When I was growing up I had an absentee father. He often traveled during the week for his job and when he did come home, he parked himself in front of the TV with a drink in hand and didn’t want to be bothered. On the occasions when he and I interacted it was more often than not because he was called in to punish me, which usually consisted of a combination of mental and physical punishments. I grew up and eventually had a better relationship with my dad, but I never really knew him or knew how to interact with him. My relationship with other boys and later men was one of distrust. I didn’t trust men because I didn’t trust the person who was my father.
Eventually I learned to trust men, but I realized that I still didn’t trust the energy of the father. The father, as an archetype, felt like a patriarchal oppressor who tried to dominate and control everyone around him and did his best to suppress his son out of a need to control him. When I recognized this about my relationship with paternal energy, I began to also see how this distrust played itself out in interactions I had with other men in any role that vaguely resembled a father figure. The question I faced was how to heal my relationship with the father archetype while also disassociating that energy from other men. I didn’t want to project my father issues on other men, and I was realizing that I was doing that sometimes.
My solution to the issue involved learning to parent my inner child the way I had wanted to be parented by my father. I had to father myself, and in the process heal the wounds I had around the father archetype. Some men heal these wounds by having children of their own and making the choice to be a different father than the one they grew up with. I chose not to have kids because I didn’t want to be a father. Ironically I was a step parent for a time, but that experience confirmed that I wasn’t the type of person who ought to be a parent. I had to take a different approach to heal my wounds around the father archetype.
I started my process by doing some pathworking and parts work with my inner boy. In those processes, I asked him what he needed from me. In one case, what he needed from me was to know that I would keep him safe by staying committed to my choices and following through on those actions. He also needed to know that I would still make time to play because play was essential for his happiness and when I worked all the time, it reminded him of my dad. Making the effort to reassure that part of myself helped it feel like it didn’t need to protect me from possible choices. It allowed me to step up and follow through on my mission and purpose.
I am continuing to father myself and in that process I’m getting better at recognizing when someone triggers a reaction that’s based on my projections around my father, both positively and negatively. These realizations provide me another opportunity to father myself because when I react to someone that brings up energy around the father archetype, I can examine my projection, separate it from the person and father my inner child while also releasing the charge around that other person. This is helping me change my relationships with people in my life, while also healing my relationship with my inner child AND my inner father.
Sometimes we can’t heal the relationships we had with people in our lives. That doesn’t mean we can’t do some kind of work that brings an element of healing in our lives. By working with inner our inner child, inner parent, etc., and recognizing when we are projecting onto other people, we can transform our relationship with ourselves and the people around us. If that’s something you need help with, contact me for a sacred masculinity coaching session and we can take a look at doing this work together.
