I’m Sorry I Wasn’t A Better Dad

Fatherhood, Personal Development & Inner Healing

MY VANTAGE POINT:

I am now a septuagenarian, from my viewpoint I can see five generations. I can observe the psychological / emotional states and development of them all. I see two generations into the future and two generations into the past plus my own. I knew my father’s father. I know a bit about how he treated my father. I can see the repercussions in my father’s life. I know even more about my dad and how he treated and related to me and how that affected my life. I know a lot about my children and how I treated and related to them and how that has affected their lives. Now I have four grandchildren to observe.

What I see is that healing (what I prefer to call integration work) is needed and healing is happening, but real integration is hard work. We need all the help we can get. For the sake of our families and our society, we owe to ourselves, our loved ones, and everyone to do the best we can to be our best selves.

ATTACHMENT ISSUES

The great and wise DR. DANIEL P. BROWN, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Harvard Medical School, author, and Meditation Master points out that our development as humans is greatly affected by our early life attachment environment. He points out on his website that we have 5 basic needs as children in order to develop a secure attachment model. 

• Security; The child feels safe

• The child feels seen and known

• The child feels comforted

• The child feels valued

• The child feels support for being their best self

Suffice it to say, I didn’t get what I needed when I needed it as a child, and what I did get was unpredictable and chaotic. This didn’t bode well for my attachment model. My dad through difficulties and stress got triggered regularly. He became violent and threatening as a defense. I developed some of the same symptoms. Because of my inner turmoil, I became an avid seeker of Truth, wholeness, and Reality. I was pretty desperate to find the answers that would lead to feeling some inner peace.

I do not “blame” my parents. They were working with what they had been dealt. I’m sure my dad’s childhood was even worse than mine. My mom had 12 brothers and sisters and grew up during the Depression. Then world war 2 happened. Then my parents went on to have 7 kids. They struggled to survive financially.

Simply put, blaming is a victim’s game. A complete waste of time. It’s basically a defense mechanism to avoid facing reality. The key to actual change is to understand what happened and to take responsibility to do what’s necessary to overcome it.

I started my family at the age of 19. At a time when my brain wasn’t even fully formed yet. That doesn’t happen til we’re 25 or so. I went on to have 6 boys. Of course, I tried my best, don’t we all? A major illness in our family put us in a bad position and we struggled to survive financially as well. The stress was high and we had to move a lot to try to stay in “good neighborhoods”. It wasn’t the best environment, tho better than my own childhood.

Although I studied a lot and tried different things like yoga and pop psychology, and religion, nothing really worked to satisfy the lack of wholeness I felt. That didn’t start to really happen til I was in my mid-40s. Unfortunately, my boys were all out of early childhood by then. Their holding environment was tainted by my attachment issues and childhood trauma. 

TO BE A BETTER DAD LET THE HEALING BEGIN

What I found that began to really change me from deep inside was what I call emotional integration. There are many processes and modalities that facilitate integration aka “healing” that can be done by yourself in the comfort of your home once you develop the skills. These processes are powerful. The one I will share with you is remarkably similar to some I learned a few decades ago. Before we go there let me say this.

There are a lot of things we do that amount to what I call bandaids, coping, or maintenance that do not actually transform, integrate or heal your traumatic residue. These can include activities like self-care or feeling better practices. Unless you get down to the root of your personal issues that stem from the disruption of your childhood holding environment, those weeds will keep popping up. Unless you learn to swim like a fish in the turbulent waters of life, you’ll keep frantically treading water forever. You risk riding a merry-go-round of getting triggered, seeking a coping device til you feel better, and starting over again.

The real breakthrough happens when you can adopt a meta-cognitive(objective and self-reflective) viewpoint toward the content of your thoughts and emotions. How do we do that? With practice. The object is to move out of living life from a reactive orientation to a responsive stance ready to face and accept reality. 

In the beginning, I learned from a few different therapists and got some quick and decisive resolutions. But ultimately it took me years of practice to develop the skills to scale up the processing before I felt a greater, more permanent release and relief as well as a new freedom to just be. I got this relief from trying out many modalities of what falls under the umbrella of Energy Psychology. I worked at it every day for years. After 27 years I’m still learning new helpful nuances to this body of knowledge.

One of the most powerful types of process or protocol is one that directly addresses the “wounded child” within that did not get its attachment needs fully met. It works by facilitating the integration of emotional loss as well as developing a new and positive attachment map.

Until you address these unmet needs, everything you do to pursue happiness or fulfillment comes from a place of compensation. It is the seeker’s dilemma. Our personalities are geared towards compensating for this lack. It will affect your relationships, your feelings of well-being, and your ability to be the whole, wise, and nurturing person and parent you want to be.

My hope is that everyone will take responsibility for their own development and integration of their attachment disturbances. Not just fathers, but mothers too. Below you will find some resources to do just that.

SOME TOOLS THAT QUICKLY RESOLVE DEEP ATTACHMENT DISTURBANCES

In the book “Attachment Disturbances: Treatment For Comprehensive Repair” Dr. Brown talks about a process he calls: Ideal Parental Figure Protocol This is a powerful process that can enable you to resolve your attachment disturbance issues.

Psychologist Dr. Kym Sage has a version of this process on YouTube.Which I think is very good.

~If this article or information seems helpful for you or anyone you know, please consider joining my substack where we will be discussing this process and many others like it. I will answer your questions or comments there.~