How To Forgive Your Father

Welcome, guys and gals. I'm Connor Beaton, and today on this week's midweek mini episode, we are going to talk about how to forgive your father. Now, if you have tuned into some of the. Some of the anonymous conversations that I've been having and some of the ones that are going to be coming up, there is a revolving theme that you might notice. And that revolving theme is in and around a wound with the father, a break with the father. And this is a very common thing. A lot of men feel like they didn't get what they need from their father or their father figure. And this can show up in a bunch of ways. So whether or not you are like, oh, yeah, I had this abusive father, or, oh, yeah, my father abandoned me, or, oh, yeah, my father was never around, there are many different variations of not getting what we need from. From our father figure. It may just be that he wasn't able to give you guidance or direction in the way that you wanted and needed as a kid. It may be that he didn't teach you how to strive for the goals that you wanted in your life because he was constantly playing it safe. And maybe that he didn't show you how to have a healthy relationship with anyone because he got divorced and never dated anyone else. There's so many versions of this, but one of the greatest tragedies that young men and old men and just men of all generations are facing right now is growing up in some form of a fatherless home. And a fatherless home doesn't mean that your father wasn't there. It can mean that your father was drunk all the time. It can mean that your dad was shut down and didn't talk to you about the things that you needed to talk about. It can be that your father was a workaholic and was only there once a week on weekends. And other than that, he was constantly gone. So there's many different forms of a fatherless home, but the impacts of it are dramatic, right? So 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. That's five times the average. 90% of all homeless and runaway kids are from fatherless homes. It's 32 times the national average. 85% of children who show behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes, which is 20% of the national average. And that's from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control. So we can see that the impact of fathers are incredibly, incredibly important, especially in the development of young men. So if you are listening to this and you didn't have the type of relationship with your father that you wanted, and maybe you carry anger or animosity or, you know, resentment towards him, whether he is alive and with you still and in your life or not. I'm going to talk about how to forgive, but also how to learn and integrate some of these lessons that we need to be taught, because it is absolutely imperative for you as a man to forgive and move forward from the relationship with your father. So, first and foremost, where do we start? Well, the first piece is understanding. So, number one, we need to understand what it is that you wanted from your father that he didn't or couldn't give you. All right? So understand what you wanted from him that he didn't or couldn't give you. This can be a multitude of things, right? Maybe you grew up a product of a divorced family and you wanted your father to be there for you, to take you to practices. I remember for myself as a kid, my stepfather was the coach of my hockey team, and it drove me crazy. I hated it. You know, I rebelled against him because I didn't want it to be him that was there. I wanted it to be my father that was there supporting and driving me to hockey practice and teaching me how to skate and lace up my skates and teaching me how to check and take a slap shot. But it wasn't him, and he had his own family. And so part of what I needed to understand was that what I wanted from him was mentorship and guidance, and I wanted to know and learn from him in a very direct way. But because we had such limited time, that was very challenging for some. For some men, you know, they'll. They'll have so many different lessons. For some guys, it can be that, you know, their father was an oversharer and, you know, talk to him too much about the challenges with his mom or, you know, with his father's wife, his mother. And for some guys, it's going to be that their father was, you know, emotionally unavailable and incredibly shut down and never talked about any challenges, never showed any sort of emotion, and never really opened up about what was happening in his life, and always sort of had this very stoic demeanor on the outside, but. But wasn't really open enough to teach that young boy how to manage his own emotions and just led by example of shutting down. And as a young man, that can be quite taxing. Maybe what you wanted from your father was kindness and compassion, but instead you were met with anger and aggression. Maybe what you needed from your father was a sense of mentorship. And guidance and direction in times where you felt lost. But what you got instead was a suck it up or figure it out yourself. So, first, we need to understand, and second, we need to stop waiting for him to give you these things. All right? I see a lot of men in their 30s, 40s, sometimes even 50s, that are struggling with this idea that.

A part of their life is on pause. It might be their happiness, it might be their success. It might be the type of relationship that they want. It might even be the type of father that they want to be to their kids. But they have put pause on their life, on a part of their life, because they are waiting for their father to. To show up in the way that they've wanted. So step two, stop waiting for him to give you these things. You need to realize that it's no longer his job at some point. It's not your father's job to provide you with these things, nor is it his responsibility to know exactly what it is that you need. Part of our work in this is to view our father through the lens of fallible and view our father through the lens of forgiveness and being able to see them as someone who is allowed to make mistakes. What I see a lot of young men and a lot of men doing is that they view their father as someone that should have showed up perfectly and are really, really angry and upset with them. And on the other side of the spectrum, I see men that have sort of whitewashed over the aggressions of their father and say, it's okay, he did the best he could, or, it's okay, you know, he was busy trying to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, trying to make a living, trying to provide for the family, whatever that it is. And what that does is it is it takes away your ability to feel and process the anger or the resentment or, you know, the frustration or the sadness that was actually there. So the whole point of, number two, stop waiting for him to give you these things is that you need to honor your own feelings about the upbringing that your father gave you. All right, maybe it wasn't perfect. Maybe he did the best that he can. But. But no matter what the case may be, waiting for him to show up in the way that you need is, for some people, never going to happen. Never going to happen. Maybe your father's passed away. Maybe he has an addiction problem. Maybe he. Whatever it is, maybe he's just not capable. Maybe he hasn't learned the lessons that he needs to learn in order to show up for you in the way that you want. Or maybe he's completely content with the way that he's showing up for you and he doesn't think that there's a problem. We need to move past putting pause on life and start to move in our own direction. And this brings me to number three, which is we need to start to father ourself. We need to see the hurt little boy or the frustrated young man, or the angry 16 year old that's pissed off at his father and is trying to get some form of revenge by not having a relationship with him and withholding any form of connection, or is trying to get revenge towards him by not having the conversations that he needs to have or not accepting his apologies. And we need to repair not only that relationship to him, but we need to repair, first and foremost our relationship with our younger child. And there is an inner child within all of us. There's a young boy within every, every man.

Who in some way shape or form, whether you had a great relationship with your parents, but you were bullied by one of your older siblings and you wanted your parents to step in, you wanted your dad to step in, but he never did. And so there's frustration there. So you need to start to learn how to set those boundaries for yourself. And when you can do this, when you can start to father yourself, which requires a few things. One, it requires boundaries with other people, but it also requires boundaries with yourself. So this is the capacity to say no to others, to say no to yourself, to be able to see the hurt, scared, upset, angry 6 year old or 16 year old within you that's pissed off and trying to take his anger out on the world. And you need to be able to say no to it. And you need to be able to say, it's okay, like, I understand why you're pissed and I've got you now. You know, I'm in charge, I'm taking care of you. Let me hear what the problem is so I can set some boundaries and I can create some direction and some structure and some order. Now I'm going to do a separate podcast on how to start fathering yourself, because this is a much larger conversation and there's many other pieces to this, but that's a good place to start. And finally, you can start to understand. You can start to understand your father through a lens of empathy and compassion. And.

We come into this world with grace. We come into this world with a sort of strength in ultimate vulnerability, right? There's this beautiful strength about a child in the sense that it is Pretty much incapacitated. It can't do anything but cry, sleep and shit. There's not much else that it has in order to take care of itself. It needs us, but there is a strength in that. We can't help but love it. And how we develop ourselves in this world is incredibly important. And so how we execute with grace in our life and how we execute on empathy and compassion towards the people who maybe let us down or weren't there for us is also incredibly important. And so that might mean that you sit down with your father and ask questions about what his experience was like when you were younger, what he was going through in his life, how he was struggling when you were born, whether that's financially or mentally or emotionally. Not that you are his caretaker, not that you need to become his coach or his therapist or his psychologist or his best friend. Because that is not it either. Healing your relationship with your father might actually mean that you see the co dependence that exists between you and him and you start to set boundaries around it. Or you start to see the dysfunction of not having really any relationship at all. You and you seek to understand him better. So the last piece again is just to understand your father's position through empathy while not bypassing this is the important part. While not bypassing your own experience, having an understanding and empathy for someone else does not mean that you get to bypass your own experience. Because what that will do is it will continue to carry on. It will continue to live in your shadow and impact the way that you raise your children, interact with your your partner, run your business or your career. It will continue to impact those things. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you take action.

On one of these. At the very least, to take action on one of these and either have a conversation or start to not rely more fully on yourself, but start to father yourself in the sense that you set boundaries with others and with yourself. And you learn how to say no. And you learn how to say yes and invite in the things that you really want. And you repair the relationship with your father, whether he's in your life or he's gone or you don't know where he is. But you start to repair that relationship so that you can move through life more fluidly without the weight of the what ifs and the pain and the hurt that was either given to you or withheld. So thanks so much for tuning in this week. I'm Connor Beaton signing off. Don't forget to share this episode and leave us a rating and review on whatever platform you're listening to us on. So see you next week.