Fathers and Children: The Beginning of a New Conversation

Source: Monfocus/Pixabay

In a previous post, I shared a letter that Rufus imagined his estranged son, Owen, writing to him. After we spent some time discussing what he had come up with, I asked Rufus to respond to this imaginary letter of Owen’s with a letter of his own.

I made it clear to Rufus that he might or might not choose to eventually send this letter to Owen, but that either way, writing it would move him closer to being the kind of father he wished he had been, and closer to being the kind of father that Owen wished he had had.

One thing that I did emphasize to Rufus was that the focus of this letter needed to be acknowledging what he imagined to be his son’s experience, rather than letting himself off the hook by expressing contrition or asking for forgiveness.

Rufus did realize, when he wrote the initial imaginary letter from Owen, the extent to which he had let his son down in so many ways. And when we have let someone down, our natural urge is to immediately say that we are sorry.

But doing so often skips a necessary step in the relational repair process, which is to make it absolutely clear that we are trying to understand the ways in which we have hurt someone. Too quickly moving into confessional remorse usually leaves the other person feeling silenced and dismissed rather than recognized and witnessed.

With this in mind, perhaps the most important part of Rufus’s letter to Owen shows up in this particular paragraph:

I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am for the ways in which I failed you as a father. And, in a way, I don’t even want to begin telling you how sorry I am because that makes this letter all about me, and I want this letter to be about you—about hearing you, about understanding you, about knowing you as the child that you were and as the man that you are.

What Rufus accomplished in his letter was, from my perspective, both significant and promising. Because what he demonstrated—to himself but also, potentially, to Owen, if he does one day send the letter—is that he was able to respond to his son’s hurt and anger without feeling compelled to defend himself.

He didn’t attempt to question Owen’s perspective or to argue with Owen’s point of view, but to simply receive and respect Owen’s perspective and point of view.

Rufus wasn’t yet ready to send this letter to Owen, partially because he feared that Owen would rebuff him. But just the fact that he was able to focus on the difficult aspects of Owen’s childhood and his own role in making Owen’s childhood so difficult, rather than attempting to justify his own words and actions, ultimately lays the groundwork for his son feeling heard.

And Owen feeling heard is going to be essential if he and his father have any chance of repairing their currently shredded bond.