Father-Son Love: A Man's "Chicken Soup for the Soul"

It is often assumed that the relationship between father and son is just that. Freud's "Oedipus" theory gave theoretical basis to the alienation and exclusion of fathers and sons. The following dramatic scene is probably familiar to people:

The son called his father from out of town because they hadn't seen each other in a long time. The son tried to narrow the distance between him and his father, and finally plucked up the courage.

"Daddy, how are you?"

"Oh, oh, it's okay. Wait, I'll call your mom on the phone. ”

"No, don't call Mom, I want to talk to you."

"What's wrong? You run out of money again? ”

"No, I don't need money." The son began to confess his inner feelings. "Dad, I've been worrying a lot lately about your health and remembering what you did for me. You worried about my college and gave me all the financial support. Now I'm living well, all because of your help and encouragement. But I never really said, "Dad, thank you!" I heard my mother say that you had a stroke not long ago, what is going on now? ”

There was silence on the other end of the phone, and the son continued: "I want to tell you, Dad, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, how much I love you!" ”

"Did you drink too much today, son?!"

At this moment, my father was really touched, and his eyes flashed with crystal tears.

In fact, every father who is superficially majestic or indifferent has been expecting his son to love him and respect him all his life, which gives his son some right to influence his father. Over the years, the idea that fathers have the power to destroy a child's self-esteem has been widely accepted, but few people realize that sons have the same power to hurt their father's self-esteem.

We often see that if a man is dispensable at home and no one expresses his inner feelings to him, then he is mostly unwilling to stay at home, and even when he abandons the family, he will have no remorse, because the family does not have his hard work and no achievements that he deserves to be cherished. Children are most likely willing to coddle or be close to their mothers, not entirely because the father is an unapproachable man. This is a bad habit in family life that needs to be corrected. If you are a family of three, then everyone has a responsibility to change. The communication between the son and the father is not in the number of words, but in the need to communicate their inner feelings. Sometimes, a man's anger and pain come precisely from the comfort of his lack of affection in his heart, so he will feel the desolation and emptiness of life.

In some families, especially in those where the husband and wife are not harmonious, the mother consciously or unconsciously unites with her son to attack the father, thus creating an alienation between the father and the son. There is a son who once resolutely sided with his mother, and his parents did not see their father for 10 years after they divorced. When he was 35 years old, he occasionally learned from a TELEVISION program that his father was seriously ill, and he felt very guilty and decided to travel thousands of miles away to visit his father. He tried everything he could to find his father's quarters and knocked on the door nervously. When the white-haired cang dragged the sick father to the door, the son bravely said a heartfelt sentence: "Daddy, I did something wrong in the past, please forgive me!" The father burst into tears, and as he dragged his son into the house, he murmured, "Thank God, I'm dead now!" ”

If you are a father with a son, if you are a son with a father, please cherish the affection between father and son.

The barrier of father-son communication is not too late to break down. The sense of alienation caused by the father's inability to communicate properly with his son sometimes becomes a kind of misery or despair, and sometimes it is vented in a violent way, which makes the father and son feel deeply depressed. For all sons, learning to understand and respect their father is a compulsory lesson in learning to be a man. In the hearts of men, what is especially indispensable is respect and praise. In real life, it can be seen that men are easy to praise and respect women, including mothers, but they are difficult and ashamed to praise their peers, especially fathers and sons. Psychological research has shown that when there is a lack of closeness between a son and a father, the hunger and thirst for love gradually becomes a deformed emotion. This unsatisfied hunger and thirst drives men to desperately seek compensation outside the family, some regard their careers as sons, some regard their lovers as daughters, and more in the pursuit of success and glory to compensate for the lack of love and obtain the self-esteem and prestige he needs. Some iron-fisted politicians, businessmen who desperately try to make money, show business stars who cannot enjoy the joy of normal marriage and family life, athletes who will stop at nothing to win gold medals, etc., many of them are driven by the hunger and thirst of their unsatisfied love. They are excited when they are brilliant, but in the face of failures and setbacks, they may be devastated by not being able to be soothed by love. This is where the vulnerability of those so-called "strong women" and "strong men" lies. People are constantly shocked to learn from the media that a certain and famous movie star, sports star, singer has taken drugs, becomes a monk, and even commits suicide. However, in a utilitarian society where superficial success is the criterion for value judgment, certain spiritual and psychological phenomena have not yet attracted sufficient attention and have been deeply analyzed. In the era of fierce competition, people blindly calculate visible gains while ignoring invisible losses. If it is calculated in terms of "loss", I am afraid that men lose more than women. The average life expectancy of men is 4 to 6 years shorter than that of women, which may be one of the costs of men's desperate pursuit of achievement. Therefore, changing the inequality between men and women will benefit both women and men.

(The author is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Source: China Women's Daily