The Father Wound - How To Become The Man You're Meant To Be
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So I have a little surprise for you guys today. First off, I'm going to read a quote from you by a guy named David. He said,

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So go and enjoy. I would love to hear your feedback as you dive in and enjoy the growth. All right, team, the time has come. We are going to dive into the father wound, what it is, how it gets created, and how you can move through it. I'm Connor Beaton. This is the Man Talk Show. Don't forget to man it forward, like and subscribe. If you enjoy this content, let's dive in.

Recently, I did a video called Healing the Mother Wound or Dealing with Your Mommy Issues. If you haven't checked that out, you should definitely go dive into it if it feels like it might be something for you. But today, we're going to be talking about the father wound. This is something that, honestly, I could probably spend multiple episodes on, days worth of content, to be honest. Over the last decade of working with so many men, a lot of men carry a very deep wound from

from their father, not having a father present, having a father who was abusive, having a father who was there, but a father who was kind of complacent or weak-willed, let mom run the show, et cetera. So I'm going to go into a couple of the very specific archetypes that I've seen

the quote-unquote damage that they can cause within their personality, and how to actually work with those wounds, how to actually move through them. So let's dive straight in. Like I said, this is something that so many men carry. And what it is is essentially the pain of not being loved for or cared for

in the way that you needed from your father. Maybe he was absent, maybe he was angry, maybe he was spineless, maybe he was a tyrant or he was a complete ghost and you just actually never really knew him, so he was vacant. Either way, it's the pain that you carry as a man

for having been a boy who needed something different from his father. Maybe you didn't get certain guidance. Maybe you didn't have a role model to look up to or a direction that you could move towards as a man. Maybe he was completely absent in being able to teach you anything of substance about what it means to be a man. Maybe he was just a terrible man and all that you learned was don't be like that. So either way, it's the pain that you carry as a man.

for not having gotten the transmission of masculinity, the transmission or the modeling of what it means to be a man within the world and the good and the bad, right? It's not about having a perfect father because to clarify, part of the father archetype is about not being exactly what you've wanted, right? It's not dad's job. It's not the father's job to be your best friend, right?

or to have been your best friend. In fact, for some of you, the core wound might have been my dad just treated me like a friend and not like his son. And he never really showed me the things that I needed to know. And so I've kind of wandered through the world without a real sense of having had a father. I just had more of like an older male friend.

So part of the father archetype is about not giving you what you want, but providing you with what you actually needed.

which are two very different things. So part of the father's role is to be able to see a little bit more clearly about who you are, and then for him to adjust and adapt his parenting of you so that he can bring forward the most of you. He can teach you the things that he thinks needs to be taught to you. But it's not about perfection. And this is part of the father wound for many men is that many boys go through this period of

of seeing their father as God, right? I don't know who said it, but somebody said something along the lines of like, a father to a boy is their first real image or visual of God, right? And so usually, and that's not from an ego perspective, but for a lot of young boys, their fathers are very big, very large,

They're strong. My boys looked at me this way for sure. He's four years old when he was two, three. And even now today, I pick him up with one hand. I do shoulder presses with him and then throw him on the couch. And he wants me to protect him from ghosts and spiders and scary things. And so for him, what keeps him safe in the world is me. And so for a lot of boys, their first experience

experience of safety in the world. Yes, it comes from mom and nervous system. Yes, absolutely. That's the first sort of 18 months of life. Then after that, after like two, three, four years old, it starts to become this play with dad that helps them to understand their role and their place in the world.

So I want to talk about what actually creates the father wound. Then we'll go into the symptoms, how it shows up in your life. And then we'll talk about how you can actually work to resolve it. So the first thing very clearly is emotional abuse.

Really, any type of abuse, but I'm going to talk about emotional abuse first specifically. A father who was physically present or completely emotionally unavailable, they just were absolutely shut down to any type of meaningful dialogue or conversation. You as a boy may have felt like he didn't have any interest in you whatsoever at

You felt completely neglected emotionally. You never really checked in. How are you doing? How's your day? Those types of things didn't really happen. Your emotions were completely dismissed. Maybe they were shamed. Maybe they were vilified. Maybe you were ostracized, made fun of. Maybe you were even punished.

for your emotions. So this is a very common one that a lot of boys experience because that's generally what their father has experienced, right? You have a big emotion as a boy. Maybe you're angry, maybe you're sad. And dad deals with that by going over the top, getting loud, getting dominant, making fun of you for your emotions, criticizing you, shaming you for having those emotions, all those types of things. So you as a boy will begin to distrust your own emotions.

And through a process of trying to get close to dad, to try and acquiesce or appease him in some way, because every young boy wants their fathers to love them, wants their fathers to be happy with them, will begin to either emotionally disconnect, distrust, or suppress your emotions.

Or depending on your personality, you might start to go more in that direction. And so this defiance will start to happen, right? Maybe you and your dad started to clash when you were very, very young because of that. Next is authoritarian and control. Maybe your dad was sort of tyrannical. He ruled with fear, right? I'll give you something to cry about. He was extremely critical of

He demanded perfectionism. So maybe he was extremely controlling, deciding what you would wear all the time, how you needed to sit and eat and kind of like militaristic. I remember a couple of people that I've worked with over the years have had military fathers and like at the age of three or four years old.

When their dad would get back from base, they'd have to stand outside their room, salute. Their room needed to look a certain way. And then if it didn't look that way, then there was physical punishment. They'd get the belt, they'd get spanked, that type of stuff. And so extreme amounts of control, very tyrannical, sort of authoritarian. And what will happen is that you as a boy will have internalized this very harsh inner critic. I'm always the problem. There's always something wrong with me. I can't just be loved

or connected to because of who I am, I actually had to perform in order to get any type of love, affection, or connection from my father. And I see this all the time with guys that usually are very high performing in life. And they had the fathers who were like,

They bring home a 95% exam and dad would say, where's the other 5% or something like that. So that's the kind of idea around the authoritarian father figure or the dad that just exerted so much control that your sense of individuality, your sense of being loved or cared for by him was very contingent and dependent on how well you did.

Right. So who you were was a byproduct of what you did and how well you did it. It didn't actually matter how you felt or any of those other types of things that was completely irrelevant.

The next thing is neglect or abandonment. So obviously, a father wound can be created if dad is just never in your life. If he pieces out, maybe a father left, either literally or figuratively, right? Maybe he's there, he's around, but he's what I call ghost dad. I'm going to give you some archetypes here in a minute. But ghost dad is that dad that's like, he's around, maybe your parents divorced, but he's kind of in and out of your life.

You don't really know him. You don't really know what he thinks about things. You don't really know. You kind of question like, you know, did you even want me? Why did you bring me into this world? Why did you have me? You know, are you interested in spending time with me? So ghost dad is very, he's sort of there, but it's hard to really connect with him. And then obviously there's complete abandonment, right? Dad was just never around. You don't really know who he is. Maybe the circumstances are very unclear, those types of pieces. And then neglect.

Obviously neglect, that dad was just so consumed by his own life, his own wants, his own desires, that he didn't really take much interest in you whatsoever. So divorce, death, addiction can be another big one. If your father was an addict, that can be a big wound where you can have experienced a good amount of neglect or ongoing abandonment.

or that he was simply a workaholic. That's honestly another one that I see with men that have a big father wound is that dad was gone half the year or during the week he'd be working 12, 14 hour days and he'd work another 10, 12 hour day on Saturday or something like that. And so they'd see their dads once a week basically. The other one, violence and abuse. We've kind of talked about that, but any type of physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, this will really damage the core

of your psyche as a boy. And depending on your age and your development, it can begin to make you question like, is there something wrong with me? Is there something fundamentally broken with me that this man that I love and I want to love me back, because that's every boy's desire, I want you to love me back. I want you to love me for who I am and how I am, especially at a very young age.

really harm your sense of self and often leave a pretty lasting imprint internally of, at

am I all right? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me? Things seem to go wrong in my life. And is that a result of me? Did I somehow bring this punishment upon me or upon myself? You might carry a good amount of shame about who you are. Rage is another big one. If you experienced or witnessed violence from your father or abuse from your dad, you probably have a good amount of rage either that is externalized and expressed or

in your life or it's very repressed, but it's in you. And oftentimes there's a term in psychology called retroflexion where the emotions that we should or need to express externally don't get expressed externally and then they get held internally and then they get targeted towards us. So you might notice that you might not express anger or rage externally,

But you have this simmering, boiling over pot inside of you that ends up getting directed at yourself or the judgment internally. Lastly of this one, if you experience violence or abuse at the hands of your father is worthlessness or being unworthy. So that's another big one.

Last piece here is a failure to initiate. So in my frame, every young boy needs to know that he's crossed the threshold into manhood. And we've really stripped initiation out of the culture. So what happens for a lot of young boys is they're looking for cues from dad. When you were growing up, you were probably looking for some cues from dad that would tell you,

hey, like, am I becoming a man? Am I doing a good job of becoming a man? What are the things that I need to know about becoming a man in terms of how to treat women and just how to do basic things, you know, how to shave,

how to dress myself, how to speak to people in public, how to sort of, you know, how to do taxes and bench press properly. Like there's some, there's not, maybe not all those things, but I would certainly be teaching my son all those things. You know, I'll teach him how to bench press. I'll teach him how to do his taxes. I'll teach him how to shave.

But that's not the initiation I'm talking about. That's more, here's how you be a man in the world. The initiation that I'm talking about is actually helping to demarcate the line for our sons between you are a boy, you're an adolescent, and now you're a man. And I believe that every father should at some point take their son on some process of initiation.

And for a lot of young men, they've just never experienced that. And it can be any number of things. It could be a hunting trip. It could be an all-night vigil out camping in nature. It can be so many things. But a lot of men that I've worked with that have a father wound

When push comes to shove, what they'll really say is, I just didn't feel like he taught me how to actually be a man. He didn't really give me any of those tools. And I didn't feel like I went through any type of initiation. So a lot of men experience things like college initiations, which are not really initiations.

So that's what causes the father wound. Next, we're going to talk about some of the symptoms that you've probably noticed in your life. I'm going to try and just get through these. And I want you to really notice which ones stand out for you because this is important. The symptoms or how it manifests in your life

are going to be the areas where you likely need to develop, that you likely need to build some competency around in order to move out of that fatherhood.

So lack of direction or inner authority. See this all the time with men. I don't know what I want to do with my life. I don't know who I want to be. I feel helpless or powerless against my own impulse control. Like my impulse control just runs my freaking life. That is a big, big sign of a father wound. If you're a man that really lacks impulse control and your impulses really control your life, that is a sign of a father wound.

Fear of asserting yourself, especially to women, but conversely, on the other side, is a kind of tyrannical control, trying to control other people, trying to control self, but also a kind of tyrannical self-criticism. So men that have a pretty big father wound, depending on the severity of it, can

can be not just hostile, right? You might not just be hostile towards yourself. You might actually be verbally and emotionally and maybe even physically abusive towards yourself. This was me to a T. I was really, really harsh to myself. I was verbally and emotionally abusive to myself. That's the way I treated myself. You might rebel against

everything. So you might rebel against any type of authority or structure. You might rebel against any type of routine or ritual in your life, and that might be causing you a lot of harm. Many of the men that I work with that are like, I just can't seem to get a routine together. I can't seem to just get a morning routine together. And it's like, yeah, well, you probably have a fatherhood. Let's talk about that. Let's get into that.

And nine times out of 10, it's like, yeah, dad was either this tyrant that was demanding this perfectionism, or he was completely absent and didn't teach that boy how to have any type of rigor or meticulousness.

How it also will appear is usually a fear of authority. So a fear of external authority, a fear of internal authority, of you even being any type of authority, or a complete defiance of it. I definitely went down that path. I had a lot of defiance for it, trying to break the rules, trying to break the law. I had a 1,000cc motorcycle for many years and

ran from the cops on a number of occasions because I wanted to see what would happen, you know, and that just didn't work very well. So either you kind of cower in fear before authority and you basically give your power and your own will towards authority and you sort of bow down towards it because of your relationship with dad or

or you compulsively challenge it. Like you don't even know why. You just, as soon as you get like a whiff of authority, you want to rebel against it. You want to challenge it. You want to deny that it has any sense of power. So you're seeking to assert your value and avoid humiliation basically.

Next is insecurity in your own masculine identity. So big common trait of men that have father wounds is I don't know who I am. I don't know who I am in the world as a man. I don't know who I'm supposed to be as a father, as a husband, as a boyfriend. I don't know how I'm supposed to operate. There's no real guidelines or guardrails because you've kind of been left to

to your own device. And so you're unsure of what it even means to be a man. You're very unsure of what it means to be masculine. And this is very indicative of our culture. You know, I think one of the things that I've talked about for years is that our culture went through the death of a father in terms of like an archetypal sense. You know, our culture really

with certain movements that came, with the feminist movement that came, and then the patriarchy is the problem for everything. The answer to any problem that we're facing in our existence is the patriarchy. That is the vilification and the villainization of the father archetype within culture and society. And so because of that, a lot of fathers stepped out of this role of

of teaching their sons, here's what it looks like to be a good man. Here's how you be good at being a man. Not just how do you be a good man and open doors and be chivalrous, but here's how you be good at being a man and actually clarify that and transmit that information and pass that down to the next generation. So there's this ambiguity.

That, and I see this so many men, it doesn't, and they can be 60 or they can be 16 or they can be 40. It can be everything in between where so many men are just like, I don't know what it means to be a man. I don't know what it means for me to be masculine. I have no idea what that looks like or feels like. And it's completely lost and ambiguous.

Next is that you probably struggle with intimacy. So you might have difficulty trusting others. That can be a big one, especially in partnerships or relationships, but also in business. I see this a lot with guys where a lot of their father wound will start to come up in their business relationships with other men. And it's this fear of being known, being seen, needing to compete, needing to be perfect, needing to dominate.

fear of being hurt, fear of being abandoned again. So all of that can show up in your relationships with a woman, but it can also show up in your relationships in your business and your environment. And I've seen this go so far as, you know, men kind of projecting their father onto their employees, onto their bosses, onto their peers at work.

Or what will happen, and I'll just give you one example of this because I've seen this so many times, is a more docile, meek man who maybe had a very dominant father, a tyrannical father, will get into a relationship with a very dominant, more aggressive, hyper-assertive, more masculine female. And that dynamic will start to play out between the two of them.

Next is rage or depression. If you have a fatherhood, if you have a father wound, part of the symptoms is that you either really struggle to control or have any sense of sovereignty or dominion over your own emotions, or you have used the tactic of suppression and repression for so long that you go through pretty serious bouts of depression. So you've

You likely have unprocessed grief from what you experienced as a boy growing up around the father that you went through. That pain may show up in chronic anger that you just can't seem to have any sense of control or direction over. Or again, you've turned it inwards and it's turned into a pretty deep depression.

Lack of direction and drive, another big factor. And this, again, can be from I just wasn't shown how to even have direction, have drive, have motivation. I wasn't taught those things. My dad just didn't stick with me enough to encourage me. Or my dad was so strict and all over it that I just, I've rebelled against it. So without a positive impact,

of an inner father image inside of yourself, you might feel not only aimless, but you might feel like, what's the point? Right, what's the point? Because the catch here is that every boy wants to kind of prove to his father for a period of time. And then part of breaking, part of becoming your own man is breaking out of that cycle. But that cycle has to be healthy and secured.

For a period of time where you as a boy are doing things to gain dad's approval, you're trying to get a sense of like, am I doing well as a boy? Am I doing okay, you know, as a five-year-old boy or as an eight-year-old boy? And your father's validation and approval and guidance is meaningful. And the encouragement is meaningful.

And at some point as you get older, you break away from needing or even at some point wanting that direction, that encouragement, et cetera. But if that's not established in the beginning and you reject your dad's guidance altogether because he was mean or abusive or whatever,

whatever the case may be, it can cause all kinds of lacking internal structure, being unmotivated, kind of saying like, I don't really give a shit, like why bother, that type of behavior. Two more things that'll show up in addicted behaviors. So you'll attempt to soothe

a lot of this vacancy, a lot of this pain through addiction, substances, sex, work, achievement, drugs, alcohol, gambling, et cetera, right? Porn and masturbation can be another big one. And then lastly, projection onto mentors or leaders. So I'm just touching on this last part again, but

you may have found yourself getting caught in idolizing people where you put these men up on a pedestal that you revere to such a degree and they become almost godlike to you and they're these replacements of fathers in your life.

Or you completely demonize male figures. No man's good enough. No man will ever live up to your expectation. You're friends. You refuse to have a mentor. You hate the leaders that you work with. They're all bad guys, that type of stuff. So now that you have a very good picture of

what the father wound is, how it gets created, how it shows up in your life. Let's talk a little bit about how you begin to work with the father wound. I'm gonna give you a couple more pieces here actually just before we dive into that. I wanna give you a couple different archetypes of dad, okay? First one is ghost dad, I talked about ghost dad. And this is important because understanding which archetype you're actually working with is super important.

So ghost dad is the dad who either was never around, just wasn't there and you don't really know him,

Or he was there, but you just couldn't get anything from him. It was like eating something that's just completely empty calories. There's just nothing in it. There's no nutritional value. It's like corn, right? It's like you eat corn, there's nothing. There's no nutritional value. It's like some sugar. That's kind of like ghost dad. Maybe he was around, you could chat with him, but you just couldn't get anything from him. It felt like just constantly malnourished in every sense of the word. That's ghost dad.

Then there's tyrant dad. Tyrant dad is the dictator. He rules with authority, usually angry all the time, loud, volatile. Maybe he's neglectful. He punishes quite a bit. He might be physically abusive or emotionally or verbally abusive.

But he demands not just respect, he demands that you are, he parents through fear, basically, right? He parents through fear. The next one is Wimpy Dad. And Wimpy Dad is the kind of

spineless dad that didn't really teach you the things that you needed to learn. Usually he's married to somebody that runs the life for him. He doesn't really have his own backbone. He doesn't have his own opinions. He's constantly deferring to other people. And you see him never really stand up for you or himself. Because of that, there's a lot of anger and animosity and resentment towards him.

The last archetype of the dad that I want to give you is just the father of chaos. The father of chaos is almost like a combination of all those things where his life is kind of marked by constant up and downs. He might be rotating women through different jobs all the time, but he's there. He's not. He's loving. He's not. He's forceful and dominant. And then he's loving and kind. He's submissive at other times. He's just...

you never knew what you were going to get from him. You just never knew what you were going to get from him. And it was extremely confusing because for you, with The Father of Chaos, it was almost like the unpredictability of

was the biggest painful part of it. You didn't know if you were going to bring home an A and he was going to be happy, or you're going to bring home an A and he was going to flip his shit, or he was going to buy you ice cream, or he was going to ground you. So that type of unpredictable nature from the chaos dad is part of, it was the main part of what the wounding is. So let's talk about what you do. The first thing is beginning to acknowledge that

that there is a wound there, and understanding the impact and how it's showing up in your life. So understand, acknowledge the wound and understand how it's showing up in your life. So Jung said, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,

but by making the darkness conscious. So here, what we're starting to look at is how is this father wound actually showing up in your life? So bring this wound into consciousness. This requires a bit of honesty, a bit of courage.

But you have to look at your personal story and be brutally honest about the relationship with your father. Because the end goal for all of this work is that you can forgive and release dad. Forgive and let go of your father and the impact that he's had. I mean, David Data had this saying in his book of, you know, live from today forward as if your father was dead.

And there was nothing you needed to do or say to him to resolve with him. And I think that that's a big stream. I think that's hard for almost every single man who has a father wound. But-

What did your father give you? Where was he absent? What did he teach you? How did he harm you? How did he make you question yourself? What was painful about your relationship with your father? That's the big question that I really would encourage you to explore. What was painful about the relationship with your father? Was it that he wouldn't show up?

Was it that he would leave you at games and be an hour late for everything? What was really painful? I want you to try and write all those things down. And then I would ask myself, where does that pain show up in my life today? So what was painful about my relationship with my father? And where does that pain show up

in my relationship today. And by the way, if you want to dig super deep on this topic, my book, Men's Work, there'll be a link in the show notes or the description if you're watching this on YouTube. My book, Men's Work, has a whole chapter called The Shadow of the Father. And it's all about digging into the impact of the father wound. So your prompt here is, what did I most long for from my father that I did not receive? What did I most long for from my father that I did not receive? So what was painful?

What did I long for that I didn't receive? And where do I see that showing up in my life today? Step number two is begin to really let yourself feel the impact that your dad had in your life and on your life and express those emotions in a place and environment where they're welcome. So this is where men's work really comes in, right? Men's work

in a lot of ways, is about healing that father wound and getting you in right relationship with your own sense of manhood and masculinity. But Jung said, where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. So

Once you get a sense of what was painful, how does that show up in my life today, ideally in a men's group or in a men's circle, or maybe with just one of your buddies that you go through this work with, you

you start to have some conversations and you express, not explain, right? You start to express, here's how my dad and my relationship with my father really, I think, negatively impacted me. Maybe this is with a therapist or a psychologist or a coach that you work with, but you allow the grief and the sadness and the anger and the confusion to surface. This is not a weakness.

This is something that you need to acknowledge as a trial to move through the father wound. Because for so many of you, the likelihood is that

You have this story of, I can't let myself feel those things or express them because if I do, it would give my dad more power than I want to give him. And on the other hand, it's, I want my father to see these things and understand the damage that he caused. And in very small cases, that's possible where a father will be open to some type of reconciliation or understanding that maybe his parenting had flaws in it and that he caused some damage.

But very often, this is going to be a process of you going through a kind of ritual of expression, writing letters to him that you don't send, but that maybe you read off to your men's group, doing chair work, which is something that you can do in good therapy or coaching. There's many different ways of expression, right?

taking something that you've written out into the wilderness and speaking to a tree or an animal or something that represents father for you. So avoid bypassing this phase. This is going to be the thing that you least want to do because for a lot of men, there's some very intense emotions

The last thing you could do for this one is go to a men's weekend. I facilitate men's weekends. There's lots of men's weekends out there where you can go and do this type of work and actually forgive and let go and move forward from the pain that your father's caused you or inflicted directly or indirectly.

The next piece is differentiate the personal from the archetypal father. So again, Jung said that every man carries an eternal image of the father, not his personal father, but the actual archetype of the father. Now, I'm going to say this a different way, which is start fathering yourself. Go father yourself. What that means is instead of constantly comparing and connecting to the father that you had,

Begin to connect to the archetypal father, okay? Those are two different things, right? So the archetypal father you can think of as the ideal father, the ideal father that you held as an image in your head. And if you're not sure about that, you can go and study, right? You could go and look up and research archetypal father. There's many different symbols of that.

And that'll give you some insight into what you will likely need to do. Fathering yourself is a process, again, I outline it in my book, but it's a process where you start to teach yourself the things that you needed your father to teach you. You start to give yourself the things that you needed your father to give you. And you start to become the man that you as a boy needed.

You start to become the man that you as the boy needed. So you start to actually mature and develop yourself into the type of man that was the archetypal father that the young boy in you needed. So maybe that's compassionate, understanding, disciplined, ordered, structured, whatever it is, right? So starting to clarify what that looks like.

So what you'll want to do is ask yourself the question, what was the picture of the ideal father that I had as a boy? Or what did I ultimately need from a father, from the father, right? Or if I had the ideal father, what would I have wanted him to look like, sound like, and act and behave? And what would I have wanted him to teach me? Next, motivation.

And there's only two more pieces. Next is reclaim your inner sense of authority and structure. So part of the role of the father is to teach you as a man how to carry, be in relationship with your own potency, your own power, your own sense of authority, not just outside in the world, but actually within yourself.

so that you have some semblance of impulse control, that you are making healthy decisions for yourself. You're turning down, you can say no to the things that you're like, I know that this is unhealthy, this is not for me. So you begin to build an inner foundation. You cultivate self-discipline. You have a sense of meaning or purpose that you're moving towards.

And you begin to set more healthy, clear boundaries without them being hyper rigid. If you're battling with that rage and anger and tyranny and without being completely absent, if you're more in that sort of nice guy, meek orientation. And so as you do this, you start to reclaim a sense of,

My life is mine to design. My life is mine to build. I'm responsible for the life that I have. And you begin to systematically dismantle the blame that you have towards the father. And this is kind of what needs to happen. This is just an aside. This is kind of what needs to happen in a cultural sense within our society.

There's so much blame towards the archetypal father, towards the patriarchy, seeing it as the eternal problem. But there's actually no reconciliation. There's zero level of forgiveness. There's zero level of understanding. There's zero level of, I want to work to a place of reconciliation. There's actually just a mentality of kill and abolish.

kill and destroy the archetypal father. And so we don't want to do that with our dad. We don't want to do that with the image of our dad. What we want to do is find a way to move towards forgiveness, to move towards, even if you don't want to talk to your father, even if you don't want him in your life for whatever reason, maybe you have some good reasons for that, being able to find yourself in a place where you reclaim an inner sense of authority and

and structure and discipline to such a degree where you can write the relationship with him and say, you know what? I've become the father that I actually needed. I know what it's like to experience being the archetypal father, and I no longer need to carry and harbor resentment and anger and rage and disappointment towards you. I can understand those types of pieces. And then lastly is embody and integrate the

the healed father, embody and integrate the archetypal father. The goal of individuation and the process of individuation is the synthesis of the self. It's the coming together of all of our different parts.

And part of that is you beginning to, again, embody this archetypal father. So with time, you start to develop more wisdom. Your resentment and anger and frustration and the pain and the sadness and the shame that you carry because of the relationship with dad starts to dissipate, starts to lessen. Or at the very least, you become...

a man who does what your father could never do, which is that you become a vessel of knowing how to carry and interact with those very intense emotions in a way that doesn't bleed out over the people in your life. And that, for me, is really the crux of almost all of this. The father wound is a generational wound that is passed down.

Our fathers only hurt us. Your father only hurt you, almost inevitably because his father hurt him. It is almost like as close to a guarantee as I can give. And so we end this generational lineage of wounding the next generation of men and boys by becoming a man who

that not only has reverence and self-respect, but it becomes a man that knows how to carry his pain in such a way that it doesn't bleed out into the rest of our life, that it doesn't harm and hurt and damage

the people that are around us, because that is the real father wound of men. The father wound of men is that you as a man get wounded to such a degree that you take that pain out into the world and you wound those around you, men and women, boys and girls alike.

So we become somebody that doesn't pass that pain on. And that's what it really means to heal your father wound. That's what it really means to father yourself.

So don't forget to man it forward. There are likely so many men in your life that could use this message. Please man it forward to them. I know it's a little bit of a longer one, but I hope that you found value in this. Comment below whether you're on Spotify or on YouTube and let me know how this hit home for you. Until next week, Conor Beaton signing off.

Thank you.