It is easy to get stuck in complaints about the father you never got or in blaming the father figure you did get for not giving you the thing you needed and wanted. And while it is important to understand what went on back then (and what coping mechanisms you adopted to survive those circumstances), it is equally important to learn how to provide that missing “thing” for yourself. Now that you are an adult, no parent, no friend, no addiction, and certainly no “one-and-only” can provide that “thing” for you now.

How do you provide that missing male role-modeling for yourself? By this I do NOT mean some stereotypical, broadly defined ideal of what your culture tells you a man should be. The male role model you will provide yourself with will be the very specific kind of father figure that you need—a male role model for someone with your particular personality, quirks, and needs. For some, that might be a more involved father; for most, I suspect, a more tender and open one. And why not a father who would help and encourage you to grow and blossom in your own particular way—be it gay, straight, trans, bi, queer, or any shade in-between? What’s more, that father figure would be teaching you and reinforcing in you what it means for YOU to be a man with strength and self-confidence.

Here are some steps to working on creating your own positive father energy. The first step is to reclaim your inner child:

1. First make a connection with your wounded inner child, the son who felt rejected by his father, and develop a clear image of who you were before the blows of rejection fell, your likes and dislikes, interests, passions, talents—your shining.
2. Reinvigorate that inner child by doing something you used to like to do, a form of play or creativity (games, hobbies, activities, interests, etc.) and make a regular practice of it.
3. Explore the reasons why you cut off that vulnerable, innocent, and playful side of yourself. Think about the messages you received from your real father—or the fathers in the world around you then. Focus on ways in which those hurts are still holding you back or causing certain thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors.
4. Imagine your own ideal, fantasy father with whom you can have an inner dialogue. Ask yourself, “If I had grown up with my ideal, fantasy Dad, who would he have been and what would he have taught me? What would he have instilled in me?” Make sure your fantasy dad shares your sexuality and sexual orientation. For him to properly affirm who you are, you need to be confident that he understands you and your experiences, physical, mental, emotional, and sexual, and has shared many of them himself.
5. Take steps to enhance your self-love. Use daily affirmations, change negative habits and mindsets, become aware of your fundamental emotional, psychological, and physical needs. Converse with your new inner dad, who only wants you to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

While the steps given here appear in brief, outline form, the work involved in each one of them can be quite activating, often triggering episodes of anxiety or depression. Try to work on this process with a trained mental health professional. Together you will discover that your inner Dad can be even more powerful than you’d imagined.

For detailed help in formulating and creating your personalized father figure and how to make use of him, a self-directed online course is available through www.fatherfigures.info.

Photo by Harika G on Unsplash

A boy with a negative father complex has trouble creating his own internal schedule and disciplining himself. He doesn’t like setting goals or making choices because he will have to hold himself to them. He will often have trouble identifying his own needs and can lose sight of his inner strength, strength that is rooted in primitive energy and natural male aggression.

Research shows that sons who do not receive adequate fathering, or who find male authority unworthy of respect, often have unsteady self-esteem and repress aggressiveness, ambition, and inquisitiveness. Absence of authority during early childhood—or inability to respect whatever authority figure there is—creates problems with authority as an adult.

Inadequately fathered boys often rebel against the patriarchal system, possibly leading to such extremes as addiction, sex work, and crime. Other typical long-term psychological effects of a negative father complex are childhood abuse (resulting in PTSD), depression, anxiety, anger and tantrums, passive-aggressive behaviors, procrastination, low self-esteem, abandonment fears, inability to self-discipline, emotional numbness, and self-sabotage through self-denigration, isolation, relationship problems, or inability to hold boundaries.

What else can be an indication of lack of father energy? Dependencies, legal and financial problems, relationship problems, career problems, anything that has to do with self-control. When we make ourselves do something that we do not want to do, father energy teaches us to persevere. It prompts us to keep working on something even when we are not feeling particularly inspired. It shows us how to take pride in a job well done or a career accomplishment. Without knowing how to take pride in our accomplishments, we can spend our lives looking for and living for the approval of others.

What makes a father figure different from a mother figure? You can thank evolution for that. Back in our prehistoric days, physiology and survival ruled. For millions of years, testosterone-based humans had one role in the community and estrogen-based humans had another. Over the millennia, fathers and sons, just like mothers and daughters, came to have particular sets of roles and expectations of life, and especially around child rearing: In self-help book terms, mother figures were supposed to teach us unconditional love; father figures conditional love. Both types of love are necessary for success, self-esteem, and self-control.
A father figure’s “conditionality” is always counterbalanced by affection. However, this does not mean that love outweighs the necessity of learning some hard lessons. Archetypal father energy is supposed to teach self-discipline, especially in the case of delaying gratification for a larger goal. Father energy sets limits and enforces boundaries. Such basic life skills are so fundamental to psychological development that they cannot be learned in the same way and at such depth at a later age.

Father figures are expected to—with affection—set conditions and goals for sons. Furthermore, they are supposed to teach their sons how to achieve those goals and to provide affirmation and love when their sons achieve their goals. This way they are teaching their sons to work hard and delay gratification for end results. This also teaches them the need for and the practice of patience and self-discipline, which ultimately lead to wisdom.

A strong, mature father figure also shows a boy how to deal with his own testosterone-based aggressiveness, his sexuality, his sense of exploration, and his ability to balance wants and needs against shoulds and shouldn’ts.

We all want unconditional love. We want to hear words like, “I love you no matter what you do or who you are.” Unconditional love is sought after as the highest kind of love. In the world of archetypes, it is the kind of love that easily forgives, eases the way, constantly praises, and gives you whatever you want to make you feel good. In short, a mother’s love. It is this kind of love that, left unchecked and unbalanced, produces laziness and inability to accept responsibility.

Unconditional love needs to be counterbalanced by conditional love. Conditional love says, “You need to do something and then I will show you I love you and reward you.” Conditional love teaches us to keep promises, set limits, delay gratification, and enforce boundaries. With conditional love comes learning, abstract thinking, and the desire to accomplish. Teaching ourselves the lessons of conditional love is the work of a lifetime for boys who lacked a nurturing father.

Since we cannot go back in time and change our fathers or our childhood experiences with them, how then do we provide that “father energy” for ourselves now? How do we learn to father ourselves? What are the guidelines for reparenting ourselves? How do we supplant the negative inner parental voices with a positive one? “The challenge for men with missing fathers,” writes Corbeau, “is to themselves become the fathers they lacked.”

Here are some steps to working on creating your own positive father energy. The first step is to reclaim your inner child:

1. First make a connection with your wounded inner child, the son who felt rejected by his father, and develop a clear image of who you were before the blows of rejection fell, your likes and dislikes, interests, passions, talents—your shining.
2. Reinvigorate that inner child by doing something you used to like to do, a form of play or creativity (games, hobbies, activities, interests, etc.) and make a regular practice of it.
3. Explore the reasons why you cut off that vulnerable, innocent, and playful side of yourself. Think about the messages you received from your real father—or the lack of them. Focus on ways in which those hurts are still holding you back or causing certain thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors.
4. Imagine your own ideal, fantasy father with whom you can have an inner dialogue. Ask yourself, “If I had grown up with my ideal, fantasy Dad, who would he have been and what would he have taught me? What would he have instilled in me?” Make sure your fantasy dad shares your sexuality and sexual orientation. For him to properly affirm who you are, you need to be confident that he understands you and your experiences, physical, mental, emotional, and sexual, and has shared many of them himself.
5. Take steps to enhance your self-love. Use daily affirmations, change negative habits and mindsets, become aware of your fundamental emotional, psychological, and physical needs. Converse with your new inner dad, who only wants you to be the best version of yourself that you can be.

While the steps given here appear in brief, outline form, the work involved in each one of them can be quite activating, often triggering episodes of anxiety or depression. Try to work this process with a trained mental health professional. Together you will discover that your inner Daddy can be even more powerful than you’d imagined.

David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.

Photo credit: Katherine Chase UNSPLASH

Whether straight, gay, bi, trans, queer, or questioning, men all share the common curse of being measured for—and measuring themselves for—masculinity. Males, no matter their sexual orientation, all seem to struggle with the issue of what is to be and to appear to be masculine. In the 1960s, the women’s movement began the modern discussion of the meaning of gender identity, throwing off the 1950s’ ideal of submissive housewife and accepting that there are many different kinds of femininity. But men never seem to have gotten beyond the shock of the Alan Alda-type “sensitive man” as the 1970s’ antidote to the 1950s’ John Wayne-type “stoic man.”

In many ways, the John Wayne stereotype is with us stronger than ever, as evidenced by the misogynistic, immature, narrow-minded, school-yard bullies currently occupying positions of power. While GBTQQ men have already broken the “norm” by allowing themselves to break the expectation of heterosexuality, they still fall victim to being measured for masculinity and to finding their place among the outlines of mainstream American cultural expectations.

It is understood that these various versions of masculinity are all social constructs and we internalize them. They are rooted in biology, true, but constructed nevertheless. The identification as masculine can be daunting for men who don’t easily fall into our stereotypical versions of masculinity: tough-guy truck drivers; wise and erudite teachers; vital, rebellious artists; emotionally vulnerable and physically beautiful actors; successful businessmen; caring family men; competitive athletes, and on and on and on. Which of these conventional stereotypes lies nearest your version of masculinity?

There are many ways to consider masculinity. In a famous exercise now fairly common in typical college-level human sexuality classes, students are asked to place themselves on each of the following continua of sexual and gender expression—without expectation of their alignment in any way—between masculine and feminine.

1. Physical characteristics (body parts)
2. Internal sense of gender (self-identification)
3. Outward expression of gender (gendered appearance to others)
4. Attraction to the other vs. same gender (sexual orientation)
5. Preferred sexual behavior (active, passive, vanilla, kink, etc.)

In an illuminating book about Jungian masculine archetypes, authors Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette discuss four basic male energy fields, coincidentally the title of their book: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. While each of these archetypes describes a kind of masculine-associated energy and role—executive, active, creative, and feeling—they are each detailed in their active and passive incarnations, as well as their childish (immature) and adult (mature) versions.

No matter what our particular mixture of predominance and subordination of these various male energies, roles, and archetypes, it is incumbent on us to move beyond their childish, immature manifestations and work on becoming truly mature, responsible, vital, and generative men. In this journey, straight, gay, bi, trans, queer, and questioning men all come to therapy in an effort to discover the type of real man they are meant to be. The work of therapy is to discover your own particular brand of masculinity, to rest easy with it, to wear it proudly, and to understand that there is so much more to being a man than simple possession of a penis.

David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.

Photo credit: Karl Fredrickson UNSPLASH