Projections Part II: Atonement with the Father

We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.

- Gabor Mate

This article is the fifth post in the Hero Path Series, a journey toward discovering and embodying your most authentic self. If you haven’t already, you may want to start with my previous installments:

• The Hero’s Path to Authenticity, Meaning, and Living the Life You Were Born For

• Why You Feel Like You Don’t Belong & How to Reclaim Your Authenticity

• The Hidden Parts of You That Control Your Life (And How to Take Your Power Back)

• Why Your Relationships Keep Failing (And How to Break the Cycle)

Each step of this path has stripped away the layers of illusion, bringing you closer to the authentic YOU that longs to be free and whole. First, we faced the discomfort that signaled something deeper—the invitation to step into the life you were meant to live. Then, we uncovered the Persona, the mask you wear to fit in—the same mask that often stands between you and true belonging. From there, we confronted the Shadow, the hidden parts of you that operate in the dark, influencing your actions, fears, and limitations. 

Most recently, we explored the Anima, the lost feminine within—the mirror of your unconscious desires, shaping how you love, what you seek, and what remains hidden in your quest for wholeness. Now, we turn to one of the greatest struggles a man must face: his relationship with The Father—the key to understanding your masculine identity, your relationship with leadership, and your power.

Without an integrated father figure, men live in a state of arrested development. We remain forever “boys” in search of validation, avoiding responsibility, never truly stepping into our power.

And this is where the two halves of projection meet.

• The Anima keeps us chasing women (mates) for wholeness.

• The Father Wound keeps us running from our own responsibility.

It’s why some men spend their lives seeking love but never leadership, connection but never commitment.

But a man who integrates both his Anima and his Father archetype is unstoppable. He is whole—and that is one of the rarest things in this world

When I talk about the ‘Father,’ I don’t just mean the man who raised you. I mean the archetype of the Father—the force that represents leadership, power, initiation, and wisdom. For some men, this was their biological father. For others, it was a coach, mentor, or older male figure. 

For many, it was completely absent—leaving a wound that has shaped every aspect of their lives.

This article is deeply personal to me, and in a way, it is the origin story for Modern Manhood. I do what I do today because I freed myself from the wound that kept me from embracing my wholeness and my life purpose. As we’ll see in the final article of this series, our purpose is so often rooted in our wounds and healing this wound within myself gave me my mission and empowered me to live the life I was born for.

In order to heal though, we need to realize some tough truths.
Namely, that we are more like our fathers than we’d like to admit.

The Father Wound: The Ghost That Never Leaves

I hated my father.

Not in a loud, raging way, but in a quiet, smoldering way.
In a way that sat deep in my chest every time I heard his name.

I hated him for being absent. For being weak. For making me feel like I had to be the man of the house before I even hit puberty.

But most of all—I hated the part of me that was just like him.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even want to. I learned to. I was taught to.

From the youngest age I can remember, I knew my father struggled with drug and alcohol addiction.
Why do I know this?

Because my mother told me.

She told me about his drinking and drug abuse. His temper. His selfishness. I knew he made her cry. I knew he left us as often as he could. I knew he was reckless and indulgent and irresponsible.

And I swore, from the depths of my soul: I will never be like him; I am “good”.

Life often has other ideas than we do though and forces us into situations that evoke the very thing we’re running from and, when it does, we don’t know how to hold them.

We become fathers without fathers—terrified that we will repeat the cycle.

We become leaders without elders—unsure how to lead because we were never led.

We become men at war with ourselves—rejecting parts of our nature because we only saw them in their most destructive form.

All of these experiences can be paralyzing, which is why healing this wound is the secret to reclaiming our power, our potential, and our purpose.

How Our Fathers Shape Our Concept of Masculinity

As a reminder from my last post describing the Anima, from the moment you are born, you contain infinite potential—the capacity to express a vast range of traits, emotions, and characteristics. Some of these qualities are predisposed (nature), while others are shaped by the environment you grow up in (nurture). At an early age, though, that potential is narrowed.

Like a flashlight in a dark room, your Ego—the Self you believe yourself to be—shines on specific traits while leaving the rest in shadow. This light is not random; it is shaped by the world around you, and in particular, by your earliest model of masculinity: your father.

Just as the Anima represents the subconscious, rejected feminine aspects of the self, so too does your relationship with the father shape the aspects of masculinity you embrace or reject. If your father was strong, protective, and present, you may define masculinity as those traits. If he was absent, volatile, or cold, you may associate masculinity with those qualities instead—or reject them altogether in an attempt to be nothing like him.

Rejecting part of yourself only leaves you fractured. The parts of masculinity you exile do not disappear—they live in your shadow, shaping your actions in ways you don’t even realize. This is why many men either repeat their father’s mistakes or go to great lengths to avoid them—only to find themselves trapped in a different kind of suffering.

Atonement with the father is about seeing him clearly—both his strengths and his wounds—so you can reclaim the full spectrum of your own masculinity, including the aspects you’ve rejected in yourself because you rejected him. 

This is just like Shadow integration but at a deeper level. 

Unlike with the Shadow, this isn’t about reclaiming lost traits from your past, this is about claiming your potential and your future.

A Generation Without Elders: Men Wandering in the Dark

Many of us grew up in a world without true initiation into manhood like you’d find in traditional, tribal societies. Without rites of passage, our fathers were lost, following a blueprint for masculinity that no longer fits the world we live in. 

They were taught to be providers and protectors, but not mentors.

They worked, they sacrificed, they did what they knew how to do.

But they didn’t show us how to be men.

Some of us had fathers who were present but emotionally distant.
Some had fathers who were absent altogether.
Some of us had fathers who were violent, weak, afraid, or lost. 

We may have hated them for it.
We may have been ambivalent.
We may have emulated them.

Regardless, as we step into manhood ourselves—as we become fathers, mentors, leaders—we feel the weight of their absence.

• How do I become something I have never seen?

• How do I avoid making the same mistakes?

• How do I embrace responsibility when all I want to do is run from it?

The truth is, we resent them for putting us in the situation we’re in, never stopping to realize that they were here too.

We are carrying the same wounds.

Until we heal them, we will pass them down to our sons, haunted by the ghosts of these scars as we try desperately to escape them.

The Shadow of the Father

What we resist, persists.

- C.G. Jung

Carl Jung tells us that whatever we repress becomes our shadow—the disowned, exiled part of ourselves.

And our father was the first man we measured ourselves against.

We learned who we were in relation to him.

If he was strong, we had to prove we were stronger.
If he was weak, we had to be everything he was not.
If he was absent, we learned that no one was coming to help us and so became hyper-independent.

For many men, this creates one of two reactions:

1. Rejection – “I will be nothing like him.”
   Often leads to disowning parts of the masculine self and struggling to lead.
   

2. Replication – “I am destined to be just like him.”
   Leads to repeating his cycles of pain, addiction, or emotional distance.

Both of these are traps—because they still define you in relation to him.

Until you face your father as he truly was, you will never be free.

This is the crossroads. 

We can either reject the mantle of leadership as our fathers did, or we can step courageously into the unknown as they did not.

The Hero Path makes one thing very clear: you have everything you need to succeed within you, so long as you do not turn away.

The Ogre Father and the Lost Son

Joseph Campbell speaks of the Ogre Father—the terrifying, oppressive force that the hero must confront before he can claim his power.

In myth, the father often appears as both the obstacle and the path forward. He is the one who must be overcome, but also the one who holds the key to transformation.

• Luke Skywalker must face Darth Vader, only to discover that he and his father are the same. Remember when Luke saw his own face in the mask?

• Arthur must pull the sword from the stone, claiming the mantle his father left behind.

• The prodigal son must return to his father to reclaim his inheritance.

Every boy resents his father at some point.
We see his weaknesses, his failures, his fears, and we vow: I will never be like him.

But in rejecting him, we also reject ourselves.

Whether we like it or not, he is inside of us because our understanding of who we are was formed by who he was.

Until we reconcile with our fathers, we will either:

• Repeat their mistakes.

• Spend our lives in rebellion, letting their failures define us.

• Remain lost, afraid to step into the unknown.

Atonement with the father does not mean approval of his actions. It does not mean forgetting what he did or didn’t do.

It means seeing him as he truly was—not the monster, not the god, but the man—and in so doing, seeing ourselves clearly for the first time.

My Story: Fatherless and Unprepared

I saw my father as the monster in my story. He was chaotic. Unstable. Selfish.

In rejecting him, I rejected every part of me that reminded me of him.

• He was reckless, so I became hyper-disciplined.

• He was indulgent, so I denied myself pleasure.

• He was irresponsible and selfish, so I made sacrifices I didn’t choose.

Then, life forced me to confront my father’s ghost in the most brutal way possible: I became a father.

I still remember the day my son’s heartbeat echoed in that dark hospital room.

My wife was beaming. The technician expectantly asked if we were ready to hear the sound.

We smiled and eagerly said yes. 

But when I heard it, I felt… nothing.

No joy. No connection. Just a deep, gnawing emptiness.

Actually, that’s not true.

I was annoyed. I wanted to go home. I had taken time off work for this.
I had a glass of Scotch and a cigar waiting for me at home.

I had everything—a family, a future, a chance to be the father mine never was.

And yet, I felt trapped, anxious, and empty.

For the first time, I saw it clearly:

I had never chosen fatherhood. It had always been forced upon me.

• Forced to be the “man of the house” as a child.

• Forced to take care of my mother at a young age.

• Forced to be a parent for my younger sister.

• Forced to sacrifice my needs and wants for others.

I had fought so hard not to be like my father that I never saw the truth:
I had been running from fatherhood my entire life.

And now, it was right in front of me and I was terrified that I would never escape this prison.

How the Father Wound Shows Up in Your Life

Unresolved tension with the father can manifest in countless ways:

• Perfectionism: Proving to the world (and to yourself) that you are not weak like him.

• Avoidance of Responsibility: Running from leadership because you resent the weight of it.

• Self-Sabotage: Fearing success because it would mean stepping into the father role.

• Anger at Authority: Seeing every boss, leader, or elder as a reminder of what he failed to be.

• Fear of Fatherhood: Doubting your ability to guide the next generation.

The way out of this cycle is not rejecting the father—it is integrating him.

The Atonement: Becoming the Father

The paradox of the Hero’s Journey is this: to defeat the father is to become him.

Not the broken version. Not the cowardly version.

But the father you needed.

To step fully into manhood, you must accept that your father was lost, just like you.
He was afraid, just like you.
He carried wounds, just like you.

The difference between you and him is not that you have all the answers.
It’s that you have accepted the call anyway.

You are walking into the unknown, leading without a map. That is true fatherhood.

And when you can see your father clearly—not as a villain, but as a flawed man who did what he knew how to do—you will find something unexpected: Compassion. Empathy. Maybe even Grace.

And with it, freedom.

I never truly reconciled with my father before he died.

I had barely spoken to him in years. And then, at 30, I found myself standing over his grave, realizing that his story had become mine.

I was drinking more than ever.
I resented my responsibilities.
I felt the same distance from my son that I had felt from my father.

And then, life gave me a gift.

When my wife and I separated, she asked me if I wanted to share custody of my son.
She did not assume that I wanted it. She did not push it on me. She asked me what I wanted.

For the first time, fatherhood was not forced upon me. It was a choice.

And that gave me my power back.

I chose to be a father. I accepted the mantle.

Not out of guilt. Not out of resentment. But because I wanted to.

That was the moment I became my own man.

Breaking the Cycle: How to Begin Healing the Father Wound

If you have a father wound—if you are still running from him, hating him, or defining yourself against him—then you are still trapped in his shadow. 

In truth you are controlled by him.

The only way forward is through atonement—not approval, not reconciliation, but integration.

1. See him as human. He was just a man. A flawed, broken, struggling man. Just like you.

2. Identify the traits you rejected. What aspects of yourself have you repressed because they remind you of him?

3. Reclaim your masculine power. Masculinity is not what your father made it. It is what you make it.

4. Forgive—not for him, but for you. Until you stop fighting his ghost, you will never be free. 

5. Grieve what was lost. Grieve the leaderless childhood you had. Grieve for what you missed out on. Grieve and move on.

The Hero's Crossroads: Will You Take the Mantle?

Our fathers belonged to a generation without elders and they inducted us into that fraternity.

Their fathers practiced silent suffering. They had no one to guide them. They were lost.

We do not have to be.

Modern Manhood means stepping into fatherhood, leadership, and responsibility—not because we know the way, but because we have the courage to lead others into the unknown.

THAT is what makes a man.

You have a choice.

You can remain lost, blaming your father for what he failed to do, or you can become the man he could not be.

This is your initiation.
This is your moment to break the cycle.

The next step is yours to take.

Take the Next Step:

Download the Emotional Mastery Toolkit for guided exercises to becoming the person you were meant to be.

Book a call with me to start your journey toward healing.

Your father may not have shown you the way. But you are not alone.

You are the elder now. Lead the way.

Even after healing the wounds of the past, one great challenge remains: stepping fully into your transformation. Read the next article: Why Your Life Is Falling Apart: How to Let Go of What No Longer Serves You and Fully Live Your Transformation