How To Be Your Own Best Daddy

A Parts Work, Attachment-Informed Guide to Nurturing a Relationship With The Inner Archetypal Energy of The Good Father on Father's Day

Not everyone has the relationship they want with their father.

I’ve found in my therapy career that you are the exception if you do have the relationship that you want with your dad.

Father’s Day is a day to celebrate the dad in your life but for many of us, it’s a day full of grief, anger, or confusion, especially if you grew up parentified or without a father actively in the picture.

How do we celebrate someone we’re not in contact with?

How do we celebrate someone who avoids affection or emotional expression, or on the flip side, lashes out with their emotions and demands a kind of emotional labor from us that feels inappropriate?

How do we celebrate someone we have complicated feelings about?

These are some of the questions you might be asking yourself if you struggle with Father’s Day. Today, I want to invite you to set those questions to the side. Instead of thinking about how to make a complex relationship with your father work, I want you to consider your relationship to the healthy masculine and your inner archetypal energy of the father, regardless of your gender.

So many of us have a relationship to the masculine that is marked by wounds of malevolence and absence.

We expect men to disappoint us. We joke about having “daddy issues.” We even have a term in our society for the kind of masculinity that wounds, “toxic masculinity,” and we use it so much that we confuse masculinity for toxicity.

But masculinity is not inherently toxic. Mature masculinity, healthy masculinity, grounded masculinity, is deeply protective, healing, and creative.

In King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archeytpal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects, Robert L. Moore says that:

“Submission to the power of the mature masculine energies always brings forth a new masculine personality that is marked by calm, compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity.”

We have so few examples of healthy, mature masculine energy in our culture that we don’t see these benefits. We equate the power of the masculine to violence because we don’t see connected, benevolent expressions of masculine power.

And while we sorely need examples of benevolent masculinity in our culture, we can all connect to and express archetypal masculine energy, or what Jung called the animus, in our own psyches.

In working with parts through the model of Internal Family Systems Therapy, I have found that we all have an innate understanding of the archetypal energy of the father. Deep inside of us, nested inside attachment instincts and the collective unconscious, we all want to be loved by the archetype of the good father.

The good father is magnanimous, nonreactive, and deeply loving. He guides our decisions so that they are informed by our values and empowers us to make decisions that benefit the world. He doesn’t stuff down his feelings or explode with rage. He doesn’t make us walk around on eggshells or fulfill his unmet ego needs. He expresses his feelings without victimizing himself or attacking us. And because he knows himself and is rich in wisdom of the world, he can lean into his vulnerability and still set boundaries around his vision and integrity. We relax in the presence of the good father and we feel nourished, seen, and protected by him.

Connecting to the good father inspires self-love, creativity, and healing. Even if you don’t have a relationship with someone in your life who is connected to their own good father energy, you can still connect to yours.

Here’s how to father yourself with the archetypal energy of the good father:

Provide provision that nourishes, offer protection that keeps your vulnerability safe, and show up for yourself in a way that reflects your personal values and life vision. Savor goodness. Receive the wisdom of your own history and live these lessons with the decisions you make today. Set healthy limits around your time and energy. Move toward your goals with focus, discipline, and consistency. Believe in and encourage your loved ones. Be congruent. Mean what you say and say what you mean. Don’t go to people who treat you like shit with your precious inner world. Respect yourself. Set boundaries without servile explanations. Let your actions and values mirror each other. Give grace instead of judgment. Be merciful and kind. Care about justice. Consciously sensitize yourself to other people’s struggles. Offer deep listening and presence magnanimously. Be true to yourself.

You have everything inside of you to father yourself well, regardless of your relationship with your dad.

Always believing in the gifts and genius of your parts,

~Sarah