December 17th, 2007: Men and their fathers—Oh, how I long for you

Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed and even more rearely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is nearly always given by his father. (John Eldrege, Wild At Heart).

Father Absence

While most men I have seen in therapy enter the therapeutic process with relational issues, I often spend a great deal of time listening to men telling me about their fathers. The stories I hear are often filled with pain, with longing, with anger and hatred, but almost always with a sense of unrequited love. Sometimes these stories are about abuse. But more often than not they are about some form of abandonment or neglect. I hear about men who haven’t received what they need so desperately: their father’s blessing.

This very simple observation led me to a very simple conclusion: Adult men need their fathers. And if those fathers are no longer around, adult men will need at least a word, a blessing, that can help them form and keep a firm positive image of one of the core masculine influences in their lives.

Recently, I had a meeting with an older client he is in his mid-seventies has had several marriages, several children and is suffering from depression. As he likes to put it

“I’ve always been able to bring out the Lion, when things went tough on me. I could just roar or even pounce on things and, with that, felt my strength coming back to me. But now the Lion won’t come so easily to me anymore. I more feel like a Koala bear.”

My client’s history reveals many complicated life-cycle situations: three failed marriages, a daughter committed suicide as and adult woman, his son lives in circumstances that worry my client, several friends have died in the last twenty years . . . We all know how those things can eat away at us, how our life seems to wear thin—and so do our powers of resistance—until we ourselves feel that we’re unable to get up, that we’re dying slowly. So, all of this makes sense. No wonder my client is depressed. But there is an additional issue and this is the one I’d like to focus on tonight.

This issue is the relationship my client had with his father. None, according to him, by the way. “My father was rarely there, but he provided well for my brother and me.” As it turns out, my client’s father died when my client was in his mid-thirties and his father was 62, his paternal grandfather died in his early fifties and my client has not recollection of him at all. My client has, in other words, outlived his father by 12 years and his grandfather by almost 25 years.

“I know I should be happy, he says, but I’m not. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I kind of always expect to die, because he died so damn early.

This client exemplifies well, I believe, what might be one of the less intuitive areas of understanding men. Men, adult men, need their fathers. They depend on them and if they lose them early, they are quite likely to struggle with life issues (relationships, friendships, money-issues, professionally, etc.). So, while it’s quite established by now that boys (and girls) need their fathers and that they will show behavioral and emotional issues, if they grew up with a largely absent father, I am saying that father-absence continues to matter for adult males. It matters in ways quite comparable to how it matters in boys and adolescents.

I believe that much of what this relationship with their fathers will look like is shaped during childhood and adolescence. Fathers who practice connectedness with their sons during those early times will likely stay deeply connected with their sons later on in life.
In my own life, for example, my father and I were never unconnected, but a truly deep connection started about 17 years ago when, at the end of a short and unsuccessful marriage, I went back to visit my parents. My father and I had greeted each other in the usual way, and embrace and expression of our mutual happiness to see each other. But then, all of a sudden we both began to cry, quietly first, then almost uncontrollably. I believe what came to the surface during those minutes was our need for each other at this crisis-point in my life, perhaps it was my father’s recognition that I needed his guidance more than he had been willing or able to see. Since that time our relationship has taken a turn towards more awareness of our need to be available to each other. We have spent uncounted times talking, listening and just being with each other in silence.

But this doesn’t mean that fathers who didn’t have a chance to do the work of connecting with their sons during those times are now out of opportunities to do so. Fathers and their adult sons have opportunities to renew their relationships every day. The real question is what do sons need when they’re adults and what do fathers need when they have adult sons. Today I will mostly deal with the first question. Because I believe that much of what sons need from their fathers is visible already in the early years of the son’s life, I will use two observations of fathers and their sons from the mall to highlight how positive father-son relationships can work.

Fathers At The Playground

About two weeks ago, it was a rainy cold day, I went on an outing with just my two year old. It’s rare that we have this one-on-one time together. We started early in the morning with an attempt to hike around MeadowBrook Park, but gave up after twenty minutes. It was too cold. So, we went to Kopi, my favorite hang-out place. I had a hot tea and Gabriel had not one but two whole raspberry bars. We had a wonderful time. There he was, sitting across from me, pointing things out to me, enjoying his treat in a way that just made me want to feed him more. It feels so good to see our children eat and eat well. It is at moments like these that I start wondering and fastforwarding to the future. How about in twenty years? Will we be sitting in a café like this, talking to each other with him pointing things out to me? How about in thirty? Will he need me? Will I need him? I assume I will not be literally feeding him anymore at that time. But how will I be feeding him then? What kind of nourishment will he need from me when I am 66, 76, 86. I have this overwhelming wish to give to my sons, no matter how old I am. I hope I will be able to do that until I die.

When we left Kopi we had a choice of either going home (we were approaching his mid-day nap time) or going to the Mall. I decided on the mall. Not to go shopping. I am not mad. No, I like spending time at the local mall because one of our two local hospitals gave money to put in a safe playground for children 0-5. Lots of soft and large things to climb on and in. All the items look like things taken from a doctor’s bag and above it all hovers a stork carrying a baby in a blanket. A three feet high wall surrounds this play-ground with only one opening to get in and out. Around the walls are benches to sit and watch the children play. This is where I do much of my observing for parents and their children, particular fathers and their children. This is where I would like to start today.

As I was sitting down I noticed that there were lots more fathers around than I usually see here. Saturday morning, I thought. This is the time when many fathers have time to spend with their children. This is an obvious place to come and enjoy the morning in a relaxed way. All of them were engaged with their children in such different ways. One was talking on his self-phone almost the whole time I was there. A superficial observer might have thought he wasn’t paying attention to his three children. But his eyes were darting around, following the children everywhere. If they disappeared behind something he would get up, while talking on the phone, and look for them. Another father, with only one child, followed his boy everywhere he went. Up the ladder, down the slide, into the tunnel, over the stethoscope and around and around. Another father had noticed that part of the rope had come undone that served as a railing for the steps to the slide. With an earnest face he began to re-braid the rope. He seemed very concentrated on the rope. Did he notice his two sons playing? Yet another father was sitting and just watching his son how he carefully explored the play-ground.

I want to talk about these last two fathers. As it turns out, both of them were not alone with their children, but had come with their spouses. This I learned when both fathers had to attend to their children because each had fallen and was crying. It first happened with the father whose son was exploring the playground. His son fell and was crying and didn’t get up. The dad went and picked him up right away. His son nuzzled quickly against his shoulder and the crook of his neck and, while still crying a bit, seemed comfortable and okay. It looked as if the father was singing to his son. But just a moment later a woman who had sat on the other side of the play-ground got up, walked over to them, took the boy from the father (who released him without resistance) and walked back to the other side of the play-ground where she sat down with him. He was still crying. The father’s hand slid along the arm of the boy as she was taking him. His eyes followed them for a brief moment. Then he picked up a news-paper he had brought, looking up only occasionally to see what his wife and son were doing. She did not release him again to play and soon thereafter they all left.

The other father, the one who was braiding the rope, was still in the middle of doing that when his younger son fell. He, also, was lying on his back and cried. The father looked up from his work, looked at his son quizzically—seemingly thinking “are you really not going to get up on your own?”—and, when he really did not get up, dropped his work, knelt beside his son and gently touched his cheek with his hand. His son kept crying. So, the father picked him, but not by putting his hand under his body and lifting him. Rather, he took him, ever so gently, by the front of his shirt and lifted him up far enough to then use his other arm to support his weight. For a moment his son was floating in mid-air held only by his own t-shirt. Then the father sat down, held his son on his lap, put his hand on his son’s forehead and rocked him. Throughout this whole episode this father had been very quiet. Almost not saying a word. At this point his spouse, who had evidently been shopping, returned. She asked what happened, he told her and she took the boy from him. He, also, released him immediately. He got up, walked around somewhat aimlessly sat down again and looked at his wife and son. Finally, his other son who had been playing with some other children came back and needed his attention.

While I was observing these two, as well as some of the other fathers, my own son, of course, kept cruising around on the play-ground, checking in with me once every other lap before he would take off again. Don’t think for a moment, that I didn’t know where he was or what he was up to.

I don’t want to talk about fathers and their child sons and babies today. Much of this will be reserved for two later lectures in January and March. Rather, what I would like to do with these two stories is to use them as lenses through which we can understand how not only boys need their fathers, but also men. All of the things that are happening in these two stories are relevant for how men and their fathers relate to each other later in life. These stories are mostly positive examples of how this relationship can work. Let’s look at the details.


What Fathers Do For Their Sons

1. These fathers were giving their sons space.

2. Rather than taking them by the hand, and leading them around the play-ground, they allowed them to explore this space by themselves.

3. They were watching but not in a way that could have made the child unsure of himself.

4. They did not immediately rush to their sons’ rescue when they fell.

5. Instead they waited, they checked. And only when the crying lasted longer (I’d say about 20 seconds) did they really tend to the child.

6. Both fathers immediately and naturally knew how to care for their children.

7. Neither father seemed too concerned about the cause of the fall, i.e., neither seemed to think that their children should be more careful

8. In both cases the children were immediately comfortable with the care of their fathers. They were not looking for their mothers.

9. In both cases the mothers took over the comforting, although there was no indication that the father needed them or that the child felt more taken care of with the mother.

10. In both cases the father surrenders right-away, without a fight.


1. Space between men and their fathers

Fathers tend to give their sons more space than mothers. This is not to say that they are less vigilant or attentive. But it seems that fathers are more likely to allow their children to take risks, to figure things out and to cope with pain on their own. Space is a very meaningful dimension between adult men and their fathers as well.

Tom is 35 years old, adopted and struggling with relationship issues and, up until about a year ago, also with severe liver-decomposition. Just over a year ago he received a liver transplant and is doing much better today. At the time Tom told me this story, his voice had become very weak, his skin was a deep yellow, he had lost much weight and it was clear that without a transplant soon, he would die. Listen to Tom describe the relationship with his father (this is on the way to the hospital that eventually performed the transplant):

My father ain’t saying much about me. Every once in a while, on our way to St Louis, he glances at me quickly, but he don’t stare. I’m glad he don’t. He knows how I feel. I know he is worried. I look like death warmed over. He actually talked to me about guns and shootin’. Can you believe it? He knows how much I dig that stuff. Made the drive down there much faster and easier. Didn’t think about being scared anymore. You know, my mom would be on my case, the whole time. Touching me, hugging me, she be’d slobbering all over me. She just can’t help it, I guess. But that’s how she was with my marriage troubles too. Always something to say. It don’t mean a thing to me. Just feels like she thinks it’s always my fault. Nah, when things get rough, I prefer my dad to my mom a hundred times.

Let’s be clear, this client is not saying he hates his mother. He is not making a misogynist comment about women and their ways of paying attention and caring for others. What he is saying is that he is more comfortable with the quiet and less direct ways in which his father takes care of him. And while he never once says anything close to “I needed my father there. I needed him to take care of me.,” it is clear that this is exactly what happened. Tom did need his father on those drives down to St. Louis. Without his father he would have felt lost and forlorn, worried sick. Tom’s father understands his son’s need for space around him. He doesn’t intrude. He just observes, listens and—at the right moment—distracts.


2. Honoring the Son’s Need To Own His Decisions and Ideas

The two fathers I observed on the play-ground, likely without thinking much about this at all, followed a very typical male pattern of watching over their off-spring. It can be summarized as “learn from your experiences.” They did not prevent their sons from jumping and running around, i.e., from exploring their own powers as well as the space and how their powers could work in that space. Rather they watched and allowed things to happen. Perhaps the son would fall, perhaps he wouldn’t. Neither made an attempt to caution the son, slow him down or otherwise intervene before he got hurt.

This is a quite remarkable way of paying attention and watching over one’s children. It assumes that pain of some sort and degree is good for the child. It means that falling is a didactic experience, one from which the child can learn. It also means that, sometimes, the son will actually outperform the father. He will do something and take risks the father would not have taken. This is particularly important for men who lead their lives in ways that seem to move away from the life-styles and life-choices of their fathers. Sons who feel that their father does not honor their choices often struggle with guilt and shame over their difference from their father, no matter how successful they have become with that new choice.

Keith, a 40 year old client, talked about this a lot in his therapy. The first time he felt that his choices had made the judgment of his father come down hard on him was when at age 19 he decided to improve and then sell the car his father had given him. Keith needed the money to begin buying equipment for a business that a decade later should turn him into a millionaire. His father was crestfallen when he found out about the car, though. Keith, though his father never directly commented on the sale of the car, has never stopped feeling guilty and ashamed about it. The fact that he has become a millionaire and that this really did start with the sale of the car doesn’t matter at all. In fact, Keith believes that he should hide from his father how much he really makes because he fears that his father would criticize him for not giving enough of his money to charity. “But we give 10%,” he once groaned in desperation.
Keith’s struggle with his father’s unhappiness about him, despite the clear success of Keith’s life resulted in many secondary issues. Keith was often depressed. His marriage was suffering. He found himself not masculine enough. He behaved in a stand-offish and awkward way towards his children. The need for an acknowledgement by his father of what he has achieved is almost haunting Keith.


3. Helping the Son grow sure of himself

It would be easy to think of fathers as negligent when they don’t pay attention in the close ways we’re used to from mothers. Certainly many of the spouses of such fathers do think there spouses are at least irresponsible and, therefore, resolve not to surrender child-care to their male partners. But what is easily forgotten is that fathers’ ability to stay back and watch, to allow pain to take place is actually helping boys to become sure of themselves. For it is in this way that they are getting an accurate sense of their own powers.

What happens, if fathers cannot stay back? What happens when fathers get in the way by suggesting or, perhaps, even forcing their sons to follow a path that is not of their own choosing? In the case of Keith we can observe that, at times, it is not even the son’s pain that is the issue, but the father’s narcissistic pain that, if projected onto the son, can cause much damage to the soul of the son. Keith had never felt he could really be sure of himself. He lacked assertiveness and often turned to passive-aggressive strategies have his needs met. Keith had trouble relating to other males in friendly and open ways. Instead he often turned to fierce competition with them. Given Keith’s immense success in his business this lack of self-confidence has almost tragic dimensions.




4. Fathers Don’t Help Right Away

Should fathers always stay back? Is that what they do? Not quite. What was striking, too, about the two fathers I observed was the seeming evenness of mind with which they watched their sons after they had fallen. There is no reason to assume that they were paying less attention or even felt less sympathetic towards their sons than a mother might have. Rather, the waiting period after the fall seemed almost deliberate. A watchful moment of silence and patience during which the father, clearly, seemed to negotiate internally how long he should give his son to at least try to get up on his own.

Fathers value and reinforce this kind of independence and self-sufficiency in their sons. The question seems to be “Can you take care of this by yourself, or do you need me to help? This is not a tough question. It is not the question of a man who is interested in getting his son not to show any pain. Rather it’s a loving question meant to strengthen and support the son in his endeavors to stand on his own feet.

So, this waiting period is not to be confused with a silent way of passing judgment. These fathers are not hesitant because they want to get back at their sons or even wanting to teach them a lesson. Rather, this is a way of communicating love by saying “hands-off” at least for a few moments.



5. Fathers’ tolerance for pain

In an earlier ManMade Talk we found that men seemed to be biologically set up to perceive pain in lesser measures and later than do women. Hormonal differences as well as structural difference in brain anatomy and brain-functioning seemed to be at the root of this. However, this doesn’t mean that cultural forces should be pushed aside. Because empathy and sympathy are so much built on the possibility of experiencing someone else’s emotions and feelings because of our own ability to experience and express feelings, it seems like a small leap to assume that fathers’ tolerance for their children’s pain is, at least in part, a result of their tolerance for their own pain.

Not all fathers can do this equally well, however. A middle-aged client who had come to see me for issues in his marriage began talking about his children by saying

I cannot stop worrying about my son. He has made some bad decisions, got himself into a lot of financial trouble. It just hurts me to see him down like this. I know he is mad at himself and embarrassed. I just want to help him. Send him lots of money, but every time I do, it gets burned again.

The more we talked about his son the clearer it became that this client was riddled with guilt over not having been a good father to his son when he was little. He took his son’s business failures as his own failure to be a providing and present father. So, any sign of pain in his son became an indication to him of how badly he had failed as a father. Logically he attempted to erase that guilt at the very first indication that his son was in trouble or in need of something. This, of course, didn’t work well at all. Rather, it only increased the son’s sensitivity to pain causing the father to spin faster and faster to end his son’s pain.

What this client has to learn is how to express his own feelings and emotions before he even begins to project his feelings about himself onto his son. Not an easy task after a life of doing it differently.


6. Fathers Know How To Comfort/Nurture

Perhaps one of the most amazing and heart-warming parts of my observation was to see with how much ease, sincerity and self-assuredness these fathers held and comforted their sons. Despite the almost diametrically opposed ways in which they were doing this both clearly knew what their sons needed and both felt happy and strong enough to give it.

I try to picture what the care from these fathers will look like when their sons are grown. Will they continue to use their voices, words and bodies to soothe their sons’ pain? Will they hug them and hold them tight and even let them put their heads against their shoulder? Will they try, with almost superhuman strength, to lift up the boy by the front of his shirt before pulling him close? It really doesn’t matter how they do it. The pointis that fathers must not forget how they knew when their sons were children. They must remember that comforting them will still be important and can be done in ways quite similar to how they were comforted as children.


7. What was the cause?

We know that men’s problem solving skills tend to lean towards analysis and finding concrete solutions to problems. It is the more surprising that in the cases I observed as well as in clients I have seen analysis seemed to play such a subordinate role. Neither father seemed to have much of an interested in “teaching” his son why he might have fallen. There was no inspection of the troublesome ledge the made one trip. Their was not admonition of the other to reduce his speed while cruising across the playground.

Did these men know that their analytical and problem solving skills wouldn’t do anything but create more pain at this point? Did they know that a father who tells his son why he fell and what caused it will really only succeed in making his son believe that he was just called stupid for falling. This is what happens between men: analysis means “this could have been prevented.” It could have been prevented means “I was stupid to let it happen.” That my father knows why it happened means that I look like a fool in front of him. I know many fathers who trust their son’s inborn skills to analyze, recognize and correct a previous pattern or mistake.

My 15 year old client Eric who had left the public school system and was being home-schooled by his parents felt this way every time his father began to analyze and lecture him about his supposed goals in life. Every time his father started Eric averted his eyes. His father meant well, analyzing the reasons why Eric had needed to leave the public-school system. But every time he did talk about this, he ended up shaming his son in deep and lasting ways. Eric needed his father to know that he could figure this out by himself. He needed for his father to acknowledge that he could be strong, persistent and courageous. But he also needed his father to stick around and not go away thinking his son might have rejected him.

The truth of the matter is, most men can figure out why they are in the situations they’re in. They don’t need their fathers to tell them why. Rather, they need them to tell them that things will be better, that they will be around no matter what, and that they have confidence in their sons’ choices.


8. Confident Comforting

Both fathers seemed confident comforters for as long as the mother wasn’t around. As soon as the mother appeared their comforting techniques seemed less assured.
During family sessions I had with a Latin American family, I noticed the strong bond between the father and son. The son had had troubles finding and keeping a job. He, in his early thirties, and his father, in his late fifties, seemed to get along well. Most striking was the father’s strength of support for and confidence in his son. He showed this support at all the meetings I had with just the two of them. His son was just gobbling this up and showed strong signs of improvement and confidence in himself as a result. However, every time we had meetings with the mother included, the father began to waffle about his son’s abilities. At times he even began to criticize him, analyze his wording of letters of application, etc.

Interestingly, it wasn’t the case that the mother expressed skepticism towards her son. She was a rather quiet woman, actually. But her very presence seemed to make her husband less sure of himself and his ability to comfort his son. He looked over at her more often, waited for her to complete his sentences and avoided looking at this son too long. His confidence and willingness to support his son had made way for almost a sense of embarrassment about his son’s failures (causing him to not even look directly at his son anymore.

9. Mother Replaces Father

It is certainly not the case that many adult men find themselves more attended by and cared for by their mothers. I do believe, however, that the switch in care and comforting I observed in both families on the playground may be part of the root-cause for why men ultimately do not get from their fathers the care and nurturing they need to get from them. Even young and progressive families seem to tend towards a care-taking and nurturing model that prioritizes the mother over the father. It is reasonable to assume that, over time, with enough incidents of surrendered nurturing taking place, fathers will feel themselves to be less and less important and necessary in the care and comforting of their children. They may even feel as if they have forgotten how to take care of their children. From there it is only a small step to understand why they would not think of themselves as qualified to comfort and support their adult children.

In other words, coming through for one’s son requires practice and steadiness. Most fathers when asked about caring and comforting patterns they had with their children during their early and middle-childhood years respond vaguely and mostly with an emphasis on “times when mom wasn’t there.” It comes as no surprise that, later in life, when their sons have grown, fathers are hesitant and feel out of practice when it comes to tending to their sons. Often the hole that exists between fathers and sons as adults was first created during childhood.


10. Fathers Giving Up

Both fathers surrendered. They didn’t object. Their spouse got the boy and they became spontaneously superfluous and unnecessary. The uncertainty runs deep, it seems. All it takes, it seems, is a determined female to show up on the scene to let the male waver and sign over his rights. Fathers give up on their children in many ways. Surrendered custody rights and run-away fathers are only the most extreme cases of such run-awayism. But because our culture still teaches, or perhaps teaches even more now, that fathers are really unnecessary that the job can be done well by mothers alone, fathers often walk away from strong connections with their children. This hurts the children immensely, because the gap between them and their father will likely never be quite bridged again. What would have to go through a father’s mind, I wonder, who at the point that his wife wants to take over, turns away from her (with child in arm) saing “no” I want to do this. Thank you for offering, but leave us alone. How could he muster up this resistance, knowing that later on when his children are adults it will fortify his care and support for them?


The Wound

The quote at the beginning of my talk today talks about the wound almost every boy receives from his father. After having listened to my thoughts on the issue you may have a better idea of how fathers can wound their sons. But while giving space, and holding back advice, allowing for self-determination and knowing how to comfort without being overly emotional are essentials of how fathers need to care for their sons and how adult men will continue to need their fathers, there is one thing, overarching all of these, summed up in a single word: presence. Boys and men alike struggle and suffer greatly when their fathers are absent. Presence is both concrete and metaphorical. Especially when dealing with adult men and their fathers the wish for paternal presence is often cut short by death or sickness. This is why the conversations between adult men and their fathers should not shy away from these topics. Rather, they should give cause and reason to express to each other mutual appreciation. Perhaps a father’s blessing or a son’s expressed recall of a meaningful experience with his father can function in this way.

I want to end today with a quote from the book Papa, My Father by Leo Buscaglia:

The last time my dad and I were together
I was in Nashville, where he and Mom
lived. The two of us were in the car. He
was driving, in his cowboy hat and coat.
We were enjoying the moment. Then I
looked at him chewing on his pipe, and
was suddenly deeply moved. I had to say what
was in my heart. It took a lot of nerve for
me to speak up because he was so reserved.
I said, “I just want to thank you for
being my father. I think you’re the
greatest man I ever met and I love you.”
He smiled slowly before he said,
“yes, son, that’s very nice.”
Dad, I’d like to hear you say it, too.”
“What?”
“Do you like me?”
“Well, I love you.”
“Then let me hear it.” And he did.
Three weeks later he was gone.
–John Ritter

Men and Faith: Church is Rarely an Option

Shame and Men
Before I begin I would like to say something about males and shame. There is overwhelming evidence that boys and men are quite sensitive to being shamed and to feeling the effects of shame. Most males would rather choose solitude than stay in a situation in which they experience shame. Men tend to distance themselves from all kinds of sources of shame. However, in so doing they often move so far away from the things and people that could be vital in their lives that they become emotional loners unable to connect with others. Religion has a particular role in this and in what follows I am hoping to show some of the features of this role.

Men in Religious Organizations

World-wide the numbers of men who are members of religious organizations are dropping. This is not only true for Christian denominations of all colors and tastes as well as the two other major Abrahamic religions (Islam and Judaism), but it is also true for non-Western religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism and the many other religions that have, in the course, of history emerged in the world. It seems that the forces of secularization have had a particularly strong effect on the precept shared by many religions: that of an absolute Other, a God or transcendent being or beings, who have ultimate reign over the world.

I believe that this tendency is detrimental to men as a healthy spirituality is an important part of an overall healthy life. Without faith and spiritual connectedness men lack ways of expressing their thoughts and feelings about death, creation, love, awe, experiences of an infinite nature and others. I am finding in my practice that men as a group seem to have experienced a strong decline of their ability to speak about these topics meaningfully. Their language and thinking seems to have gone through a kind of impoverishment. What’s left is quite often nothing but the next day at work, the next pay-raise, the next conquest of some sort. Men have become restless and yet apathetic, likely to resort to quick quasi religious experiences like drugs and alcohol and sex.

Unfortunately, most religions respond to this decline by shaming and threatening those who are outside of its boundaries. Men don’t respond well to those strategies. Some might join for a while, some might join even for their whole life. However, I have found that even those who stay begin to feel resentful of the very structures they are a part of as they feel that those structures are coercive, shaming, and therefore, a threat to their freedom. This is another way of saying that organized religion has mostly let men down, even when it has rewarded male membership with leadership positions and a powerful visibility of males at the top of their hierarchies. Many of those men lead double-lives. The scandals of sex-abuse in the Catholic Church are only one example of how shaming and threatening can debilitate a church from within. Similar abuses of power within faith structures can be found in religions across the board. Again and again, the riddle of why this happens, why often, too often, men seem to be involved in these abuses, finds its answer in the very shaming and life-denying structures that are set up by many religions. As long as individual religions believe in their own, absolute right to know the one way towards salvation, they will inevitably collide with how many men want to lead their lives today. As long as religions pursue often shaming ways of convincing men (and women) that it is better to be part of a religion (and even better, if they’re, part of the “right” one) than to stand outside of accepted religious structures they will lose male members or only keep those who stand to gain from the place the powerstructures have given them. More and more men report that religious participation to them is either painfully boring or painfully shaming. Neither one of these two are appealing experiences they would like to consider part of their lives.

Again, quite unfortunately, some religions have sought to remedy this by speaking to men about religion in more “male” terms. Somewhat in the vein of war-time propaganda men are now appealed to by talk about “true causes” “the war on x” and phrases like “freedom-fighters” “soldiers of peace”, etc. The truth is that while more men than in previous years might join religious organizations, Christian or other, the promise is illusory that they will be fighting for the true cause, connected with the promise that they will be righteous in the eyes of the God. Ultimately, these causes will prove (and have proven) to be damaging to the male psyche in ways that are deep and lasting. True faith and religiosity in men do not express themselves in a fight or struggle for dominance with others. That men continue to be abused for such purposes by means of religious thought and propaganda is one of the greatest calamities of religious thinking everywhere.

Faith, Spirituality and Religion

Before we can turn our attention to the role faith plays in men’s lives, it will be necessary to become just a bit clearer on what is meant by faith. We are especially in need of understanding why it makes sense to talk about men and faith and not merely about men and spirituality or men and religion.

Though all three terms overlap in significant ways, it is worth pointing out that neither religion nor spirituality carry with them the subjective sense of having a concrete object in the way the term “faith” does. Faith is always faith in something or someone. Faith has an aim. It has intent and direction. Both spirituality and religion, on the other hand, carry with them a broader and wider connectedness with the world. Both can exist without ever expressing a particular faith in anything. Spirituality and religion are general while faith is specific. While many scholars would argue with me on this point, I strongly believe that faith and spirituality can exist without each other. (It is quite possible, in other words, to find a man who has a strong faith, but shows few signs of an overall sense of spirituality. It is equally possible to encounter someone who is strongly connected to the world spiritually, but has little or no faith in a specific being or event or even set of principles.) However, I also believe that faith and spirituality can be especially powerful, if they come together in an individual or a group of people. In this case, they can form a particularly strong religious attitude.

My choice of the term “faith” rather than one of the other two, then, already points to a certain way in which I see men approach the world and the possibility of an absolute that somehow impacts this world. I believe that men are constantly in search of a specific other—an absolute—that will give meaning to their lives, structure their lives and give them stability. Men are in search either of a father or mother and, sometimes, they are in search of both. However, men are also quite suspicious of themselves as they go about this search, always ready to recant and recoil in shame from having been tricked or fooled, or, simply, because they were looking.

A client of mine, for example, used to point to a quote from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Joshuah. The quote was simple “as for me and my family, we will follow the lord.” In his personal life my client was looking at much chaos in his family. His wife was severely mentally ill with a personality disorder. He certainly didn’t expect to be loved by her in any of the ways he had imagined he would be loved by a woman. One of his daughters was beginning to show signs of anti-social tendencies that should a few years later blossom into huge and sometimes terrifying intra-familial conflicts. But this client managed his life with faith. Following the lord for him meant that he would never divorce his wife or leave his family. A stubborn faith one might say, one that didn’t allow him to cry out for the nurturing he so much wanted to receive. Yet, there was shame in this faith as well. He wondered about his constant need for nurturing and love. This factored into great doubts he had about himself and his faith. Perhaps, he wondered, I have just been wrong about this faith thing. Would I be able to build a new, better life, if I followed my need for love? But then, from the perspective of faith, his need for love and nurturing looked infantile and immature, shameful also, and he had to reject it as well. In essence he had become a prisoner of his own faith with no place to move.

And this is my point exactly: a man’s choice of religious attitude, either as faith or spirituality, is often informed by what he feels is more of an embarrassment. When it is about faith it is often about discipline, structure, steadfastness, loyalty and judgment. Yet to need order and structure can also be seen as an embarrassing admission of incompetence, one that men often are not prepared to make. When it is about spirituality, however, admitting that they are believers because they are seekers of nurturing, love and the warmth of a lasting embrace is equally embarrassing because it, once again, sheds shameful shadows on a man’s ability to lead a man’s life.

So, while many men are clearly in need and search of a way to express and reflect on the religious dimensions of their lives, doing so, either through strong faith or spirituality, is fraught with problems for them. For many men religion remains a shameful affair. It is anathema to them and they will reject it in favor of a more self-determined way of life. It is in this way that men often end up with neither faith nor spirituality.

Shameful Faith

In my experience faith or any religious attitude in men is often accompanied by a feeling of embarrassment or shame on the part of the man. Men are certainly more likely to speak freely about work, their upbringing, sex and their relationships than they are to speak about their faith. My overall sense is that faith often doesn’t leave much room for a man to protect his dignity. Concepts of sin, judgment and punishment as well as concepts of eternal love stand in diametrical conflict with what many men think of as their own code of honor. I will first use some of the insights of Sigmund Freud to discuss how this may have come about. I will then demonstrate some of the more subtle ways in which shaming pervades religious discourse by taking a look at a passage from Thomas Merton.

Sigmund Freud

Among his many legacies Freud left us one that certainly was a sign of his time, viz. a thoroughly anti-religious attitude. Since the time of the enlightenment religion in Europe had suffered a decline because, increasingly, it had become something to be seen as a dimension of the human psyche rather than of a reality that is absolutely different from human existence. As such it was only a matter of time until someone would make the claim that the human psyche was just as well off without the construct of religion as it was, perhaps, well off without the concept of Santa Claus.

Most notable in the many critical voices that began to be heard all over Europe, albeit—remarkably—not in America, was the sentiment that religion was a way of infantilizing oneself or keeping others infantilized. Freud was not alone with his opinion. Names like Schopenhauer, Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche—to name only a few of the more famous ones—belong into the chorus of anti-religious sentiment. All, more or less, share this view: religion is undignified because it is the epitome of what Immanuel Kant 100 years earlier had called “our self-imposed immaturity.” This is the stream of thought into which Freud sets his foot in the early twentieth century.

Thus, when I go about quoting and analyzing Freud’s work below I am doing so not because I believe that he is the only one who influenced our attitudes toward religion in this way. Rather, I’m doing it because his words, likely quite unintentionally, reflect with such remarkable clarity on the inner struggle I have been observing in men as they go about understanding the coordinates of their position vis-à-vis faith. This also means that it is quite likely that Freud voiced his own misgivings about religion not so much as a scholar but also as a male who had suffered religion in his own life, both as a boy and a man.

So, as we begin to listen to Freud’s remarks I want to invite you to listen to them, in particular, from the perspective of the many things we have learned about men in the last few months. Listen to them from the perspective of what it means to be a man.

In a summary of his book Future Of An Illusion he remarks

I was much less concerned with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion—with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence of any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

You can see that Freud’s basic assumption was that religion was a regression to a more infantile stage of being. In it we are looking to be nurtured and loved. Why does he think that? His main contention is that an adult would simply no longer experience the kind of helplessness and powerlessness that characterizes the infant’s emotional situation. Freud calls the feelings and needs that arise from such powerlessness “oceanic feelings”. So, while such feelings may still exist in adults they don’t really correspond to a realistic need that any adult might or should have. Religion is, in other words, a construct that does not respond to a true adult feeling. Ideally, adults should no longer have oceanic feelings, but should instead be able to respond to and manage their needs in mature and realistic ways. We might add that Freud probably also includes in this the need for scientific explanations which, since science does a good job at finding them, is no longer a necessary thing needed from religion.

So, given the strong separation of adulthood from childhood, of maturity from immaturity, Freud argues that the only logical explanation for why religion exists at all is that feelings of the oceanic kind have been maintained artificially.

The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate. I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for father’s protection.

The oceanic feeling and its concomitant need for protection are, in other words, a result of an artificial believe in and fear of fate. Here Freud takes us one step further into the emergence of religion, from religious feelings per se to the emergence of monotheism, those religions, in other words, that worship one god. How does he get there?

Freud’s basic argument is that that the “oceanic feeling” in no way satisfies our basic need for real protection. Freud submits that such protection can only come from a “father”, i.e., a strong person that can protect us “from the superior power of fate.” Yet, and this is the true hitch for Freud as far as religions are concerned, such a search for a father is a basic admission of one’s own lack of authenticity and authority. He believes that faith and religion ultimately undermine our dignity as thinking, decision-making beings, for they force us to surrender all real hope for pleasure and happiness and substitute as the only source of pleasure our own “suffering” and “unconditional submission.”

Freud’s critique of religion, then, turns out to be a critique in particular of monotheism, and there in particular of the monotheism of the Abrahamic kind. But, and this is crucial for our understanding of men and faith, Freud’s critique comes as a critique of the father. He identifies adult religion with a prolonged and unhealthy longing for a father. He thinks of such yearning as submission and infantile regression. Any self-respecting person, but especially every self-respecting male should see that longing for a father in this way stands in diametrical opposition to the task and need of one’s independence and self-sufficiency.

Freud’s views are instructive for us, because they give us a frame-work for understanding men in a religious context. Men neither want to be infantilized (a possibility Freud quite certainly associates with a regression to the maternal care of the infant) nor do they normally want to submit to someone or something in order to experience pleasure (a possibility Freud certainly associates with the disciplining hand of the father). Given this polarized view of religion and adding what we already know about men—viz. that they would stay away from both poles—we can see that there simply is no place for men in religion. Of course, if the current wars are an indication of what men choose, if they have to, they are more likely to choose submission and suffering as a form of pleasure than spirituality and oceanic feeling.

This means that for men—according to Freud—contact with religion is always tormented contact. It is always fraught with critical questions regarding his maturity, his will to power and his willingness to go it by himself. The inner psychic conflict that emerges from a confrontation with faith and religion is a conflict that circumscribes a man’s attempts to emancipate himself both from the sphere of the maternal and the sphere of the paternal.

As noted above and corroborated by conversations with men in my practice more men are likely to choose a faith that emphasizes submission and discipline than one that emphasizes universal connectedness, nurturing and love. Male faith is often aware of and afraid of judgment and punishment rather than forgiveness and mercy. Men, in other words, are more likely to choose a harsher variety of faith. One in which they have to prove their perseverance, righteousness and willingness to obey God. Of course, proving this also means that men will not complain while they are out to prove these things. Male faith often carries with itself traits of martyrdom, i.e., a silent acceptance of the pain that has been inflicted on them. Silent it is for religious reasons. Wailing about it would, ultimately, show a man’s weakness and inability to follow God’s will. This, by the way, holds true in all religions that see themselves centered around a God or Gods. It includes, of course, the Abrahamic religions, but also Hinduism, many African religions as well as some American Indian religions. In all of them the man of faith is the man who can endure and bear pain and even uses pain as a means of religious purification.


Thomas Merton

The need for something real and the protection that such connection with reality can have from shame can be seen in more subtle ways in the writings and teachings of many religious men. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Merton



The great theologian and religious mystic in his book Thoughts In Solitude reminds us that

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must, therefore, die. There is no greater misery than to mistake this fruitless death for the true, fruitful and sacrificial “death” by which we enter into life.


Putting this into plain male language I would translate Merton’s passage in this way:

There is no greater failure than to be fooled about what’s real and what is not. If I want to be real I need to do/be in touch with real things. When we are connected with things that are not real, we become weak and will be killed. There is no greater embarrassment than to be killed for something we thought was real that turns out to be not-real. However, if something is a true cause (i.e., real), it’s worth dying for.


My translation of Merton’s words highlights shame as one of the most vulnerable issues in a man’s psychic constitution and in his search for faith. It is simply shameful to be mistaken. Especially when it is about something so important and vital as how to lead a spiritual life or a life of faith. How different could this passage have sounded, had Merton thought of taking out the words “disaster” and “misery” and, instead, said “sometimes it happens that we think something is real and it turns out it is not.” How different could this passage have sounded had he said “no big deal; forgive yourself; understand what went wrong and do it differently the next time. God loves you.” How immeasurably great would it have been, had he chosen to omit the verbiage about death (fruitless or sacrificial) and instead talked about life unambiguously? Such talk, by the way, would have included much attention to the subject of dying. But it would have stayed away from putting a judgment on the kind of death someone dies.

While Merton’s insights about immersion in unreality were clearly not meant to be about men only, they come to have a peculiar application to the state of men and faith. I believe that for many men it is the fear of what Merton calls “immersion in unreality” that keeps them distanced from traditional faith options and in search of a more meaningful, more moving and more invigorating faith.
Unfortunately, men’s need for being connected to something real, often ends up with men choosing suffering and pain over nurturing, war over peace, battle over conversation. Many men are looking for “the true cause” or the “sacrificial death” rather than a fruitless one.

Interestingly, faith for most men is rarely of a solely contemplative nature. Few men are satisfied to simply pray, fast, meditate and then pray some more. However, if they can do these things by causing themselves to suffer significantly, they might be more inclined to engage in these activities. What I mean is this, if men can find enough pain, i.e., a way of competing either against themselves or others in their exercise of prayer, fast and meditation they might feel more inclined to engage in it as an “activity of faith.” Again, we come up against the particularly male way of approaching the world through pain and surviving pain.



Men’s connection with nature

Throughout my practice and certainly also in my own life I have observed that men often are highly attracted to a connection with nature as a link to their own experience of something that goes beyond themselves. It is probably true that more men find something akin to spiritual happiness in nature than anywhere else in their lives (golfing not excluded). What is it about nature that has such magnetic appeal for men?

I think our understanding of Freud’s view on religion can be helpful. While it is possible to live in tune with, if not attuned to, nature, it certainly cannot be said that nature is a nurturing and loving sphere into which a man simply has to let himself fall in order to be saved. Quite to the contrary, the man who encounters nature unprepared will, most certainly, die! Being in tune with nature requires skill, talent and practice—in some cases even a little cunning and trickery. On the other hand, however, nature will never seem like an arbitrary force to which a man simply will have to submit, if he wants to be attuned to it. No, it is precisely this struggle with nature that makes it a masculine environment. Nature is not giving, but it is certainly also not taking. Whether a man emerges from nature with his dignity intact or violated depends solely on him. Nature simply is what it is. It acts in accordance with its own laws. Nature doesn’t judge. Nature doesn’t punish. In a way it could be said that nature lives its own stoic ways and, as such, becomes an example for how many men would like to live.

This, by the way, is quite different from how many American Indian men have looked at nature. To them nature is not a stoic other, but rather an enchanted universe. One in which Gods have to be satisfied, appeased and, on occasion, tricked in order to make it through. Nature in the American Indian view is moral. It responds to the wrong-doings of men and women by punishing it with droughts, storms, blizzards and floods. This is precisely not the “nature” many men are looking for when they embark on a nature experience. To them, nature is about a struggle for survival. In this struggle their force is no different from the force of the wind or the rain. The only question is who will supersede.

Immersion in nature, in other words, is without shame. There is no embarrassment or shame about having fallen into the arms of a nurturing maternal force. But there also isn’t a trace of the shame and embarrassment of having submitted and put oneself into the service of a disciplining paternal force.



Faith and Religion Without Shame

I believe that religion and faith cannot be passed on. They are decisions that are made individually and are part of a person’s ripening sense of the world and its limits and, perhaps, its sense of connectedness to an absolute about which we cannot say much that could be taken as truth by others. Rather, we can only talk about our own experience. Faith is always absolutely subjective.

For example, if I believe that there is a God who sits in judgment of my actions and that I should take this judgment into consideration when I act and decide, I might talk about this to my children, but it would be wrong to force them to frame their own actions in the same way. The experience that there might be an absolute power, benevolent or not, is an experience that can only come out of the experience of the limits of one’s own thinking and existence. I consider regular exchanges about such things with our children part of the way in which we can teach them faith and spirituality without shame.

Such exchanges include three general topic areas which each can have several sub-topics. These areas are
a) the limits of our existence
b) aesthetic experiences
c) ethical experiences
d) a combination of these three

In all cases our exchanges are done best and most effectively when we speak about our subjective experiences rather than some allegedly objective precept that everyone should follow. Above all else, though, it is important that we speak without shame and shaming.

Recently I had a conversation with my two older sons. We had dropped off our van at the shop and were walking the two miles home. It was about 8:30pm, dark and the last part of the walk led across a local cemetery. We drive past this cemetery almost every day. It’s rather large, but stuck between a Meineke and across from a car-dealership and a porn-shop just down the road we hardly pay attention to it. This time we did. As we entered it, we realized that what had looked like just a grassy area was actually crowded with flat tomb-stones, one next to the other. I reminded them that it was important not to step on any of these stones. We walked in farther and found tombstones from two centuries ago, old and withered, the writing barely legible anymore. We thought about what Urbana must have looked like when these people were alive. What were they thinking, feeling, wondering, worrying, laughing about?

Then came the question: Papa, what kind of tombstone would you like to have? I thought for a moment. This is a conversation I had with my father. I know what he wants, actually, a natural stone with just his name carved in it. So, I said to Noah, who had asked the question, I think I’d like something simple. Perhaps just a rock or a cross. Definitely not something carved and polished. And, I said, perhaps my name and birthdate, and a small thing you guys would like to say about me.

I think I would like something that’s shaped like a couch, Noah said, so that when someone comes to visit me there they sit down and talk with me. Jacob chimed in saying I’d like something like a tree-stump. No writing, just something that looks like nature. And, as always keen to match—if not trump—what his older brother says, if someone comes to visit my grave they can sit in the grass.


There is so much to say about this anecdote. But I would like to highlight just a few things that, in my opinion, are meaningful for the development of faith and spirituality in men.

a) as boys they need to have strong connections with their father
b) they need to feel and understand their father’s faith and beliefs.
c) experiences with each other, their father and other friends where reflection about others, past and future times can emerge
d) openness about death, spiritual questions, etc.
e) there needs to be an absence of shame/shaming in how they relate to each other
f) awe and other experiences of the infinite (through music, art, nature, etc.) need to be shared often
g) strong respect for others, their lives, their decisions, their ways of life.
h) A good sense of the balance between passion and task-orientedness on the one hand and the ability to let go on the other.

You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about God, commandments, religious precepts, rules of holiness, etc. I only spoke about the world and how we live in it. If we can teach boys and men these things, if we can speak convincingly of how living mindfully, can be a way of living faithfully and without shame, then all talk of God and diving will merely be an afterthought, to be thought or not to be thought.