The Father Wound - How To Become The Man You're Meant To Be in Brief

Today we're going to be talking about the father wound. And this is something that honestly, I could probably spend multiple episodes on days worth of content, to be honest. You know, over the last decade of working with so many men, a lot of men carry a very deep wound from their father. You know, not having a father present, having a father who is abusive, having a father who was there, but a father who was kind of complacent or know, weak willed, let mom run the show, etc. So I'm going to go into a couple of the very specific archetypes that I've seen. The quote unquote damage that they can cause within the personality and how to actually work with those wounds, how to actually move through them. So let's dive straight in. Like I said, this is something that so many men carry. And what it is is essentially the pain of not being loved for or cared for in the way that you needed from your father. Maybe he was absent, maybe he was angry, maybe he was spineless, maybe he was a tyrant or he was a complete ghost and you just actually never really knew him. So he was vacant. Either way, it's the pain that you carry as a man for having been a boy who needed something different from his father. Maybe, maybe you didn't get certain guidance, maybe you didn't have a role model to look up to or, or a direction that you could move towards as a man. I want to talk about what actually creates the father wound. Then we'll go into the symptoms, how it shows up in your life, and then we'll talk about how you can actually work to resolve it. So the first thing very clearly is emotional abuse and really any type of abuse. But I'm going to talk about emotional abuse first specifically. So a father who was physically present or completely emotionally unavailable, right? Like they just were absolutely shut down to any type of meaningful dialogue or conversation. So you as a boy may have felt like he didn't have any interest in, in you whatsoever. You felt completely neglected emotionally. He never really checked in, how are you doing? How's your day? Those types of things doesn't really happen. You, your emotions were completely dismissed. Maybe they were shamed, maybe they were vilified, maybe you were ostracized, made fun of, maybe you even punished for your emotions. So this is a very common one that a lot of boys experience because it's generally what their fathers experienced. Right? You have a big emotion as a boy. Maybe you're angry, maybe you're sad. And dad deals with that by going over the Top, getting loud, getting dominant, making fun of you for your emotions, criticizing you, shaming you for having those emotions, all those types of things. So you as a boy will begin to distrust, distrust your own emotions. Couple things. I'm going to try and just get through these and I want you to really notice which ones stand out for you because this is important. The symptoms or how it manifests in your life are going to be the areas where you likely need to develop that you likely need to build some competency around in order to move out of that father wound. So lack of direction or inner authority. See this all the time with men. I don't know what I want to do with my life. I don't know who I want to be.

I feel helpless or powerless against my own impulse control. Like my impulse control just runs my freaking life. That is a big, big sign of a father wound. If a, if you, if you're a man that, that really lacks impulse control and your impulses really control your life, that is a sign of a father wound. Fear of asserting yourself, especially to women, but conversely on the other side is a kind of tyrannical.

Control, trying to control other people, trying to control self, but also a kind of tyrannical self criticism. So men that have a pretty big father wound, depending on the severity of it, can be not just hostile, right? You might not just be hostile towards yourself. You might actually be verbally and emotionally and maybe even physically abusive towards yourself. This was me to a T. I was really, really harsh to myself. I was verbally and emotionally abusive to myself. That's the way I treated myself. Let's talk about what you do. The first thing is beginning to acknowledge that there is a wound there and, and understanding the impact and how it's showing up in your life. So understand, acknowledge the wound and understand how it's showing up in your life. So Jung said, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. So here, what we're starting to look at is how is this father wound actually showing up in your life? So bring this wound into consciousness. This requires a bit of honesty, a little bit, bit of courage. But you have to look at your personal story and be brutally honest about the relationship with your father. Because the end goal for all of this work is that you can forgive and release dad. Forgive and let go of your father and the impact that he's had. I mean, David Data had this saying in his book of, you know, live from today forward as if your father was dead and There was nothing you could. You needed to do or say to him, to resolve with him. And I think that that's a big stream. I think that's hard for almost every single man who has a father wound. But what did your father give you? Where was he absent? What did he teach you? How did he harm you? How did he make you question yourself? What was painful about your relationship with your father? That's the big question that I really would encourage you to explore. And what was painful about the relationship with your father? Was it that he wouldn't show up? Was it that, you know, he would, like, leave you at games and be an hour late for everything? Like, what was really painful? I want you to try and write all those things down. And then I would ask myself, where does that pain show up in my life today? So what was painful about my relationship with my father? And where does that pain show up and in my relationship today? The next piece is differentiate the personal from the Archetypal father. So again, Jung said that every man carries an eternal image of the father, not his personal father, but the actual archetype of the father. Now, I'm going to say this a different way, which is start fathering yourself. Go father yourself. What that means is instead of constantly comparing and connecting to the father that you had, begin to connect to the archetypal father. Okay, those are two different things, right? So the archetypal father you can think of as the. The ideal father, the ideal father that you held as an image in your head. And if you're not sure about that, you can go and study, right? You could go and look up and research archetypal father. There's many different symbols of that, and that'll give you some insight into what you will likely need to do. Fathering yourself is a process. Again, I outline it in my book, but it's a process where you start to teach yourself the things that you needed your father to teach you. You start to give yourself the things that you needed your father to give you, and you start to become the man that you as a boy needed. Our fathers only hurt us. Your father only hurt you almost inevitably because his father hurt him. It is almost like as close to a guarantee as I can give. And so we end this generational lineage of wounding the next generation of men and boys by becoming a man that not only has reverence and self respect, but it becomes a man that knows how to carry his pain in such a way that it doesn't bleed out into the rest of our life, that it doesn't harm and hurt and damage the people that are around us because that is the real father wound of men. The father wound of men is that you as a man get wounded to such a degree that you take that pain out into the world and you wound those around you, men and women, boys and girls alike. So we become somebody that doesn't pass that pain on and that's what it really means to heal your father wound. That's what it really means to father yourself. So let me know what you thought about this video. Don't forget to man it forward. There are likely so many men in your life that could use this message. Please man it forward to him. I know it's a little bit of a longer one but I hope that you found value in this comment below whether you're on Spotify or on YouTube and let me know how this hit home for you till next week. Connor Beaton signing off.