Listening to the Father Within

Source: Siegella/Pixabay

As I wrote in my previous post, men tend to have a harder time experiencing and coming to terms with regret than women do, based on gender socialization.

Nevertheless, in my work with fathers over the years, I have been able to develop a series of exercises designed to help them to contemplate and make sense of their regrets, rather than defend against them. This, in turn, can help them to grow, heal, and feel a renewed sense of hope and purpose as a dad, even when day-to-day parenthood has come to its conclusion.

In this post and subsequent ones, I will share some of those exercises, and some examples of how fathers have used them to their psychological advantage.

What Was Happening Inside of Me?

Choose a parenting moment that you regret, but instead of condemning yourself or blaming yourself, spend some time thinking about the following questions:

1. What was I feeling in that moment?
2. Who or what was I afraid of?
3. Who or what was I trying to protect or rescue?
4. What was I hoping to accomplish by acting/sounding the way I did?
5. Did my regrettable response help, in any way at all, to accomplish that?
6. In what ways did this evoke memories of my own childhood or adolescence?
7. Whose voice was I using—my own, or someone else’s, perhaps someone from my childhood?
8. How would I have preferred to handle the situation? What do I wish I had done differently?

Dennis, a 62-year-old father, met with me a few months after his oldest son, Luke, had left home for college. While he was proud of Luke, he found himself ruminating about a particularly difficult patch in their relationship during the winter of Luke’s junior year of high school.

At that time, Dennis and his wife received a call from the assistant principal that Dennis was selling the Adderall pills that had been prescribed for his ADHD, and would be suspended from school for a week. Not only were they upset that he had become involved in illegal drug-dealing, they were angry that he was not taking his medication.

When Luke returned from school, Dennis erupted at him, calling him terrible names, grounding him “forever,” grabbing Luke’s wallet and confiscating his new driver’s license, and ignoring him for days afterward.

“I can’t believe some of the things I said to him. I called him a loser, I called him a criminal, I told him he should be locked away. I told him he had embarrassed the entire family, and that he had ruined his younger brother’s reputation as well. I completely lost it with him. And then I wouldn’t talk to him for a week. Talk to him? I couldn’t even look at him! It was a horrible time…”

Gradually, Dennis told me, things began to improve, and in an overall sense, tension diminished. Dennis and Luke’s relationship slowly thawed, Dennis and his wife monitored Luke’s medication more carefully to ensure that he was taking it as prescribed, not distributing it, Luke’s baseball season started up, and the school year ended on a decent note.

Luke’s senior year also went relatively smoothly and Dennis and his wife were pleased that he was admitted to one of the colleges he wanted to attend. While he graduated with a lower GPA than they would have liked, at least there were no further legal or disciplinary issues.

Nevertheless, Dennis was not feeling pride in himself and the family for having successfully flown through this turbulence. In a way, this crisis had essentially been “buried alive,” with little subsequent discussion or exploration.

So it was not surprising that Dennis, more than a year later, was still finding himself consumed by self-hatred for his volcanic reaction and the hurtful things he had said to Luke, as nothing had ever been worked through.

With this in mind, we began working through the questions I supplied above:

1. What was I feeling in that moment?

“Well, all I can remember feeling is pure, hot rage, just seeing red. It was anger, anger, anger, that was all…”

2. Who or what was I afraid of?

“That’s a good question. I guess I was afraid of what was happening to Luke. How could my son be a drug dealer? What was to become of him? Was he going to go to jail? Would he ever graduate?”

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3. Who or what was I trying to protect or rescue?

“I suppose I was trying to protect Luke. From getting into further trouble. From digging a hole for himself. From ruining his future.”

4. What was I hoping to accomplish by acting/sounding the way I did?

“I guess I’d answer that the same way: I was trying to get Luke to change his ways, to think about his actions, to not do stupid things. To ‘scare him straight’ as they say.”

5. Did my regrettable response help, in any way at all, to accomplish that?

“I really don’t know. I still feel so awful about it. On the other hand, things did begin to settle down after my blow-up and there weren’t any subsequent transgressions. But all I can remember is the awful look on Luke’s face when I was ranting at him. He looked crushed.”

6. In what ways did this evoke memories of my own childhood or adolescence?

“Oh, absolutely. My younger brother, Will, got into all kinds of trouble when he was a teenager, and it took him quite a while to grow out of it. He was a mess for quite some time, didn’t even start college until he was well into his 20s, and even then it took him like 8 years to finally finish. Now that I’m thinking about it, there really are some similarities there between Luke and my brother.”

7. Whose voice was I using—my own, or someone else’s, perhaps someone from my childhood?

“Well, it was certainly my own voice, that’s for sure. I can still hear myself yelling. But my father was always screaming at Will when Will was in trouble, so it’s possible that I was channeling his voice, as well.”

8. How would I have preferred to handle the situation? What do I wish I had done differently?

“One obvious thing is that I never asked him why he was doing what he was doing. I was just so angry that I wasn’t even curious. I still don’t know what was going on for him, but I wish I had taken the time to ask.”

In the next post, I will discuss the ways in which Dennis’s self-examination placed him on a pathway toward greater empathy—and improvements in the father-son relationship.