To all the men today who think they are a shit dad, I see you through me.
I see what constraints you are living with, between your childhood trauma and the toxic culture that has relegated us to the dustbin of the heartless-provider1. It’s very fucking hard to be compassionate and kind and patient with our kids today when generations behind us were not these things: we didn’t have the role models.
I understand, as you do, that not having the role models doesn’t excuse us from the responsibility to be the good-hearted men we know our kids need. We understand it’s not our fault that our parents didn’t love us the way we needed, but we also understand it’s our responsibility to find the love we need to give ourselves and our kids.
That though, is so fucking hard, especially in our culture, alone, divided, “the village” now a legend we hear about from traditional societies and pre-industrial Europe. It’s really really hard to act and live from our higher true self (where compassion and kindness are the default reactions) when our conditioning and ego and trauma is running the show most of the time because our nervous systems are fried and our default reactions are non-constructive, damaging, traumatising.
It’s very fucking hard to be aware enough, awake enough, and self-compasionate enough to not pass on the trauma we are carrying from generations past. It takes work to reconnect with our true self enough that our default reactions transform out of destructive habitual maladaptions into constructive and compassionate active responses.
On the journey of trauma recovery and conscious evolution, we are gradually ascending in a spiral that brings us inexorably closer to reacting with compassion as a default because that’s all our true self knows. But it’s a journey and a spiral, meaning we have to go through the same tests and lessons over and over again, learning something new each time, and evolving if we are aware of where we tripped up last time.
If you’re doing this, then you’re on the right track and you’re a much-better dad than you are probably giving yourself credit for.
Taking responsibility for your own love and healing and evolution is the absolute best fathering a man can do, because without that our kids are just getting some performance of what we think a father should be and that’s only ever going to be disingenuous, dishonest, not real.
Be your flaws and do the work of overcoming them, of recovering from and transforming trauma and becoming whole again, and know that you’re setting an example of a man who takes genuine happiness seriously and will not settle for some performance of happiness we copied from a fucking beer ad or something.
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I made a video of this post because I know that some folk out there just can’t do reading sometimes and I wanted this compassion missive to reach as many as possible 👇🏼
- What I mean by this is that we have been conditioned to provide materially for our families, at the expense of our own hearts and we are now expected to be loving and compassionate fathers despite having those parts of us conditioned out of us by culture. We were made into worker drones to serve the industrial economy and now we are trying to find our hearts again. ↩︎
Kokoro 心 Heart 