Walking with your father
Exploring the different ways that we can be caught in challenging patterns with our father and an exercise designed to support an inner movement towards better.
There is a significant and important emphasis on our relationship with our mother in all schools of thought exploring the human condition. This is understandable as she is the source of our life and we inhabit her, absorbing her emotional field both during and after our time in her womb. However the role of the father and our relationship with him is also core to developing our inner constellation and finding our place and voice in the world. Our relationship with our father is in one way complex, and in another very simple.
We each have a father, who, along with our mother, created us.
As long as we refuse him his right to his place as our father we will suffer.
As a result, so will our children.
It is that simple. But it is also very complex because of what happened in the relationship, the feelings that were left unresolved, the things that were said or left unsaid. In addition to our own relationship with our father, there is the distance between our father and our mother, as well as their relationship with their parents that all have a deep impact on our own patterns and responses. Life is complex.
This short article offers a systemic perspective from both a son’s point of view and a daughter’s. It also includes a brief look at some of the societal dynamics around being a man or a woman and ends with an exercise that you can use, build on and make your own.
Fathers and sons
The relationship between father and son is central to the healthy development of a young man into adulthood.
Many men struggle with their relationship with their fathers and so, when they grow up to be parents themselves, their sons. The way that a man relates to his father has a profound impact on his relationship with his life, his partner and his work.
The more complex the father/son relationship dynamic, especially if there is absence, violence or both, the more complex and painful is the son’s life when he becomes a man.
Looking at historical examples can help illuminate this, in particular how absence and threat, combined with an entangled relationship with the mother, can lead to inflation and grandiosity.
“If you look at the childhoods of Franco, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, one very obvious thing they all had in common was very complex relationships with their fathers. Each of their fathers were frequently absent, and then, when present, were drunk, violent and threatening. That meant each child developed very close and emotionally intense relationships with their mothers. They went through their life resenting their fathers, while they always saw their mothers as a sanctuary of emotional refuge.
It’s easy to imagine the conversation. After a violent outbreak from their father, a mother vesting her hopes in the child could fuel a sense that the child will be different. A belief in themselves as somehow greater than their environment.”
Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez
History Professor and author of ‘Franco: The biography of a myth’
If a father leaves his son this can have far reaching consequences and create a pattern of behaviour that lasts a lifetime. Just as John Lennon wrote about his relationship with his father: ‘Father I needed you, you didn’t need me.’
The impact of a father leaving his son is that the boy may cling to the mother and grow up to be a ‘mother’s son’. A son who is entangled with his mother in that way, especially if his father is also rejected by the family, may find it easy to be in relationship with women when he grows up but may struggle in his relationship with men, especially perhaps male authority figures.
Alternatively, especially if the mother allows the son to hold his father in his heart and include his father in his mind, the results can be more balanced. She is generous and lets him stay connected to his father and work up to his internal, idealised idea about him.
“When you’re young you want to prove yourself. It may grow out of different life experiences. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the admiration of the demanding father. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the love of an absent father.”
Barack Obama
His mother will be able to model some of this for him and there are lots of well known examples where men without fathers have grown to be happy and succesful in life and work. This is usually when they have internalised a benevolent inner image of their father and work hard to win his attention, to show him that they were worth staying for.
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