connected to me taking more responsibility. I am the creative force who is going to make that happen and that is beautiful. There is emotion behind that. It is tears but not sadness. It is a moment now right now of appreciation and knowing the preciousness of all of this. My anger my struggle my sadness - there is a preciousness that all is not lost. I used to feel that if my dad had died I would have been so unfulfilled. But now I can have some of those yearnings fulfilled and we have moments
like that now. Seeing this now helps me to be at greater peace with the past. Even though I didn’t get what I wanted then we can still create some of that now. As a boy I was required to be tough and strong and I did not fit into that. I was not able to ask for help or to even say I don’t know how to ask for help. That was isolating for me. The part of my story that I think is a very, very powerful is the gender role idealization around my dad. Strong, drinking beer having fun, “He is like the poster boy of what it means to be a man”. I am totally inadequate to live up to that and developed a core belief I am inadequate as a man. There was this interplay between this idealized picture of my father and who I was at that time as a little boy with anxiety and didn’t even know it. I felt like the opposite of him and the ideal man he represented. Some part of me was asking what is wrong with me and feeding a shame cycle with self-hatred towards myself as a man. There was this power dynamic between me my father that played itself out with the females in my life. My father had the power and ruled with an iron fist. I tip toed around him. The message in my family was men are supposed to have more power and power over females. I was disconnected with the masculine because I saw this violent face. So even
