Fatherhood, Authenticity and Self-Care

Noel Coakley is a psychotherapist, meditation teacher, partner, and father. Noel brings a down-to-earth approach to the intersection of Western psychology and Buddhist philosophy. You can find him at the Boston Center for Contemplative Practice and learn more about his upcoming meditation retreat to Costa Rica here.

For all of its moments of joy and awe, parenthood is hard.

What’s even harder for many of us is talking about it - expressing the difficulty in a healthy way and finding outlets to do so. Also, the practice of self care while mainly orienting to taking care of others can pose additional challenges. These two are intimately connected.

Simply expressing difficult feelings can be a mixed bag for many of us. Unless one has grown up in an environment where feelings were seen, welcomed, and their expression encouraged, it can be difficult to trust that this is a safe practice. Doing so may have actually come with negative reinforcement. Without vilifying prior generations entirely, we can broadly say that it’s possible that there just wasn’t the skill set to handle it and respond with what was needed.

‘Be a man’

For those of us who grew up identified as male, there have been historically implicit or direct messages about how one expresses oneself. The old ‘boys don’t cry’ and expression is weakness has done a drastic disservice to our communities.

It’s important to acknowledge the innumerable historical privileges in society when presenting as male. This problematic, patriarchal philosophy that fosters such privileges is also the source and cause of the suppression of authentic self-expression in the name of rigid gender roles and capitalism/productivity. This can been found on the broader social level, the family level, and then internally within the individual.

Break up the pattern

In the absence of this aspect of education, we’re left with two choices - continue the pattern or learn how to heal this within ourselves. We must first learn to be authentic - to be fully real about how are at any moment, to be fully ourselves.

This first takes practice in simply bringing awareness to our experiences. To be real about how we’re doing, we have to know how we’re doing. Already, this can present its challenges. We are often worried about how everyone else is doing. We are perhaps practiced at suppressing how we are doing to get through the day. So, it takes some training to re-orient to this.

How do we start?

Practices like mindfulness can help train our attention toward what we are thinking and feeling at any given time. This can feel vulnerable at first, especially if it feels like it will come at the cost of being able to care for others, if there is fear of negative feedback for feelings, and if there is fear that if we actually go there that it will become unmanageable. So, it takes some practice to get to the point that we can trust feeling without negative consequence.

Regularly checking in with others, particularly those we can trust to have supportive responses - partners, friends, professional supports - can also be a way to check in with how we are doing out loud. Again, if this has historically come with anything less than positive feedback and encouragement, it can feel incredibly vulnerable to do. This will shift with practice. The more opportunities we have to do so that come with validation, encouragement, and affirmation will lead to corrective emotional experiences - a re-writing of the internal programming that tells us ‘this is a bad idea to talk about.’

Familiarizing ourselves with an attitude of unconditional love

We can look at this all though the idea of developing unconditional love for oneself for the sake of also being able to do so for others. This is what I mean when saying that we either have the choice to repeat it and pass it on to the next generation or to interrupt the pattern.

Most have learned some form of conditional love, meaning there were certain ‘conditions’ - expectations of behavior, absence of certain behaviors, roles to play, things that could be or shouldn’t be expressed. Not maintaining these conditions might have meant causing difficult situations in early relationships. So, many of us have had to learn to suppress what we need or what we are feeling, authentically, in order to meet the conditions to keep stability in the caregiver relationships. We can build our entire personalties and ways of operating in the world around this.

Begin unlearning the conditionality

So what is our unlearning? Letting go of strict adherence to the roles (conditions) we think we need to play and express in exchange for re-learning listening to ourselves (authenticity). It starts with bringing basic attention to our existence. Then, a little deeper, we bring attunement to our internal state. Furthermore, we have to honor what we find and respond accordingly in order to give it any power and avoid learned helplessness. For example, when we tune in, we may find that we’re feeling a bit burned out. That becomes empowered if we actually respond by taking a break versus just plowing through, which reinforces the idea that how we are feeling is irrelevant. This is where the awareness and expression of how we are doing moves into the coping skills and self care territory. We have to develop the unconditionally loving perspective that what we are feeling is important, it is worth expression, and that it is worth taking care of.

It’s truly not until we can develop this for ourselves that we are able to fully do it for others skillfully. We can definitely be completely focused on others, but it will lead to burnout and also is bypassing cleaning up the conditionally loving relationship we are playing out internally, which inevitably gets replicated externally. In other words, we internalized a certain way of responding to our experiences from those in our early life, continue that with ourselves, and then continue it with others.

This is true unless or until the pattern is disrupted. Easier said than done, of course, but entirely possible. It’s important to recognize that this may be disrupting a pattern that goes back more generations than can be counted. It’s got some momentum, no doubt. It seems easier, in the short run, to not fight it and let things continue. But, we know deep down that this makes things much harder in the long run and continues it for the next generation. The flip side of this pattern going back further than we can see is that putting in the work to disrupt it will have a positive effect for more generations to come - for your children’s children’s grandchildren. Keeping this in mind can be helpful when generating the motivation and energy to disrupt strong patterns.

It’s a tall order. But you can do it.

It starts by paying attention. That’s it. How are you doing? Can you perhaps express that? Can you respond lovingly to what you find and take care of yourself? Can you hold whatever you find as welcome, acceptable,  and fundamentally lovable, as you would with your kiddo? Can you let go of the patterned reactivity that perpetuates toxic masculinity and inauthenticity through the generations?