As I wrote in my previous post, men have a harder time with regret than women. sex socialization.
However, over the years in my work with fathers, I’ve been able to develop a series of exercises that help them think through and understand regrets, rather than shield them from them. This, in turn, can help them grow, heal, and experience a new sense of hope and purpose as fathers, even when the day-to-day parents came to his conclusion.
In this article and the ones that follow, I’ll share some of those exercises and some examples of how dads have used them to their psychological advantage.
What was happening inside me?
Pick a parenting moment that you regret, but instead of judging or blaming yourself, take a moment to think about the following questions:
- What did I feel at that moment?
- Who or what am I afraid of?
- Who or what was I trying to protect or save?
- What was I hoping to accomplish by acting/sounding?
- Did my sorry reply help in any way to get this done?
- It somehow triggered my memories self childhood or adolescence?
- Whose voice was I using – my own or someone else’s, maybe someone from my childhood?
- How would I have preferred to handle the situation? What do I wish I had done differently?
Dennis, a 62-year-old father, met me a few months after his oldest son, Luke, left home for college. While he was proud of Luke, he thought about a particularly rough patch in their relationship during the winter of Luke’s junior year in high school.
At that time, Denis and his wife received a call from the assistant director that Denis was selling it. Adderall medication prescribed for his ADHD and suspended from school for a week. Not only were they upset that he was involved in illegal drug dealing, but they were angry that he was not taking drugs. medicine.
When Luke returned from school, Dennis berated him and called him horrible names, knocked him down “forever,” took Luke’s wallet and confiscated his new driver’s license, and then ignored him for several days.
“I don’t believe some of the things I said to him, I called him a loser, a criminal, I said that he should be locked up, I said that he shamed the whole family, he ruined the reputation of his younger brother, I completely lost touch with him, and then I didn’t talk to him for a week. The thing is to him I couldn’t even view to him! It was a terrible time” …
Gradually, Dennis told me, things began to improve and, in a general sense, the tension subsided. Dennis and Luke’s relationship slowly thawed, Dennis and his wife closely monitored Luke’s medication to make sure he took it as prescribed and didn’t split it, Luke’s baseball season began and the school year ended on a high note.
Luke’s senior year also went relatively smoothly, and Dennis and his wife were happy that he had been accepted into one of the colleges he wanted to attend. While he graduated with a lower GPA than they wanted, at least there were no other legal or disciplinary problems.
However, Dennis was not proud of himself and his family for successfully overcoming this turmoil. In a way, this crisis was literally “buried alive” with little discussion or research left behind.
So it was no surprise that Dennis, more than a year later, was still consumed by his self loathing for his volcanic reaction and the hurtful things he said to Luke because nothing was ever done.
With that in mind, we started working through the questions I posed above:
- What did I feel at that moment?
“Well, all I remember is pure emotion, hot anger, just seeing red angeranger, rage, that was all…”
- Who or what am I afraid of?
“That’s a good question. I guess I’m scared of what’s going on with Luke. How can my son be a drug dealer? What’s going to happen to him? Will he go to jail? Will he ever graduate?”
Essential reading for parents
- Who or what was I trying to protect or save?
“I guess I was trying to protect Luke. From further trouble. From digging a hole for myself. From ruining his future.”
- What was I hoping to accomplish by acting/sounding?
“I guess that’s how I’d answer it: I was trying to get Luke to change his ways, to think about his actions and not do stupid things. To ‘scare him straight’ as they say.”
- Did my sorry reply help in any way to get this done?
“I really don’t know. I still feel terrible about it. On the other hand, after my outburst, things went back to normal, and there were no further violations. But all I remember is the look of horror on Luke’s face when I scolded him. He looked angry.”
- In what ways did it bring back memories of my childhood or adolescence?
“Oh, absolutely. My younger brother Will got into all kinds of trouble as a teenager and it took him a long time to get out of it. He was a mess for a while, even start He didn’t graduate from college until he was 20, and even then it took him about 8 years to graduate. Now that I think about it, there are actually some similarities between Luke and my brother. “
- Whose voice was I using – my own or someone else’s, maybe someone from my childhood?
“Well, it was definitely my own voice, that’s for sure. I can still hear myself yelling. But my dad always yelled at Will when he was in trouble, so it’s possible I was channeling his voice, too.”
- How would I have preferred to handle the situation? What do I wish I had done differently?
“One thing is for sure, I never asked him why he was doing this. I was so angry that I wasn’t even curious. I still don’t know what was going on for him, but I wish I had taken the time to ask.”
In the next article, I will discuss the ways in which Dennis’s self-awareness put him on the path to greater empathy and improved father-son relationships.
