Chair Introduction

In class today, Dr. Hook (my human sexuality professor) asked us to discuss questions in small groups. One of the questions he posed was, "how did your father impact or maleness or femaleness?" ... I raised my hand and I asked him why he had asked about our father's impact but not our mother's. I'm no feminist, so I wasn't militant for the equal inclusion of mothers. I just found it interesting that, per the omission of a question about mothers, Dr. Hook seemed to think that a father had more impact on his children's healthy general (and for this conversation, sexual) development than did their mother. He answered me and said that he didn't want to get into all the reasons why in the short time that we had left, but that he could say that most of the time, people's major woundedness comes from their fathers, and that he hypothesized that everyone has wounds from their father. To access these and help intentional healing begin, he does this exercise with his clients:

(This works especially well in group counseling settings)

You (the client) stand up with a chair in front of you. You then pretend that you are sitting in the chair, and, in the voice of your father, you introduce yourself to the room. You act as though you are your own father, and you are telling this room full of people about your child (which is you.) So in my case, I would stand behind the empty chair and say, "Hi everyone, my name is Larry Ray, and this is my daughter Rainey. Let me tell you about her. ..." And then you commence to say to the room what you think your father would say about you. You can say, "this is how I feel about Rainey," "this is what I'm proud of," "this is what I'm not proud of," "this is something I'd like to apologize for," ... anything. You say anything that you think your father would think/feel/say about you. He said that when he does this, people almost all the time will start crying. For some reason, he said, this format is disarming, and so it ends up hitting things that aren't accessed quite as well if you just have the clients speak as themselves as tell you about their dad. For some reason, people are more ready for that and so they are prepared to deal better with it. But in this exercise, changing the format of thinking about your father is different enough that clients are able to access wounds that they are normally able to cover.

I don't think I need to tell you. I LOVE THIS. I want to do this with a client as soon as I can.

I also want him to tell me the reasons why your dad shapes you so much more. Maybe it's because God acts primarily as our father, some of the primary imagery with which He paints Himself in Scripture is that of "Father." So maybe, we connect with and are shaped by our fathers so much more powerfully because they were engineered by God to model for us how we should think about and feel about and trust God. I know that my picture of God is a strong and healthy one largely because it isn't hard for me to imagine. I had a strong, dependable, trustworthy, loving father figure, so it isn't a stretch to buy into another one. So maybe, we know deep down that our father is the head of the household, our father is our leader, because he has been given the ultimate responsibility of teaching us in very large part how to think well about God. That is his divinely appointed commission. So when our father wounds us, it hurts that much more because now we have not only been hurt by a parent upon whom we were supposed to be able to count, but also had our image of God because a little more unstable. Maybe our father hurts us more because we then grieve on two fronts, even if we don't realize it.

It also makes you wonder just how much (definitely longterm, possibly irreparable) damage is being inflicted within a society where paternal neglect, disassociation, and abandonment are so permissible, maybe even normal, maybe even expected.