than forty books and more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters.

    Terry L. Martin, PhD, was an associate professor of psychology and thanatology at Hood College prior to his death. 

    "This book reminds us of the unique nature of the end of life and that one size does not fit all. It reminds us also of the highly complex, individual nature of grief."

    Cruse Bereavement Care

    "This is a revised and expanded look at instrumental and intuitive grieving, and it makes for engaging thought-provoking reading. Doka and Martin's book represents a significant advance in thinking about bereavement, grief, and mourning. It offers that rare gift: a powerful conceptual framework for organizing one's whole thinking about doing bereavement research and counseling the bereaved. The ideas of intuitive and instrumental grieving offer conceptual scaffolding both researchers and practitioners can understand and use to communicate with one another. This book contains possibilities for collaboration between researchers and practitioners to bridge the gap that separates them; even more important, it offers possibilities of working together as equals on projects of interest to both."

    Death Studies, [35], 2011

    "Grieving Beyond Gender is an important book that challenges widely accepted assumptions about grief... valuable reading not only for clinicians, grief counselors, hospice workers, and other professionals working with the bereaved, but also for graduate students in courses on death, dying, and aging." 

    Deborah Carr, Psychology of Women Quarterly