Taking The Initiative Towards A Healthy Relationship With My Dad
One Sunday afternoon, while my nephew was visiting, he blurted out a concern that he had been carrying around for a while about my brother. “I feel like I really don’t know my dad. He’s a really good dad but he never shares anything with me,” he confided. And I knew exactly how he felt. My relationship with my father, my nephew's grandfather, was no different. We both desired a deeper relationship with our fathers. For many years, I had no idea how to connect emotionally with my dad. Our relationship was, most times, purely mechanical. We spoke, but our conversations lacked depth and rarely conveyed any sort of emotion. I could see now how this wasn’t just my issue. Deeper insight revealed that this was common in our family, in our community and perhaps in general in the South Asian community. This led me to the journey and evolution of "how well do we know our fathers?"
What my nephew and I want from our fathers is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to control, interpret and express emotions. It is the ability to speak with emotions and express one’s true feelings. Our family is traditional in that mothers and grandmothers met our emotional needs. Our fathers are more comfortable speaking intellectually. Conversations are operational and rarely emotional. We grew up not knowing our fathers, with them not knowing us. They never shared their lives with us. I believe that much of this tendency is inherent. Coming mostly from traditional backgrounds, our fathers were much like their fathers and their fathers before them. But something is happening in our time that’s breaking this pattern. There are two things that are creating change in the dynamics of our relationships with our fathers. The first is modernization and the second is that the masculine and feminine energies in our world are starting to balance out.
The destructuralization of our traditional families and modernization took place when mothers entered the workforce. My mother worked full-time hours while I was growing up. This caused my family's mother and father roles to become more diluted. With both parents working, new rules about the household formed. Though this change came with many challenges, it also allowed for dads to spend more time with children.
This began the onset of deeper change. My father attended my school's events, like music nights and parent-teacher interviews. Though his interest in my academics grew, he still held back from sharing his life with me. Our relationship still lacked the depth I desired. Perhaps he desired that connection as well, but he was never able to express that to me.
Secondly, the world has been evolving to create more balance between masculine and feminine energies. As a result, alpha heterosexual men seem to be becoming more sensitive, while their woman counterparts are becoming more assertive. We are even seeing women in greater leadership roles, including a possible female president of the United States. Our family role models on television and in the media are reflecting this evolution. We went from Mike and Carol Brady (The Brady Bunch) to Claire and Phil Dunphy (Modern Family). Madonna once depicted herself as a female with strong feminine characteristics in her music videos. But recently, we’ve seen a shift where she's choosing to play women with more masculine energy, including portraying a matador in her recent "Living For Love" music video. This evolution has created the opportunity to formulate changes at the deepest levels. I wasn’t really aware to what extent these changes were taking place globally until I saw the relationship with my own father start to shift — and shift for the better.
I realized that if I wanted a deeper relationship with him, then I was going to have to be the initiator. This past January, on my forty-fourth birthday, I decided to interview my dad and ask him some questions about the day I was born. What he shared with me surprised me. I got more than I asked for. He validated everything I hoped to be true. And it was almost healing to have him say everything that I have always wanted to hear. I got my in. A gateway opened up that day. It was one of the best birthdays I’d ever had. Since then, I’ve learned so much more about my dad. His stories included the good, the bad and the ugly. But that’s what I wanted. Knowing our fathers means a willingness to know all that there is to know about them. I feel like I know my father better than I ever have.
To see improvements in our relationships, we as children must initiate dialogue with our fathers. I knew that my father wasn’t going to reach out to me, so I chose to reach out to him. My nephew did the same thing with his father. He too reached out to my brother. The universal energies are now favourable to deepen our relationships with our fathers. But change will have to start with our own initiative. We must also realize that, if we ourselves want to be conscious parents, we need to be proactive in order to have healthy relationships with our children and or future children. This is a critical time in our evolution, when we are letting go of old belief systems and constructs that no longer serve us. In addition, our souls are longing for fulfillment. And that fulfillment can only happen if we are heart-centered and express our truths not only to ourselves but also to our fathers.
Here's an interview I did with my Father about me
Images: Courtesy of Farhan Dhalla (blogger's own)
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Farhan Dhalla
Author
Spiritual Personal Trainer, Angel Therapist, Author, Television Personality Farhan is the world’s first Spiritual Personal Trainer. Farhan believes we can only succeed in any our life goals when we are in alignment with our spiritual Self. Farhan uses unique techniques to he...
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