Wee Donnie and The Case of the Missing Fathers

We are globally swimming in the outfall of the toxic mess dumped from the innards of boys masquerading as men.

Or at least that’s my blunt opinion on the ridiculous matter of the so-called “men” in positions of great power around the world. This current boy president south of our border, straight out of Lord of the Flies, can only ever act the part as the biggest man in town, because he never learned how to hold his masculinity in the way a real man does. With inner strength, not outer might.

This past weekend I led a Family Constellations workshop and the consequences of “missing fathers” came up as the central unhealed trauma in both of the constellations that we worked through. Whether or not these fathers were present physically in some capacity, they were missing emotionally and energetically. And the consequences of this were (and are) wide ranging, including that boys without fathers are less likely to ever figure out how to hold their masculinity in a good way.  It isn't impossible of course,  many great men were raised by women or in the presence of an absent or boy-posing-as-man father. I'm just saying that it's a much tougher road when we have to learn and grow without positive role modelling.

​Anyhow, this prompted me to get curious about the paternal line of Donald Trump. Did you know that his father, Fred, lost his own father when he was just 12 yrs old? And Donald is not the only big boy around that was raised by a father without a father. Doug Ford Sr., father to Ontario's premier Doug Ford, lost his own father the year that he was born. And then there's Elon Musk, clearly raised by a boy-man, who has described his own father as "a terrible human being".
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What we know through the work of Family Constellations is that when the loss is not reconciled, the consequences of a missing father can carry forward to play out in later generations. No kidding, Donnie.

The unresolved traumatic residues of missing fathers are up for many of us personally, and certainly up for us collectively. Boys raised by boys will only ever grow to be boys in man costumes. And boys in man costumes are dangerous. Boys in man costumes posture as men. They throw their might and their weight around not because we need them to, but because they need to. They do it because they haven’t grown up inside, and without that inner strength outer muscle becomes all that they have.

Boys need good fathers (or atleast very solid male role models) to be physically and emotionally available to them, so that they learn how to embody their masculinity in a good way, However, the system that we have built both splits men off from their emotions, and separates them from the heart and harth of the family. As a part of the role of the masculine is to patrol the perimeters (while the feminine is the energy that spiral inwards to create), it is only natural that a part of that function of the masculine is to protect and provide in the ways of work and sometimes war. But when taken to extremes entire generations of men have been lost to their children. Men tending to the survival needs of their families (or their egos) often meant them not being available to the emotional and developmental needs of their children. Having to work and fight came at a cost of being able to feel, meaning secondary splitting (aka "coping") mechanisms made their way into the world of men. Addictions to gambling and alcohol being another way that fathers went missing.

Yes we are all equal parts masculine and feminine - where those words and what they mean exist as a convenient way to express the experience of duality that is a part of being a human. But, the genetics of woman’s body complete with a womb, and a man’s body made to carry more muscle, means that the expression of the masculine protector/provider energy more readily comes through the bodies of men, while the expression of the feminine creator/nurturer more readily comes through the bodies of women. We all have both parts yin (feminine) and yang (masculine), and certainly now is not the time to be boxing anyone into any gendered expression and I would never want to do that. I only state the facts of biology and some of the natural generalizations about energetic orientation and expression. I do this to make space for what is very real and must be acknowledged. Men went missing. Boys took their place. Boys raised boys, who could only raise more boys. And these big tyrannical boys that are posturing all over the place need the help of both real actual men and every human being's inner divine father/masculine energy now.

Wee Donnie is the perfect manifestation of the energy of the father wound. He has been brought forward as a representation of what we all carry, of what we all need to heal. Too many fathers went missing. We lost the felt expression of them. This wound is big. It is real. It is alive. In each of us and on the planet. 

So there is much we can each do here, that we must do here. We must heal our father wounds, so that the divine father energy as it wants to flow through our whole system again. Through you, and me, and our whole collective. Our survival as a species depends on it.

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Need some help? You can join me in my next Family Constellations workshop, May 3rd, or we can work through this privately. The divine masculine is waiting to be awakened in all of us individually and in our collective. Our fathers would want us to have it.