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Larry Pesavento is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, a therapist, an author and the Founder of CHRISTOS - A Center for Men located in Cincinnati, Ohio.
"In 1993 Larry Pesavento started CHRISTOS men's center to help initiate a dialogue about how a man in this confusing, elderless world can find a sense of identity, place and pride. He had been counseling men for close to 25 years and learned from their struggles as well as his own. He then decided to write a book about the internal journey that a man must take in order to find a sense of peace and generativity. He felt called to write this book to share what he had learned as part of his own journey and struggle with manhood.
For more info about Larry Pesavento, visit his web-site, http://www
.christoscenter
.com/
E-mail:
MENSIGHT will publish a chapter each month and we would like for you to submit suggestions and discuss your opinions on our Men's Issues Forum.
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Chapter 6 - The Age of the Father (Part 2)
Creating a Father
An uninitiated, traditional father will ignore his son because he is in pursuit of patriarchal masculinity. He does not know better. Yet he unknowingly abandons his son, withholding the needed masculine energy. Because of the boy's hardwired need for the masculine, he will go elsewhere, randomly picking up bits and pieces of masculine stuff from his environment. He will imagine what being manly is. He will create a montage of masculinity as his model, like a lifeless poster hung on the wall in his bedroom. In the words of Frank Pittman, "Without a 'father in residence', we may go through life striving toward an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity."
The uninitiated son of an absent father will imagine what a good father is. He will long to have this imagined father as an answer to the emptiness he feels inside. He will also long for this masculine figure to bring him along the way to manhood. He finds that the bits and pieces of masculine energy he picks up from older men is not enough to fill his void or guide him on his way. He will ceaselessly look for other answers.
Many times this answer will translate into a young man's desire to become a good father himself. Some men try to get a good father by being a good father. They unconsciously try to create the family they never had. They eventually become both father and son. Thus, they try to achieve manhood through their family and their fathering.
These men, though following a traditional path, have added a new twist to the modern father's role. This baby boom twist is often a wonderful benefit to their children, especially their sons. These modern fathers are changing the traditional Victorian role by putting a lot of effort into childraising and a lot of love into their children. They are getting close to their children. They seem to be drawing on some deeper archetypal father energy in getting closer to their children. They are also drawing on the best parts of their own father's lives. More importantly, they are learning from their own pain of growing up.
This new form of involved fatherhood is a crucial cultural addition. Many modern fathers need both support and praise for this fathering work. Though there is a ways to go, these fathers are giving significantly more masculine energy, especially to their sons. They are also giving their daughters a good foundation of self-esteem and self-confidence. They are good fathers.
In the process these men are also unconsciously providing some healthy fathering energy for the boy inside themselves. This is a form of second fathering that is more and more prevalent in today's world. It can bring a man farther along his path than the traditional father can. These men have a closer tie to childhood as well as their own sons. They give their boy inside some exposure to the fathering they didn't have. I will talk more about second fathering in a subsequent chapter.
Unfortunately these fathers give much more to their sons than they are able to give to their boy inside. Their own father emptiness is still not filled. This emptiness most often comes out in the lack of a healthy, passionate relationship with a wife, who still is more of a mother. It also comes out in the confusion these fathers feel when their own sons become adolescents and need help in career choice and life direction.
Mack
Mack grew up the youngest boy in a large family, with a father who was gruff, opinionated, hard working, and traditionally absent because of a blue collar job. Mack learned to work hard and to have high standards, as his father did. MackÕs father taught him to be in the "99th percentile of competitiveness." Mack identified with his father and idolized him. Mack also knew he was his father's favorite, which made much of Mack's childhood a happy time.
Unfortunately, Mack's father died when Mack was 14. Mack's siblings were older and out of the house. He was stuck with a mother who thought of him as her least favorite, and who was exhausted by life and grief. As often happens, Mack's fragile mother started looking to Mack for support, as well as for the manliness his father provided to the family. Mack was not ready to be the emotional head of the household and take his father's place. This was too much responsibility much too early.
Emotionally, Mack was stuck. All he knew of manhood, through his father, was to work hard, both at home and on the job, and provide for the family. Mack honored his father by becoming very responsible for his mother, his younger sister, and their house. By doing so he had to skip the whole stage of healthy adolescence, the tweens. Like many men in our society, he felt forced to become a man before his time. He had no older men who cared enough to help him prepare for his manhood or help him shoulder responsibility.
His detour was more exaggerated than most. It kept him from dating and experimenting with friendship and vocation. Mack put himself through college with high marks, while holding jobs and living at home. He then got married in his early twenties, shortly after his mother died.
Freed of one huge responsibility he knew only one way to be a man. He took on more responsibilities. This was his father's map of manhood. He and his wife started having children immediately.. Mack continued to need a father, so he became a father right away. He worked hard to provide for his children. He put all his energy into his career and the financial success it brought. He knew no other way of being a man.
Mack was well on his way to becoming a work addicted father and provider when, at age 32, he lost his executive position because of company politics. He was devastated. He went into a serious depression. He suffered a humiliating separation. The separation was from the father, the father that he thought he was to his family and the father his own father expected him to be. He was thrown, unguided, into the confusing, terrifying ordeal. He didn't realize that most of his depression was the initiatory depression following separation. Instead he saw himself as a failure in his own eyes, which were the eyes of his father.
The necessary father separation happened without preparation for the ordeal ahead. In this crisis, he desperately started to reach out to other men for advice and counsel. Men who have absent fathers find this much easier to do than men who have competitive fathers. Mack also found enough strength to come to counseling. He needed a second father, then an elder, to prepare him for this ordeal and guide him through it. Mack's own fathering was an unfinished bridge to his manhood. His father gave him good market skills such as focus, a good work ethic, and high quality standards. His father taught him that the product was worth some pain. Mack's own efforts at being a good father had built more of that bridge. However, he needed more fathering to prepare him for his next steps.
Mack had enough trust in fathering to reach out to other men, including a counselor who could talk to him about father wounds and father healing. Mack started to understand he needed more healthy fathering to help him sort out his role as father and husband. He needed to experience alternative ways of being masculine, other than his father's way. He also needed fathering to restore his confidence in his abilities in the professional world. Down the line he also came to understand he needed eldering to help him reevaluate his life direction.
In his depression Mack had started paying more attention to his children and less to his career. Mack became an attentive father to his children, not leaving them like he was left. He tried to make them feel special, as special as he felt when he was a child. He came to understand that he was unconsciously trying to get fathering by being a loving father. He was understanding his children's need in his own pain. He started to realize that, in his own need for acceptance, he was also feeling his children's need. His involvement with his children taught him that love was more than providing an impersonal standard. He learned that children need a father close, so they can feel his care and experience his personal guidance.
The emphasis, today, on men becoming more active in the lives of their children is a hopeful movement both from the view of the children as well as the man. A society that starts to value a father's role in childraising will begin to make the positive father archetype available to all its sons. Hopefully, more and more men will see the importance of fathering young men regardless of relationship. In the process they will realize their own need for the answers to manhood, beyond the patriarchal ones.
The Competitive Father
Much of the men's movement talks of the absent father, away at work or reading the paper. This father has little to say to his son and is a mystery to his family. However there is a whole other class of father that is more involved with his son, but in a dark, negative way. This uninitiated father competes with his son. As we will see, the patriarchy is based on this competitive father, using his son for his own needs. Yet many men are also personally affected by their own competitive father in ways that block their journey to manhood.
Competition between father and son is as old as Greek myths and as new as Freudian psychology. In her book, Gods in Everyman, Jean Shinoda Bolen points out how ancient myths have a personal relationship to menÕs lives today. She, like Joseph Campbell and other mythologists, emphasizes the fact that cultural myths contain a great deal of psychological truth. In her book she shows how myth tells us a great deal about the archetypes that modern men enact every day.
Bolen feels that Greek mythology contains most of the psychological foundations for Western civilization. As she says, "I think of Greek mythology as going back to a time that was equivalent to the childhood of our civilization." And Greek myth starts with father competition.
Uranus, the first god and father, was the sky god. Gaia, the first mother, was the earth goddess. They mated and gave issue to the Titans. As Gaia then continued to give birth, Uranus became jealous of Gaia because of the children she continued to bear. Uranus started kidnapping and hiding Gaia's children and would not let them see the light of day.
Gaia was devastated. She turned to her grown sons, the Titans, for help. However they were paralyzed by fear of their father. Only Cronus, the youngest Titan, agreed to help. Cronus and Gaia conspired to emasculate Uranus and free the earth's children. Bolen states that it was "Uranus' violence against his children (that was) the initial evil." Father competition came to spawn the violence of the world. Uranus was the first perpetrator as well s the first victim.
Cronus then became the patriarchal god. However, Cronus was forewarned that he was destined to be overcome by his own son. Cronus determined that this would not happen. He followed his dark father's script. He swallowed each of his children after birth, not even bothering to see if the child was a son or daughter. And the competition continued.
Zeus was one of Cronus' sons who was able to escape being eaten by the help of another goddess. He ultimately overthrew Cronus and the rest of the Titans to become supreme god himself. As Bolen says, "Violence had begotten violence for three generations."
There is also another Greek myth that relates to father competition. Freud was the pioneer psychologist who talked of the Oedipal struggle for a young boy. This psychological struggle was based on the myth of Oedipus, who eventually and unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud stated that a son would naturally come in competition with his father for his motherÕs attention. If a son did not give up this need to have his mother to himself he would run up against an angry, powerful father. Since a boy was much smaller and more vulnerable than his father, the wise and healthy son, according to Freud, would give up his mother need and align with his father. He would then identify with his father's dreams and desires. In this way a son would avoid being destroyed by the competitive father.
In Freud's view this alliance with father, through fear, was a good thing, since it bolstered the patriarchal culture of obedience to the fathers. As we will see, identifying with the aggressive, competitive father, without separation, is not necessarily a good thing.
Many men have a difficult time, as Uranus and Tim did, at the birth of their first child. The attention, nurturing and concern that they had gotten from a mother object suddenly leaves as the mother turns her attention to the infant. The husband, turned father, can find himself feeling abandoned and jealous. Unless the father is initiated he will see a son as a competitor. Resentment builds toward the infant, a resentment which can go on throughout that child's life. The son of a competitive father can feel that resentment in the form of competitive criticism and demeaning behavior. Demeaning behavior can turn into emotional and physical abuse. The father can feel that he can find manhood by vanquishing his son. In this way he thinks he can win back the mother.
This abuse cycle is probably the most wounding a son can experience. However, there is a way out of this cycle for the son and the competitive father. It is Freud's answer. But the price is great. In the competition the son can let the father win. Any success the son does get he offers up to his father. Unconsciously, the son honors his father by honoring his father's dreams. The son lives his life for his father. In this way the father is not threatened and the son feels safe. The son identifies with the competitive father and seeks manhood through that model. In this way the son also feels close to his father. In effect the competitive father uses the son to live his own dream and to make himself look like a man. The father can get a sense of pseudo-manhood by feeling responsible for his son's success. In turn the son will identify with his father and his father's dreams as the only way he knows to get the fathering he needs.
Most sons of competitive fathers will be extremely focused and motivated. They will be driven. Their focus will be hard on money, status, or whatever constitutes the father's dreams. They will be unconsciously living the father's script. They will not have taken time in their lives to have considered their own dreams.
If a boy does not succeed in living his father's dreams, the father may put him down unmercifully, punishing him for frustrating his father. This is the son who is driven back to the mother object, usually in the form of an addiction. He is the man who gives up. For he has only one ideal, and that is unreachable. He has only one road to manhood, a road he cannot negotiate.
However, if the son succeeds in his father's dreams both can reach their goal. The father feels successful, and the son feels secure in a ready made identity. Loyalty to a father is not a bad thing, but after a certain point there is a high price. The price the son pays is the relinquishment of his own vision and the path to his own identity. He lives someone else's identity. He is the one who, at mid-life, most profoundly feels the "failure of success". He is the one who gets stuck in his father's world, never able to separate and find his own manhood through his own ordeal. For the competitive father never lets go.
Don's Father
Don was an airplane pilot. His father was a successful corporate executive. His mother was a woman with little motherly instincts and a need for recognition and attention. She had a great need for her family to be seen as a traditional, happy one. She also had a great investment in DonÕs success, since that would prove they were a successful family.
Don's father was absent a lot from his son's life, though he was home with the family when not working. His father's world seemed to revolve around Don's mother. His father was alternately arguing with his wife and boosting her ego. He had little attention left over for Don. Don remembers his boyhood years as lonely, because his father and mother spent much of their time with his younger sister or with each other. Don talked of some "mystical power" his mother had over his dad, keeping him close to her and away from Don. Don felt the power over himself, too.
Don's father always wanted to be a pilot, a dream he never realized. This wish was probably one way of symbolizing his need to leave the mother object and try his initiatory ordeal. Don also found himself wanting to be a pilot, partly to honor his fatherÕs dream, partly to get more of the fathering he needed.
Don identified with his father's corporate success as well as his dreams of being a pilot. He was able to get into the Air Force and become the pilot he always wanted to be. However, Don's dreams didn't turn out as expected. He got no closer to his father. In fact, his father seemed less interested in his success the more his mother showed her adulation.
Graduation from pilot training symbolized his family life. His mother didn't come because of illness. The illness must have been real because Don was the hero of the family and this was the family's triumph. His father didn't come, presumably to take care of his mother. In fact, his father hardly showed any notice of Don's considerable accomplishment. It seems his father couldn't accept his son's success, as a Champion Father would. Neither could his father leave his mother object to acknowledge his biggest competitor.
Don became a successful corporate man, flying for a major airline. He married and had two children. At age 38, he came to counseling. He was finding it hard as a copilot to bond with the captains of his airplanes. He found himself irritable and competitive with them. He also found himself very angry when they became competitive with him. This made his work life very uncomfortable much of the time.
In his work he also found himself unable to connect with other men in the company. He tended to be either aloof or distrustful of their friendships. He didn't know how to trust other men, though he was a man who could be trusted. He found himself uncomfortable in their presence, yet wanting their friendship.
Don's father wounds came out in his problems with bonding with other men, a typical response from men with competitive fathers. His father wounds kept him from connecting with brothers who could be male friends and allies. He was again feeling the desolation of his childhood, even though he had a family who loved him. He was the empty hero. He felt successful and alone. It took him a long time to trust me as a counselor and second father, in order to start healing his father wounds.
The Sins of the Father
If a father is not initiated, he provides a son with a faulty model of adulthood. All our fathers have unknowingly colluded in creating our faulty training manuals. This fault is the origin of the father wound. We are all heirs of this wound, passed on from father to son for many generations. The wound acts like an original sin that is born in our souls as the body emerges from conception. This wound can go down many generations.
I have worked with many men who have struggled with the wounds from their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Often they live what seems their personal tragedy, when it is really the family tragedy of many generations. Sons wrestle with the same demons of their ancestors without realizing the root of their struggle. Most of us have been wounded by fathers who, in turn, have been wounded by their fathers. Most of our fathers were well-meaning but naive. Some were desperate and competitive. Others were wounded so deeply they knew only how to abuse and control others to take away their pain.
Many of us saw our father's lives as unhappy and wanted none of it, losing masculine energy in the process. We ceased to look to our father for his strength. In fact we feared we would end up living a life like his. Some of us have wanted to live our father's lives, only to find that life somehow empty. We thought our fathers had the answers, only to find they felt as empty as us.
Most of our fathers have been absent fathers, absent in ways we needed. Yet we all have an urgent need for father energy. The road to manhood goes through a father. In the absence of our own father's good energy we have learned to take up pieces of masculine energy from places beyond our family. Our hardwired need eventually forces most men to identify with the masculine energy emanating from the father culture around us. In a sense we have all been forced to identify with this competitive father, that is the patriarchy. We look to the patriarchy to initiate us. If we don't identify with the patriarchy we risk not being considered men by family, friends, society. When we do identify we become competitive, or a failure.
In this culture there is little idea of the need for fathering other than patriarchal fathering. And there is no thought of a step beyond the patriarchy. So men get stuck in the village with divided loyalties, loyal to a mother object at home and to a patriarchy in the marketplace. Neither of these loyalties gives him the direction he needs. Neither parent figure points to a reality beyond the village. The next chapter talks of how we are all forced into pseudo-initiation by a patriarchal society, in the absence of a healthy, initiated father presence.
Larry Pesavento and MENSIGHT ask you to submit suggestions and discuss your opinions on our Men's Issues Forum.
Larry Pesavento ©2004
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