ABSTRACT
As addiction recovery deepens, individuals for the first time may begin to face the emotional impact from significant losses in their life. If substance use has become a way to avoid dealing with painful life experiences, then facing difficult emotions without using alcohol and other drugs may be overwhelming for individuals identifying as male who have been socialized to “take it like a man” and bear the pain of grief and loss in silence. Practitioners in the field of addiction counseling can benefit from gaining an understanding about the intersection between treatment and recovery processes and clients’ notions about masculinity. This chapter examines how the grief and loss issues that boys and men may face in treatment are inseparable from gender and cultural socialization processes. Focusing attention on the multiple ways that males are taught to “be a man” in their family and culture can reveal hidden levels of loss that may surface in recovery from substance use disorders. Understanding masculinities in this way includes being intentionally curious about the intersectionality of ethnic, familial, multicultural, racial, and sexual identities, and experiences with gender role conflict and oppression, as well as marginalization in response to expressions of grief and loss.
