From the book “Wild at Heart” John Eldredge shared:
THE FATHER WOUND . . . . A man my father’s age told me of growing up during the depression; times were hard for his family, and his father, an alcoholic rarely employed, hired him out to a nearby farmer. One day, while he was in the field, he saw his father’s car pull up; he hadn’t seen him for weeks, and he raced to meet his dad. Before he could get there his father had grabbed the check for his son’s wages, and, spying the boy running toward him, he jumped in the car and sped away. The boy was five years old.
In the case of violent fathers, the boy’s question is answered in a devastating way. “Do I have what it takes? Am I a man Papa?” No you are a mama’s boy, an idiot, a faggot, a seagull. Those are defining sentences that shape a man’s life. The assault wounds are like a shotgun blast to the chest. This can get unspeakably evil if when it involves physical, sexual, or verbal abuse carried on for years. Without some kind of help, many men never recover. One thing about assault wounds—they are obvious. The passive wounds are not; they are pernicious, like a cancer. Because they are subtle, they often go unrecognized as wounds and therefore are actually more difficult to heal.
My father was in many ways a good man. He introduced me to the West and taught me to fish and camp. I still remember the fried egg sandwiches he would make us for dinner. It was his father’s ranch that I worked on each summer, and my dad and I saw a lot of the West together as we’d make the long drive from southern California to Oregon, often with fishing detours through Idaho and Montana. But like so many men of his era, my father had never faced the issues of his own wounds, and he fell to drinking when his life took a downhill turn. I was eleven or twelve when at the time—a very critical age in the masculine journey, the age when the question really begins to surface. At the very moment when I am desperately wondering what it means to be a man, and do I have what it takes, my father checked out, went silent. He had a workshop out back, attached to the garage, and he would spend hours out there alone, reading, doing crossword puzzles, and drinking. That is a major wound.
As Bly says, “Not receiving any blessing from your father is an injury . . . Not seeing your father when you are small, never being with him, having a remote father, a workaholic father is an injury.” My friend Alex’s father died when he was four years old. The sun is his universe set, never to rise again. How is a little boy ever to understand that? Every afternoon Alex would stand by the front window, waiting for his father to come home. This went on for almost a year. I’ve had many clients whose fathers simply left and never came back. Stuarts father did that, just up and left, and his mother, a troubled woman, was unable to raise him. So he was sent to his aunt and uncle. Divorce or abandonment is a wound that lingers because the boy (or girl) believes that if they has done things better, Daddy would have stayed.
Some fathers give a wound merely by their silence; they are present yet absent to their sons. The silence is deafening. I remember as a boy wanting my father to die, and feeling immense guilt for such a desire. I understand now that I wanted someone to validate the wound. My father was gone, but because he was still physically around, he was not gone. So I lived with a wound that no one could see or understand. In the case of silent, passive or absent fathers, the question goes unanswered. “Do I have what it takes? Am I a man, Daddy?” Their is the answer: “I don’t know . . . I doubt it . . . you’ll have to find out for yourself . . . probably not.”
THE WOUND’S EFFECT . . . . Every man carries a wound. I have never met a man without one. No matter how good your life may have seemed to you, you live in a broken world of broken people. Your mother and father, no matter how wonderful, couldn’t have been perfect. She is a daughter of Eve and he is a son of Adam. So there is no crossing through this country without taking a wound. And every wound, whether it’s assault or passive, delivers with it a message. The message feels final and true, absolutely true, because it’s delivered with such force. Our reaction to it shapes our personality to it in very significant ways. From that flows the false self. Most of the men you meet are living out a false self, a pose, which is directly related to his wound. Let me try to make this clear.
The message delivered with my wound (my father disappearing into his own battles) was simply this: Your are on your own, John. There is no one in your corner, no one to show you the way and above all, no one to tell you if you are or are not a man. The core question has no answer and can never get one. What does a boy do with that? First, I became an unruly teen. I got kicked out of school, had a police record. We often misunderstand that behavior as “adolescent rebellion,” but those are cries for involvement, for engagement. ~~ John Eldredge, Wild at Heart, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, p. 70-72
