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Take a breath, close your eyes and think back to something bad that happened to you when you were little. I remembered running to find my sister, yelling her name, and a bee flying into my mouth and stinging the roof of my mouth.
Whatever you remembered is part of your body’s way to integrate the experiences you have had. We all remember good and bad events so we can repeat or avoid them. Your choice to remember something bad a moment ago was voluntary. Often the integrative responses we have are not our choice. These reflections of the world’s ability to hurt us operate on a level much bigger than us.
We cannot stop our automatic, integrative nature. Nor could our fathers. Every father came with a package of memories, some inviting, some scary. It’s these scary memories which we all encountered in our fathers, which can prevent us from feeling close.
All men were boys. All boys experienced pain, fear, unpredictable discomfort. This includes our fathers. Each of them had many experiences in their memories which automatically steered their behaviors with us. Each dad has acted out of fear, old fear, and hurt his children as a result.
These types of responses require a great deal of concentration and courage to change. Many fathers didn’t have the benefit of tools like The Good Men Project to help them. Most of the fathers who hurt their children acted out of pain when they hurt their trusting, innocent young.
Forty years as a therapist and seventy exploring this life have taught me to bring understanding to those for whom I carry animosity. No father who hurts a child is acting in the full, present moment. ALWAYS the pain delivered to children intentionally is an extension of some past hurt. Very likely the pain was not incidental like a bee flying in my mouth. Much more likely that someone was passing on their pain to our fathers who innocently recorded the circumstances. Then years later they passed it onto us, spontaneously, automatically.
This moment, this article, is a call for compassion, understanding, forgiveness. Our fathers have done the best they knew how. Some of them were suffering so deeply for so long they passed that experience to us. Physical, emotional abuse, abandonment, isolation are all symptoms of fathers who suffer the absence of love.
If you’ve got hard feelings for your father, consider him as a child being bullied, ignored, abandoned. You have the choice of continuing these experiences or transforming them with your understanding that your father was a little boy at one time in a world that taught him a confusing lesson.
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