deb svanefelt, msw

tapping into joy,

transforming your life through
Emotional Freedom Techniques and Hacking Reality

Healing My Father Wound

Everyone talks about the mother wound. And that’s true, there is one. But there’s also a father wound I’ve been struggling to heal for my whole life.

Maybe not for the reasons you might be supposing. My dad was not a hard and abusive man. He was a black box. I had no idea who he was. And I yearned to know, to feel connected to him somehow. He died just over a year ago, without either of us having figured out how to connect emotionally. So for many people, that might have meant futility. Game over.

But I know there’s no such thing as game over. With Hacking Reality, we can even connect with people who have crossed over.

So that’s what I did last night. I have a tapping buddy, another Hacking Reality wizard, who was willing to guide me in the session. We began by tapping on some of the emotional and thought patterns that I was struggling with when I thought about relating to my dad. I described him as being like a black box. A mystery man. Someone I really had no sense of. I struggled to understand how he experienced life, what he thought about, what he felt.

Because all of that was somehow locked or at least hidden in this black box, I wondered if his emotional intelligence was just really low. Maybe he just didn’t know how to talk about feelings. In my family, there are a number of neurodivergent folks who are on the autism spectrum. I wondered if maybe that included him, even though he’d never been diagnosed?

We also tapped on some of the cultural and historical timing factors. My dad was born in the early 1930s. Grew up in the Depression and was a (young) father in the 50s, right after World War 2. He was a diligent, hard working man, who reliably ‘brought home the bacon.’ And slept on the couch in his spare time. Perhaps the quintessential 50’s dad.

In my younger years, I remember him as an artistic person. He painted oil landscape paintings of the East coast, where we went one year on a family holiday. He played the guitar. He was a photographer with his own darkroom. He loved trains… And taking computers apart and putting them back together. But as he got older, his hobbies seemed to fall by the wayside. And then I had no sense even of what he enjoyed doing. Who was this mystery man?

It mattered to me, because as much as I’m a part of him, he’s also a part of me. He holds my original imprint of what it is to be a man in this world. He’s the link in my ancestry to masculine energy. Ane I knew so little about him.

In the Hacking Reality session, when I stepped into the morphic field to meet him, I saw him sitting at first on the chair in the living room, when I was a teenager. He was playing his guitar softly. Then his energy morphed into a ball of energy, his current ‘form’, soft and bright at the same time. And we began to talk.

I told him I wanted to know more about who he was in this lifetime. I had a sense he knew why we were there. The first image he showed me was of a large battery that was being drained. It was a powerful image.

Then he shared with me some of the challenges of his life, what he had struggled with. My mom leaving him when he was in his mid 40’s, and how overwhelmingly difficult that was for him. The struggles in their relationship leading up to their separation. And his helplessness to know what to do to change any of that. His challenges with feeling seen and heard, respected by his wife. Just like his mom, she was a very powerful woman. He told me that more than anything, he just wanted peace. And he didn’t know how to find that in his relationships with the women in his life. He learned to not say as much, to try and keep the peace. The less he said, the more impotent he felt. But he didn’t know what else to do.

He showed me a second image then: of a very, very young boy curled up tight inside him in a fetal position. And a strong, caring and competent looking man on the outside. He said it was like there were these two parts of him. He tried to be the man on the outside. But he didn’t know what to do with that little boy on the inside, who was scared and hurting. And all the time, there was this image of that battery that was his life-energy, getting drained.

Our conversation took us more deeply, into exploring some other tender places for both of us. We spoke for what seemed like a long time. Most of it was him talking and sharing. It filled the place in me that had longed for connection with my dad. Near the end, with his quirky sense of humor, he made a comment that had me roaring with laughter.

The next morning, the penny dropped for me. My dad wasn’t a black box. He wasn’t someone who struggled with not having emotional intelligence.

Rather, he was a sensitive person, who struggled with having lived through very difficult times and having a number of trauma capsules that he didn’t know what to do with.

The times he grew up in were not times that encouraged men to express their feelings, let alone their vulnerabilities and fears. All he could do was to encase those scary feelings inside trauma capsules and shelve them in his unconscious, in order to get on with what was most important to him: loving his family and providing for us as best he could. He didn’t know how to take care of that suffering little kid inside him. His priority was taking care of us.

It cost him greatly. All his energy that went into holding onto those trauma capsules (that protected him from feeling that suffering little kid crying inside him) is what drained his battery of life-force energy.

I realized he’s like all of us. We all have these difficult experiences in life. And most of us don’t know what to do about that. How do we heal from our pain? He didn’t find an answer to that question. So he took all those unhealed and painful trauma capsules with him to his grave.

If anything is true for me, it’s this: his pain and unexpressed suffering inspires me forward. Some of it I carry, as part of my ancestral lineage ‘baggage.’ I’m determined to clear as much of that as I can, so I’m not leaving it for my kids to carry. I’m equally determined to continue to have Hacking Reality ‘chats’ with my dad. Turns out, we have a lot more in common than I used to think.

And his story, which really belongs to all of us with unhealed past stressful or traumatic experiences: this is what inspires me forward, in offering tapping and Hacking Reality sessions to others: because I know we don’t have to carry them with us to our graves. Healing is possible.

Words cannot possibly describe how powerful that session for me has been.

PS. I have also felt him since that session last week, encouraging me to play the specific song he was singing, when he invited me into that particular location/time for our chat. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the name of the song has kept coming to me since that session. I finally played it tonight: Willie Nelson, singing “You are Always on my Mind.” He loved that song and Willie Nelson. And the message in that song, sung to me through my dad’s love for me, melted away the rest of my Father Wound.

I’d forgotten some of the lyrics. So much healing for me, imagining my dad singing that song to me. And realizing he’s loving me still, from the other side now. Love never dies. All else fades away. It’s never too late to realize this.

And that’s the power of what’s possible, in a Hacking Reality session. If you want to book a Hacking Reality session – to connect with someone on the other side, or to heal a past memory.

Want to read more about how Hacking Reality sessions ‘work?’ Tap here next.

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