Fiona Work
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing’(Lewis 1996p. xv)
Fiona has a strong background in community health having worked as a community nurse, midwife and health visitor. Currently she works as a nursing lecturer at The Robert Gordon University.
Fiona is in her third year of an MPhil/ PhD study entitled ‘an exploration of male grief: a hermeneutic phenomenological study’. As an active grief counsellor and lecturer, she is particularly interested in the field of grief, death dying and bereavement.
The seed for wishing to engage in this research was sown after finding distinct differences in the overall counselling experience between male and female clients. The male clients appeared to respond to the person-centred environment and had less contact overall. Hours of supervision still have not answered the rationale for this for her and the literature on the topic gave no definitive answers. Studies appeared to be dominated by gender comparison, stereotyping and there was a dearth of studies focusing on the unique experience of male grief. Consequently, Fiona wishes to explore the lived experience of male grief using their own unique grief stories as data to fill that gap in the literature and perhaps lend some guidance for practitioners in the field of male grief.
