Fathers,

Some clients who have been married for many years often tell me that they have lost a common sense of why they even got married in the first place. It’s not uncommon to feel like you’ve lost a sense of direction. A friend of mine likes to tell people that when he and his wife married, they had one simple goal in raising their children: To raise them in such a way that they will be a little less neurotic than they were while young!

When my friend tells it, it’s rather amusing; but it has a lot of meaning. It shows that he understood, even before marrying, that he and his wife had a lot of choices to make and they wanted to do things with their children so that they did not repeat the mistakes of their parents. As he tells the story, he and his wife made a thorough list of the healthy and unhealthy things that each of their parents did. They agreed to repeat the healthy things and to work consciously against their tendencies to do the unhealthy things.

Family counseling (specifically, family systems theory) teaches that our emotional lives and how we interact in our relationships are reflective of the parenting styles of the families that we came from, even two and three generations before our birth. There are a million influences on us that we are not even aware of. When I work with parents, one of the things we do is to help them recapture their goals for their family or even to create new goals.

As the father and leader of your family, you have a natural role to work with your family to develop healthy goals, but this duty will be much more difficult if you have emotional wounds or patterns of behavior that are unhealthy. For the most part, unhealthy behaviors stem from wounds that we experienced from our parents and family of origin. Once those wounds are healed and we learn new and healthier behaviors, the life of the family can be renewed, and you can journey toward common goals and flourishing together.