🌿 Father’s Day Reflection: The Wounded Masculine & the Path to Wholeness 🌿

Today, I honor my father — and the pain he carried but never knew how to name.

As I deepen my healing work, I’ve come to recognize the voices inside me that were shaped by him:

🕊️ The Watcher

⚖️ The Accuser

🧱 The Reputation Manager

These voices weren’t mine originally. They were passed down from a man who believed the world was hard and cold — and that I had to be tough to survive it.

He loved me the way he knew how: by hardening me.

But love through control is still fear in disguise.

I remember the lectures. The shame.

“If you’re going to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.”

“Everything you do reflects on me."

The unpredictable shifts — jovial one moment, furious the next.

He didn’t understand emotions. He didn’t have the tools to soften.

And as his firstborn — and a daughter — I became the one he tried to shape the most.

My brother and I both inherited some of his burdens:

Mostly, the habit of using food (especially sugar) to self-soothe. A craving not just for sweetness, but for the softness life didn’t always offer us.

✨ But here’s what I’m learning:

I can break this cycle — not by rejecting my father,

but by meeting what he couldn’t.

I can sit with my sadness.

I can question the inner critic instead of obeying it.

I can stop performing for love and let tenderness live in my body.

💔 This Father’s Day, I hold space for the complexity of it all:

For the longing.

For the grief.

For the understanding that love doesn’t always come in healthy forms — but we can choose what we pass on.

To those healing from a wounded father, or the wounded Masculine within themselves:

You are not broken.

You are the bridge.

You are the medicine your lineage never knew it needed.

🌹 May we grieve what we didn’t receive.

🕯️ May we soften where they had to harden.

💖 May we return to the sweetness of life — one sacred breath at a time.

A gentle journal prompt if it resonates:

What did your father teach you about strength? And what kind of strength do you believe in now?

We are not here to blame our fathers — we are here to feel what they couldn’t, and love what they never learned to hold.

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