Two Questions That Broke My Dad
In 2012, I asked my dad two questions that changed our relationship forever.
This was the first time I saw my dad cry.
In a single instant, over a decade of misunderstanding and pain was healed.
The father-son relationship can be a mixed bag.
I was prepared to hate my dad for the rest of my life. Other men have expressed similar sentiments.
Fathers hold a certain weight in the eyes of their sons. He is his hero and protector. He can also become his abuser and worst nightmare.
We seek to avoid his wrath, fury, and disappointment while simultaneously yearning to hear him say, “I’m proud of you, son.”
Many times we didn’t know what he thought of us. He was either never around enough or physically present, but emotionally distant and aloof.
“My father gave me a ride to the airport yesterday; we were alone together. The whole way there I wanted to talk to him about all that’s happened between us. But he hardly said anything to me. Just drove out there in silence.”
“Remember, when they go on and on talking about their mothers, they are really talking about their missing fathers.”
In that empty space where a boy sees his father’s face looking everywhere but him, the boy’s mind begins to fill the abyss. Demons of self-hate and shame crawl out and assault him. “You’re not good enough. Why else would your dad ignore you?”
This is psychologically stressful to the boy. He does what psychoanalysts call splitting: separating the good from the bad. In the same way toddlers split peas and carrots so they aren’t touching, sons will separate their own psyche so good and bad aren’t touching. In the son’s case he may see his dad as good and himself as bad. We do this as children because we have a hard time conceiving of our own father as wrong or bad. But we still feel bad, so we take it on to mean, “I feel bad because something about me is bad.”
We can only do this for so long. After all, feeling bad about ourselves and believing we are fundamentally bad is not a pleasant identity to operate from. We then swing from one side of the split to the other. This time we think, “he is bad and I am good!”
This is how many men walk around today, unconsciously. Life becomes a matter of identifying what is bad and figuring out how to avoid or destroy what is bad. This is great for surviving, but detrimental to thriving.
This was how I lived. I looked at men as threats and objects of suspicion while at the same time wanted to gain their approval. This split within my psyche meant that I was at war within myself. I rejected my masculinity while I allied with women and the feminine; “they are the good ones,” I thought to myself. This belief was detrimental to my relationship with both men and women. You can read more about that in the following blogs I wrote: [1] and [2].
“The naïve man will also be proud that he can pick up the pain of others. He particularly picks up women’s pain. When at five years old he sat at the kitchen table, his mother may have confided her suffering to him, and he felt flattered to be told of such things by a grownup, even if it showed his father up poorly. He becomes attracted later to women who “share their pain.” His specialness makes him, in his own eyes, something of a doctor. He is often more in touch with women’s pain than with his own, and he will offer to carry a woman’s pain before he checks with his own heart to see if this labor is proper in the situation.”
Despite my commitment to hating my dad, life had a different plan for me (btw it always does- Life is always interested in our integration, but more on that later).
One day while I got up to shower in the morning I spontaneously burst into tears. It was absolutely bewildering because there was no clear reason or lead up. I simply turned on the shower handle, the water fell, and so did my tears. Thoughts of my dad began to surface. I had questions I wanted answers to. This was the beginning of the end of avoiding the shadow of my dad.
Immediately after the shower I opened up my laptop and sent him an email. There was mild fear and embarrassment; the last email I sent him was years ago. In that email I wrote, “I’ll be 10x the man you ever were,” while my mom nodded with approval over my shoulder. Even as that memory flashed into my mind I moved forward. My egoic concerns weren’t getting in the way of me reaching out to my dad from a sincere heart. He responded to my invitation to meet for brunch at a Chinese restaurant and that’s where I asked him the two questions that broke him.
We sat in a booth.
There was silence between us as the waiter put a teapot and teacups in front of us.
With my eyes cast down on the empty plate in front of me I asked my dad, “Was I a bad son? Did I do something to make you not like me?”
My eyes were hot with tears as I asked these two questions.
I heard a sniff from across the table. I looked up in surprise. This was the first time I saw my dad cry.
He averted my eyes while pouring me some more tea. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Your mom and I messed up.”
What we spoke about after was a blur. All I knew was in a single instant a decade of resentment, grief, and misunderstanding was healed.
My dad raised his teacup as a toast. “To a new beginning.”
We clinked our teacups together and left brunch with closure and gratitude.
This is how powerful a reunion with one’s father can be.
From that point onward I got to know my dad. I no longer committed to the stories my mom told about him nor held onto the stories I told myself about him to fill in the gap. This was over 10 years ago.
This reconciliation didn’t mean everything was perfect. We still had arguments and disagreements. It simply meant I no longer rejected or ran from my dad. I could see him in totality- neither as a villain nor infallible figure, but as a man who made mistakes while doing the best he knew how at the time. I learned more about his mentality, his playful sense of humor, and his deep care for those around him.
“Yet the outcome is illustrative of what happens to many sons in traditional marriages: They learn about their fathers through their mothers, absorbing a distorted image of their fathers and of masculinity.”
One of the things I enjoyed learning about my dad was when I asked him recently, “What accomplishment are you most proud of in your life?” He responded, “There isn’t anything particular I’m super proud of. I’m just a man who shows up, works hard, and I make sure I do a good job. That’s really it. I’m happy if that’s all people remember me for.” I respected the humility in his answer. In a culture where many men boast of all they’ve done, it’s refreshing to recognize that much of what sustains the world are the quiet, honest, and diligent men who show up every day.
I never would have been able to genuinely be curious about my dad had I remained committed to hating him. This is what I meant when I wrote that life is always interested in our integration.
Jungian psychology defines integration as the process of becoming whole through uniting conscious and unconscious aspects of one’s psyche. Consciously, I hated my dad. I made a vow to never be like him, or more accurately, to never be like the idea I had of him in my mind. Unconsciously, I had disowned my masculine energy which is why I was consistently friendzoned by women and felt too insecure to make things happen in my life. I entertained fantasies of power in my mind, while in reality I was impotent and scared.
“Boys grow into men with a wounded father within, a conflicted inner sense of masculinity rooted in men’s experience of their fathers as rejecting, incompetent, or absent.”
Underneath all of this was grief and shame, which was expressed by the spontaneous tears in the shower and the two questions I asked my dad. It was easier to hate him than to face the shadow of my own psyche. That brunch meeting with my dad changed everything. What was once unconscious was now in the light of awareness. The vow I made to hate him forever dissolved because I no longer needed it to protect me from grief and shame.
This process of integration is what men must undergo if they desire to live a life free from the father wound. This integration and reconciliation can occur even if your father has already passed.
Many adult men today are still living in reaction to their fathers. They seek to achieve and prove themselves, constantly striving while still feeling not good enough.
“Battalions of yuppies drag themselves to the office despite their utter exhaustion; they kill themselves with work, symbolically sacrificing their entrails on the altar of success. They are out to prove how capable they are, without ever asking who, if anybody, will benefit from it. Their attitudes have something excessive about them; one senses that they have lost touch with their inner selves and that deep within themselves they are terribly lonely.”
Other men go the opposite direction like I did and swear off anything to do with men and the masculine. They ally with women and the feminine while rejecting their core essence as a man. They make great lap dogs for women, but don't ever truly feel desired or respected by women or men.
On both extremes of the pendulum these men are living in reaction and opposition to life. They have yet to live free as creators of life because the unconscious motivations underlying all their beliefs, actions, and behaviors are tied up in the unresolved father wound. Imagine what a man can do when all that unconscious resentment, grief, and shame is dissolved. That is the energy, freedom, and peace that becomes available to him. He will show up to life and relationships completely different because he has changed on the deepest level within. His outer reality will then mirror that back to him.
If you’ve been reading this and thinking to yourself, “I see myself in the father wound. What can I do about it?”, I’ve got some resources for you.
First are book recommendations.
Iron John by Robert Bly.
Absent Fathers, Lost Sons by Guy Corneau.
Finding Our Fathers by Samuel Osherson.
The Absent Father Effect on Daughters by Susan E. Schwartz (for women).
These books were incredibly influential in my journey of understanding how the father wound unconsciously directed my life and the inner transformation that needed to occur in order for me to come into Wholeness. In many ways these books taught me how to be the father my inner child needed. As much as I wanted my dad to say, “I’m proud of you” and male mentors to say, “I’m proud of you”, what brought me the deepest peace was when I turned inward to face myself and said, “I’m proud of you.”
The second resource is to join a men’s group or attend a men’s retreat. Organizations like The Mankind Project (MKP) and Sacred Sons organize groups and retreats that take men through a modern-day rite of passage. I attended MKPs New Warrior Training Adventure and their men’s group as well as other men’s groups. These experiences forced me to rub shoulders with other men and rewrite the outdated beliefs and assumptions I made about men and masculinity.
If you’d like focused 1:1 guidance, you’re welcome to reach out to me via my website. I'll ask you some questions and if I sense that you are genuinely motivated to change and would be a good fit for private 1:1 guidance, I'll show you how we will create this transformation for you in 3-6 months.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
If you are interested in:
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