What is the father wound?

On this site I’ve written extensively about the mother wound, humanity’s single point of failure—the place where humanity broke ages ago and the only place we, as a species, can be healed to create a sustainable future. It’s time to write about the father wound.

What is the father wound?

You won’t find it in Wikipedia, my go-to source for concise (though, on psychological topics, often superficial) definitions.

The father wound is a subset of masculine-related damaged behaviour stemming from the collective arrested development of humanity. To unpick what ‘collective arrested development’ means, we need to unpick why, where, when, and how it happened.

To do that, in turn, we must define what healthy development looks like.

As human beings, we have three key psychological ‘development arcs’ that lead us from infancy to maturity:

• The mother-child arc from conception to about age 6½
• The father-child arc from about ages 6½ to 13
• The puberty arc from about ages 13 to 19½

Clinical psychologist Timothy Leary (who you will find in Wikipedia) calls these the first three of eight circuits. I use the quite precise span of 6½ years for each circuit because it’s no coincidence that from thirteen to nineteen is a specific life stage.

The mother-child circuit is concerned with connection, communication, community. It paves the way for healthy nurturing, self-worth and belonging.

The father-child circuit is concerned with boundaries, negotiating with others, and healthy productivity. It paves the way for the responsible use of power.

The teenage puberty arc is concerned with integrating the first and second circuits to become a productive, community-centric, sexually active adult.

It’s critical to note that each circuit can only develop healthily to the extent that the previous circuit(s) developed healthily.

OK, can we get to the father wound now?

The father wound is the failure of the second circuit to develop correctly—which stems from a failed first circuit. (Which leads to the failure of the third circuit.) While affected by adolescent male role modelling, the pattern is set by characteristics inherited through generational trauma.

The failed second circuit is endemic in humanity and has been for several thousand years. I chose this image of a lion and cub because it’s all about the desert. In fact, it’s all about that silvery trickle of water you can just see in the bottom right-hand corner.

Long-term drought across the Sahara, Middle East, Arabia and Central Asia from around 4000 BC caused desertification (spread of desert), leading to severe famines that lasted into the modern period.

In Saharasia, geographer James DeMeo writes: “The very old and young were abandoned to die. Brothers stole food from sisters, and husbands left wives and babies to fend for themselves. While the maternal-infant bond endured the longest, eventually mothers abandoned their weakened infants and children.”

A parallel impact occurred for men. As the problem solvers and action takers, they were faced with a multi-generational problem they couldn’t solve—starvation.

As the impact of the failing first circuit increasingly affected later generations, qualities that once developed healthily broke down—hence the term ‘arrested development.’

Famine-affected tribes became violent, creating the first patriarchies and eventually exporting their psychic arrested development all over the world—a process that only ground to a halt in the twentieth century.

How does it manifest?

Let’s return to the list of second circuit associations above:

• Boundaries
• Negotiation
• Productivity

Boundaries

When our energetic boundaries fail to develop healthily, they can be overextended, collapsed, or both.

People with overextended boundaries are pushy, outspoken, eager for leadership, and often successful in their careers. They prey on the collapsed boundaries of others by impressing their will (misdirected life force) for their own benefit—i.e., bullying.

They can become flag-bearers for social groups. Donald Trump is a classic example.

They can summon great reserves of force to fight on political, military, financial, and legal fronts. Yet if challenged by someone with higher emotional intelligence (e.g., a calm response to a social media rant) they can collapse into whiny excuses.

Collapsed boundaries—which everyone seems to have—allows others to march into our energetic space to make emotional demands that we struggle to repel. For example, many years ago I financially bailed out my father’s failing business. I felt I had no agency of my own and now realise I was paying him to leave my energetic space.

Negotiation

Healthy negotiation involves finding a win-win solution for all participants.

Negotiation goes out the window when boundaries fail. People with overextended boundaries often act in a ‘my way or the highway’ manner, trampling over others to get what they feel they deserve—becoming angry and indignant when they don’t.

They ‘negotiate’ with other wilful people/entities through force—military operations, hostile business takeovers, hardline office politics, legal action.

Those with collapsed boundaries often lack the self-worth to negotiate with more wilful antagonists. They loathe conflict and concede excessive ground to avoid it.

When two people with collapsed boundaries negotiate, neither is willing to take the lead or be direct. Inaction, indecision, and compromised outcomes result.

Productivity

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the father wound is the damage to productivity.

In this context I define ‘productivity’ as an inner compass that guides us to right and responsible actions, followed by the external execution of those actions. It’s doing the right thing at the right time in the right way for sustainable, communal benefit.

Arrested development of the second circuit during this ancient period of climate change—known to science as the Neolithic decline and to the Bible as the Fall—led to a failure of inner authority, self-guidance, and self-responsibility.

The helplessness and hopelessness of the situation is neatly captured in a prayer in Jeremiah chapter 14 (the Bible is an excellent emotional guide to this traumatic time): “Don’t forget that you promised to rescue us. Idols can’t send rain, and showers don’t fall by themselves. Only you control the rain.”

Out of this despair, the fertility goddesses of the Neolithic era were overthrown, replaced by monotheistic war gods/absent fathers who would one day return with bountiful resources (violently taken from others) to make everything right.

And from this lost authority came a paralysis of not knowing the right thing to do.

Paralysis

Lacking inner authority, we turn to external authority and the irresponsible use of power as a means of problem-solving.

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (written in Berlin in 1932), early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich notes how the paralysis of healthy productivity is replaced by timid acquiescence to strongman leaders, a trait still evident today: “All dictators have built their power on the social irresponsibleness of masses of people… It is ridiculous to contend that the psychopathic general was capable of oppressing seventy million people all by himself” (Reich’s italics).

This is the paralysis of a boy asked to do a man’s job, emotionally incapable of doing it, taking direction from whoever shouts the loudest while waiting for his absent father to come home and restart his arrested second circuit.

This paralysis relates to our frozen fight-or-flight response. I suspect a minute oversupply of adrenalin is the chemical mechanism behind it.

The inability to ask for help also relates to this sense of paralysis.

The father wound affects us according to our level of sensitivity and other personal circumstances. There are many, many people in the world today leading seemingly successful lives who are completely unaware their success derives from favourable coping mechanisms.

Yet, like Donald Trump, that success comes at a high emotional cost. Strip away the coping mechanisms and you’ll expose the underlying father wound.

Healing the father wound

In The Function of the Orgasm, Reich describes the legacy of the combined arrested development of the three key circuits: “The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture, is typified by… armouring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This… armouring is the basis of isolation… fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”

Until we recognise this starting point, depressing as it is, we cannot begin.

The father wound is slightly paradoxical in that, historically, it occurred at the same time as the mother wound—yet it can only be healed once the mother wound’s been healed.

This is because, as I said above, each circuit is dependent on its predecessor for its successful unfolding. It’s like a relay race at the Olympics; a slow first lap and you’re not going to win gold.

Healing these stalled development arcs takes time. My mother-child circuit restarted in 2018 and only feels like it has resolved right now—right on the 6½-year mark, and right on my realisation of the paralysis at the core of the father wound.

Getting down to the start point also takes time and hard work. I recommend starting with these courses to begin your own journey back to healthy masculinity.

Photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash