Understanding Your Relationship with Your Dad

The qualities that make us the men that we are are largely attributable to the relationships that we have with our fathers. We take on mannerisms, traits, quirks, behaviors and emotions. Our intimate relationships, in many ways, are also results of our relationships with our fathers.Too many men have difficulties being the fathers that they should be to their sons.

Many times, they never got the right role modeling from their parents. Without the right tools, or no tools at all, problems get created. Men go on to have imperfect relationships, and don’t know how to be effective intimate partners to their wives and girlfriends.First, men learn from their fathers how to be emotionally withdrawn from their women. They learn from the environment they grew up in at home, over time, to shut down, stay in their heads and generally not be present to their feelings. This is the nucleus of the problem.

Men have learned a lot of negative coping skills to gets their needs and feelings met, and sometimes that comes out as anger, rage, substance abuse, violence, criticizing or judging, or just avoiding and withdrawing altogether from their women.Second, as children we model behavioral patterns from our parents. As boys, we model the ways of being in a relationship from our fathers (and mothers). Many times, our fathers never got it right, so we simply take from them what we see, because unconsciously, if we do what they did, we just might get our needs met after all.

This is child’s logic, and somewhere down the road, we fail to drop those tools when they don’t work for us anymore. As kids, they might have had some basic effectiveness, but now they just don't work anymore.The key is to understand and deal with these negative behavioral patterns, and the emotions that we avoid buried underneath. In seeing these, often for the first time, and experiencing them in the present moment unconditionally, they begin to transform themselves and set us free from the patterns that keep us stuck in conflict and unsatisfying relationships.

We can work towards freedom from these problems if we can first see them. Our fathers might not have been able to do it for themselves, but we can for ourselves.

We can change those relationships by digging deeper, so we don't have to create those same relationships for ourselves, and so the problems don't get handed down the generations again.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Men’s counseling , or if counseling might be right for you, please feel free to contact me directly or visit our Men’s counseling page for detail.