But what about him?

A little note:This is my own personal reflection on men’s mental health and the ways we can sometimes overlook men’s experiences. It’s written to encourage conversation, not to tell anyone how they should feel or to provide clinical advice. Everyone experiences loss differently, and there is no single “right” way to grieve.

From an early age men are often conditioned to hold everything in.

‘Boys don’t cry.’

‘Man up’

‘Be strong’

‘It’s your job to look after everyone else.’

And along the way many boys learn that their emotions are something to be hidden rather than something they are allowed to feel.

Then grow into men and that expectations remains, quietly in the background of every decision and every situation.

They are now the person who is expected to keep it all together. The protector, the provider, the one who has to remain strong to support everyone else when things get difficult.

But what happens when he is hurting too?

Take pregnancy loss, for example. When a man and his female partner experience something as traumatic as miscarriage or pregnancy loss the focus naturally tends to fall on the woman. And it should, her body has gone through something significant, and that means she may need physical and emotional support as the processes what has happened.

But during this process the man can become almost invisible, in fact… he becomes the support.

He’s told how to support her through the loss, what he can do to help her cope and how he can look after her mental health. This is important, she needs support, but what about him?

He has lost something too. He might have already imagine his role of becoming a dad, pictured holding his baby, choosing the name, watching his partner become a mother and imaging what their family could look like.

And all of a sudden that’s gone.

He’s grieving the same loss but could feel he doesn’t have the same permission to grieve. Because he’s supposed to be strong, she’s hurting more, he needs to be there for her…. because that’s what men are taught to do.

And then there’s another layer… masculinity.

Questions can start to circulate in his head:

‘Was this my fault?’

‘Is there something wrong with me?’

‘What if I can’t give her the family she wants?’

‘What if it happens again?’

‘What if my body has failed her?’

These thoughts can carry an immense amount of shame, fear, and uncertainty. And yet, how often is he asked how he is doing? Who sits with him and says, ‘you lost your baby too.’

He is not a bystander in this, he is experiencing his own loss, his own grief, his own questions, and fears and sometimes he experiences his own guilt on top of that.

Support women through pregnancy loss is undoubtably incredibly important but supporting one shouldn’t mean the other is forgotten.

Men deserve space to grieve and be cared for and talk about what they are experiencing without feeling like they are taking attention away from their partner. We need to ask how they are coping. That being hurt and devastated does not make them weak. you don’t need to man up. You can be strong for someone else and still need someone to be strong for you. It’s ok to feel, it’s ok to fall apart, it's ok to not be ok.