Fr Jim Cogley
Writing about father issues I find more difficult than mother issues. My father died when I was eleven, at a time when I was just beginning to get to know him. Yet his life and death has had a profound influence on my life. His deep respect and love for my mother in particular gave me a childhood security that helped see me through my turbulent teenage years that were far from secure following his death. He had an amazing capacity for remembering peoples names. At the point where I was ready to benefit that gift he was gone, and I was left with a psychological block when it comes to remembering names. He was a man who carried quite a lot of anger resulting from unresolved grief and this often got displaced onto me being his only child. With the benefit of hindsight I can see where that was coming from but it left me having to do a lot of inner work around my relationship to anger and coming to see it as a positive creative force in my life.
I share insights from my own father story with the hope of offering an invitation to readers to piece together the jigsaw of their own father story. The all too common absence of the father relationship has long-term repercussions through life. A daughter is likely to carry her unmet needs from her father into her future relationships and possibly undermine what had the potential to be quite a good relationship. A son, in the absence of a good father relationship, can become a substitute husband for his mother and this can cause major problems in his marriage with his wife always feeling she comes second. This will leave him enmeshed in a maternal matrix from which he may never extricate himself enough to claim his own identity. This maternal identification, according to Carl Jung, can even give rise to bi-sexuality and even homosexuality.
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