Home  | His 40th Birthday 2004

It was his 40th birthday party. For the first time that he could remember, he gave his dad a hug. Feeling slightly awkward, he stepped back and saw a tear in his father’s eye. “My dad never did that” the father said.

 

As a training psychotherapist, it has been my privilege to sit with men as they tell their story. I say privileged because for many, they have never been able to express the emotions and feelings intricately woven into their stories before. Often their stories are not unlike the one above, reflecting a common theme about distant fathers and lack of emotional connection. For many, this missing experience becomes like a blue print that they carry into every adult male relationship they experience, including relationships with their sons. Such relationships may well meet certain needs, but at a deeper level, a heart level where men can find love, acceptance, and understanding from other men, these experiences are missing. This is a tragedy, often leaving men with a sense of grief for that which they never had. Greater is this grief when it is for a father or son.

 

Perhaps for many of us who are fathers, there is a need to do things differently, to realise that hugging our sons (and daughters for that matter), telling them that we love them and allowing them to see our emotional frailty, is to give them one of the greatest gifts a male can give. In doing this, we need to reclaim as our right, some of those nurturing and emotional qualities that we have attributed to being ‘feminine’, realising that they are part of what we can bring to our children’s lives. As we seek to do these things, we create opportunity for our sons to grow as men with perhaps new emotional blueprints, based on the relationship we have developed with them.

 

For many of us, such a journey will not be an easy one. To develop emotional honesty and connection with our sons requires first that we have established those connections with ourselves and to do that takes courage and a commitment to challenge old patterns and blueprints. This may require us to seek help from others’ perhaps a counsellor or a respected older friend who has trod the path before.

 

A commitment to change always requires courage, yet as we experience these changes for ourselves, and observe them in others, we will have the joy and satisfaction of doing things differently, not bound by the patterns and role models of the past. We may well experience the pleasure of seeing our sons grow emotionally attuned to themselves and the world around them, and we in turn may experience the joy of growing emotionally with them through our giving and through theirs.