Fatherless Sons excerpt from Chapter 13 - Healing the Father wound. My Story.
When I was about 22 a friend asked me about my father. When she realised I couldn't speak about him and had never spoken about him since he died, she said, "Isn't that a bit weird?" I hadn't ever thought of it that way.
A couple of years later I was living in a large shared flat with my girlfriend and realised I seemed to do things that pushed her away and didn't allow myself to really receive loving - although I was able to give it. I wouldn't let myself be vulnerable. About that time I attended a group teaching men communication skills, which seemed to be what I needed. It was run by Mike Simpson in his home and about eight other men attended the 10-week course. (Mike died recently in Wellington. I am grateful to him for putting me on the path and the work he has done to support men)
During this course we did an exercise to help identify the experience of anger in our bodies. After much thought I realised there were symptoms of anger I could feel! My jaw got tight, I clenched my fists, my pulse increased. I asked Mike what should I do with this anger now I knew about it. It was a good question and one he had a good answer for.
He was shortly to run a course on Co Counselling, which taught how to safely release feelings such as anger and sadness that had never been expressed. It seemed logical enough and I trusted him. So I embarked on the two-weekend training course and threw myself into it. This was the beginning of my recovery from a lifetime of isolation and loneliness and defensiveness against being loved.
I was amazed to discover such a huge amount of rage and anger inside me when it came time to let it out. I was carried by this torrent and found it was aimed at my father, someone I had put in the back of my mind forever. Buckets of tears flooded out, tears the nine-year-old boy had not felt safe to cry. It was as if I had lived in a dry shell of a life and only now, at 25, did the moistness return. I cried for all the years of loneliness and isolation, of feeling on the outside, of battling against authority, of hiding from being loved.
Men who have reached this point in their lives at no matter what age will recognise what I mean. Others may feel something stir at the possibility. Over the next two years, layers upon layers of the pain and the patterns of survival that were laid over the top of it, were peeled away.
This was a transformational time for me made possible by applying the skills of Co Counselling, attending subsequent groups, conversations with friends and through learning to meditate. A weight began to come off my shoulders, my temperament became lighter and my face seemed to unravel till I looked 10 years younger. I began to focus on my direction in life and actively pursued what interested me. I now had the ability to express my anger cleanly and directly instead of rebelling against the world and feeling powerless.
All of this change and the subsequent energy released into my life were a direct result of my finding a way of connecting the child part of myself carrying the pain to the father he was so angry with and hurt by. This inner meeting with my father and the release of the grief to do with his leaving came from me choosing to break down the wall I had built to protect myself. No one else could break it down for me because I felt like my survival depended on its existence. Breaking it down was made possible by meeting men I trusted who could show me the way to competently and safely let out what had been so long buried and replace it with positive loving relationships. It was a rebirth into a new way of being.
The reconciliation work with my father was not a one-off event. It was a process that unfolded over several years between ages 25 and 27, and then at a much deeper level about age 35, to do with being a father myself and leading men's workshops. The key moment in the first wave of work was nearly two years after I started and happened on a five-day group in Nelson. It was a small group in the autumn and we had a log fire blazing in the morning.
My grief reached an intense climax during an hour-long session. I spent my time talking to my father, telling him all the things I missed, and how much I had needed him, and imagining what he would say back to me. An enormous pool of sadness lifted out of me and I realised he had never really left me. I had rejected him to cope with his death. His loving had been ever-present and I had received so much from him in the years he was alive that had carried on guiding my life.
In this moment, I was able to forgive him for leaving, to forgive myself for my loneliness, and to receive his blessing. In my mind he blessed me and passed on his love to me and I farewelled him. In the purity of that moment it was as if the whole world was participating in this ritual of healing. My awareness was immensely expanded and I could keenly feel the presence of nature. A fantail flew in the open door and circled me very closely three times and then departed. From that time, significant events happened to me that were to guide my life purposefully forward.
I can remember when I was 18 and walking along Wellington's Lambton Quay to the university, looking at the faces of the men in suits parading past me and saying to myself: "I never want to become like you'. They seemed to stand for everything I despised. About 10 years later and after I had released this first layer of pain about my father, I was walking in the same area. I can remember looking at the men's faces and seeing how sad they were. They were the same sort of men, dressed as important adults in suits, yet now I was aware how they seemed like sad and frightened boys inside. Somehow I had woken up to their pain and could see directly into their isolated hearts. What had given me this ability?
It was my turning to the figure of my own father as I carried him around inside me, and addressing directly to him the feelings I had buried for 15 years, instead of projecting them on to other men. And having gone into that painful descent, I was able to clearly see the suffering in the men around me who were holding in their own pain. The reconciliation with my father awoke in my heart compassion for other men. To the extent that I was carrying unfinished business and keeping distant from my own father, I risked being incomplete and distant from all men.
Fatherless Sons - The Experience of New Zealand Men, Harper Collins Auckland. Chapter 13, pages 136 - 138.