Healing the Father Wound Mother and father are ancient archetypes that are deeply embedded in our psyches,
And we all have a deep need and desire for both maternal and paternal energy.
If we weren't well cared for as children,
It hurt.
And as adults,
We will still have a longing for precisely the kind of masculine and feminine energies we missed.
Behind our longings is a pain.
A pain we couldn't process as children,
But had to learn to manage.
For most of us,
That persists into adulthood and shows up as patterns of negative emotion.
As shame,
Guilt,
Sadness,
Despair,
Anger,
Loneliness.
A father wound is a childhood pain that was formed in the absence of the energy of the sacred masculine.
It comes through a father or father figure,
Essentially by anyone who,
For us,
Embodied a masculine archetype,
Regardless of gender.
And it comes through the combination of ways in which they were present and absent.
In other words,
Through who they were as a father,
As well as who they were not.
What they did,
As well as what they didn't do.
Masculine energy provides a sense of safety and protection.
It provides a sense of order that helps us understand our place in the world.
It provides containment that helps us to make meaning from the chaos of life.
It gives us a sense of direction and guidance.
When a father doesn't create order in his own life,
We struggle to make sense of the world and to find our place within it.
When a father doesn't protect his own well-being,
The atmosphere around him feels unsafe and we struggle with our own sense of wellness.
When a father has no guiding light,
We feel unmoored and aimless,
For he cannot show us the way.
Being disconnected from the sacred masculine creates mental chaos,
Emotional insecurity,
And a lack of meaning.
If we dwell in these states,
We may be suffering from the unresolved effects of a father wound.
But the father wound isn't the problem.
The problem is everything we try to do to escape from the pain.
Whether the wounds were physical,
Emotional,
Or spiritual,
The painful feelings we experienced as children plague us as adults because we didn't know how to process them.
Instead,
We learn to tell a story about ourselves and of the world that separated us from the sacred masculine.
At a fundamental level,
Masculine and feminine are spiritual energies.
Energies of creation that are present in every domain of life.
Two sides of a polarity that complement one another.
Two parts of a whole that do not exist in isolation.
When we express masculine energy with conscious awareness of the feminine,
We evoke its divine nature.
But when we move from a place of separation without an awareness of the gift of the other,
We're untethered from our divine nature,
And our inner conflict creates strain,
Dis-ease,
Pain,
And suffering.
Healing and wholeness come from an integration of polarities.
Masculine and feminine.
Light and dark.
Yang and yin.
Structure and flow.
Order and chaos.
We long for the divine masculine to hold space for the divine feminine.
To love,
To allow,
To honor,
And to witness the ever-changing flow of life happening through us.
Most of us weren't shown how to do this.
How to feel fully.
How to let all of life in.
If we didn't have a sacred masculine presence that could protect our most vulnerable emotions as children,
A presence that could help us feel safe and loved and help us make sense of things when we were in pain,
We simply did our best to survive and cope with the emotional chaos.
There's a Buddhist proverb that says,
Pain is inevitable,
Suffering is a choice.
Pain is part of our human experience,
And it's astounding to think about how many ways we try to avoid it,
Plan our way around it,
Or scheme our way out of it.
So much of our suffering comes from when we try to disown or wish away parts of life that hurt.
But the terrible irony of running from pain or numbing ourselves to it is that it just makes it worse.
Pain is a natural response that arises when something is amiss,
When something in us is out of balance.
Pain is a guide.
It's a wise teacher.
It tells us to pay attention in a deeper way.
To accept our pain and let it guide us is an act of love and fierce presence that goes against our culture's desperate need for us to stay in comfort.
But comfort is a kind of stagnation that pushes our pain underground.
We don't grow in comfort,
And when we stop growing,
The pain worsens.
A father wound results from the absence of loving masculine energy.
Feeling is a natural process,
A sacred process,
And a creative process.
One that requires us to consciously create a new container that cultivates a new internal environment.
When we embody the masculine structure of being present to our own depth of feeling,
To the consciousness that pervades and penetrates the world,
When we summon the courage to sit with our pain,
To befriend our darkness,
We discover that what has pained us in the past and what continues to hurt contains deep wisdom.
When we are willing to feel everything—sorrow,
Anger,
Despair,
Heartbreak,
Loneliness,
Shame—then we are open to life,
Open to the fullness of the feminine.
When we become both the masculine banks that hold us and the feminine waters that are held by us,
We experience integration and we transcend the separate self that is in pain.
We can break the cycles of generational trauma we inherited.
We can learn to release ourselves from suffering.
We must be brave enough to feel all of life,
Even the parts that hurt.
When we embrace this ancient healing process,
We discover that what was absent in our fathers is a gift already within,
Waiting to grow.
And when we allow that gift to work through us,
We heal not only ourselves,
We become a healing force in the world.
