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