Reflections on The Father Question
This article was inspired by Episode 2 of The Men's Group Debate Series, held on June 6, 2026, at Savelberg Retreat Center in Nairobi, under the theme "The Men Nairobi Raised Are Not the Men Nairobi Needs." The debate, moderated by Erick Opon and featuring contributions from Justus Kirigua, Titus Lwanda, Steve Wasilwa, and Collins Munene, explored five provocative questions on success, fatherhood, provision, emotional health, and identity. What follows is not a transcript of the debate but a reflection on the ideas, stories, and tensions that emerged as a room full of men wrestled with what it means to become whole.
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One of the strangest experiences of adulthood is hearing
your father's voice come out of your mouth.
The first time it happens is unsettling. You are usually in
the middle of a conversation, an argument, or giving advice nobody asked for.
Then suddenly you hear it — a phrase, a tone, an expression. For a brief
moment, you stop speaking and think: "Good Lord. I have become my
father."
This can be either comforting or terrifying, depending on
your father. For some men, it is a moment of pride. For others, it feels like
discovering a hereditary condition. Yet almost all of us experience it
eventually. Whether we realize it or not, our fathers continue traveling with
us long after they leave the room — sometimes through wisdom, sometimes through
wounds, sometimes through habits, sometimes through silence, sometimes through
strengths, sometimes through fears.
Which is why one of the most fascinating motions in The
Men's Group Debate Series asked a question that appeared simple but was
anything but: Are we unconsciously becoming our fathers?
The room immediately grasped the weight of the question.
Nobody arrives at adulthood empty-handed. We all inherit something. The real
question is what we inherit.
What Have You Inherited?
As I listened to the debate, I realized the motion was not
really about fathers. It was about inheritance. And inheritance is much bigger
than money.
We inherit beliefs, assumptions, fears, communication
styles, and emotional habits. We inherit definitions of success, ways of
handling conflict, and ideas about marriage, masculinity, leadership, God, and
ourselves. Some inherit confidence. Others inherit anxiety. Some inherit
courage. Others inherit silence. Some inherit emotional warmth. Others inherit
emotional distance. Most of us inherit a mixture.
Which is why the debate felt so personal. Nobody was
discussing a theory. They were discussing the people who raised them — the
people who shaped them, the people whose fingerprints still exist on their
lives. Whether they like it or not.
Justus and the Story We Inherit About Ourselves
When Justus spoke, I found myself thinking less about
fathers and more about identity, because one of the stories he shared touched
something deeper than achievement. It touched narrative — the stories we
inherit about who we are and who we are not.
Many of us receive these stories long before we can evaluate
them. You're not academic. You're too emotional. You're not leadership
material. You're difficult. You're lazy. You're weak. You're not enough.
The remarkable thing is that many people spend decades living inside stories
they never consciously chose.
Listening to Justus reminded me how powerful inherited
narratives can be. Not because they are true, but because they are repeated.
Repeated stories become beliefs. Repeated beliefs become identity. Repeated
identity becomes behavior. And before long, a man finds himself living inside a
script he never wrote.
This is one reason I appreciate Mark Wolynn's work in It
Didn't Start With You. His central insight is both hopeful and unsettling —
many patterns did not begin with us—the fear, the avoidance, the silence, the
scarcity, the shame, the beliefs. Sometimes we carry stories older than we
realize. This means self-awareness is not simply discovering who we are. It is
also about discovering what we inherited.
Steve and the Case for Honor
Steve approached the motion differently. Listening to him, I
got the sense that he was trying to rescue something modern conversations
occasionally lose — gratitude, honor, and perspective — because discussions
about fathers can quickly devolve into fault-finding. And to be fair, most
fathers made mistakes. Some made many. Yet Steve seemed determined to remind
the room of another truth: most fathers were also carrying burdens we rarely
see.
Many were trying to provide with limited resources, to lead
with limited examples, to parent with wounds they had never healed, and to
raise children while still figuring themselves out. Richard Rohr writes
extensively about masculine development, and one of his observations is that
many men spend large portions of their lives surviving rather than becoming —
working, providing, carrying, enduring. Not because they are thriving, but
because responsibility demands it.
As Steve spoke, I found myself wondering how often sons
judge their fathers based on information their fathers never had access to. The
father who struggled to express affection. The father who rarely spoke about
emotions. The father who worked constantly. The father who seemed distant.
Perhaps some of these fathers were not withholding. Perhaps they were simply
passing on the only model they had.
This does not excuse everything, but it does create
compassion. And compassion is often where healing begins.
Titus and the Inheritance We Must Examine
Then Titus shifted the conversation, as he often did
throughout the debate. His contribution felt less like an argument and more
like an invitation — an invitation to examine, question, and reflect. Not
everything we inherit should be automatically preserved.
Some inherit courage — keep it. Some inherit discipline —
keep it. Some inherit integrity, faith, and generosity — keep them all. But
what about inherited anger? Inherited avoidance? Inherited emotional distance?
Inherited silence? Inherited fear? Inherited control?
Titus seemed to be asking a difficult question: what
happens when the very thing that helped one generation survive becomes the
thing that limits the next? That question sat heavily in the room. Every
man recognized something — there are parts of our fathers we admire, and parts
we promised ourselves we would never become. Then adulthood arrives, and we
discover both are living inside us, which is considerably less convenient than
it sounds.
Collins and the Men Who Break the Cycle
Then Collins brought the conversation to a place every
generation eventually arrives at. Responsibility. Not responsibility for what
happened to us. Responsibility for what happens next.
Listening to him, I found myself thinking about how easily
an entire lifetime can be spent explaining ourselves through our fathers. And
to be fair, there is often good reason. Some men grew up with fathers who were
present. Others grew up with fathers who were absent. Some inherited
encouragement. Others inherited criticism. Some inherited emotional safety.
Others inherited unpredictability. Some inherited wisdom. Others inherited
wounds.
Yet Collins seemed to push the room toward a harder
question. Not "What happened to you?" but "What are you
going to do with it?" Eventually, every man reaches an age when blaming
his father becomes less useful than understanding him. And understanding him
becomes less important than deciding who he will become.
There is something profoundly liberating about that
realization. You may not have chosen your inheritance, but you can choose what
happens next. You can choose what continues. You can choose what improves. You
can choose what ends. And perhaps that is where fatherhood truly begins — not
when a man has children, but when he consciously decides what legacy he will
carry forward and what legacy will end with him.
Murray Bowen and the Family River
One of the most useful ideas in family systems theory comes
from Murray Bowen. Bowen suggested that families behave less like collections
of individuals and more like rivers — what happens upstream eventually appears
downstream. Patterns travel. Anxiety travels. Communication styles travel.
Conflict patterns travel. Emotional habits travel. Strengths travel. So do
weaknesses.
When I first encountered Bowen's work, it explained
something I had repeatedly seen in coaching. A man swears he will never become
like his father. Twenty years later, he discovers he has inherited his father's
conflict style, silence, or emotional distance. Not because he wanted to, but because
patterns travel more easily than intentions.
Families are remarkably effective at transmitting behavior.
This means the question is never whether something is being passed on —
something always is. The question is whether we are aware of it. And awareness
is where transformation begins.
Carl Jung and the Father Inside the Son
Jung would probably smile at this point in the conversation,
having spent much of his life exploring the hidden forces that shape human
behavior. If Jung had attended the debate, I suspect he would have asked a
question nobody wanted to answer: "What parts of your father live
inside you?"
It is a deeply uncomfortable question. Most men can
immediately identify their father's flaws, but far fewer can recognize where
those same tendencies appear in themselves. One day you are criticizing your
father's communication style. Three years later, you hear yourself speaking to
your teenager and realize you have become a limited-edition reissue of the very
man you were criticizing. Life has a sense of humor that way.
Jung believed that maturity requires integration — the
ability to honestly see what is within us: the strengths, the weaknesses, the
gifts, the wounds. Not so we can condemn ourselves, but so we can become
conscious, because unconscious patterns tend to control our lives. Conscious
patterns can be transformed.
Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts a man can give
himself — the courage to stop saying "My father was like this"
and to start asking "How much of that lives in me?"
James Hollis and the Father Wound
James Hollis explores a painful reality many men quietly
carry. The father wound. Not necessarily abuse. Not necessarily abandonment.
Sometimes, it is simply absence — emotional absence, relational absence, or
developmental absence. The father was there. Yet somehow not there.
Many men struggle to describe it. They had a father, yet
still feel fatherless in certain areas of life — no guidance, no initiation, no
emotional connection, no affirmation, no model for becoming a man. The
challenge is that unresolved father wounds rarely stay confined to childhood.
They often surface in adulthood — in relationships, in leadership, in identity,
in confidence, in conflict. Sometimes men spend decades trying to earn approval
from fathers who stopped speaking years ago. Sometimes they spend decades
trying to prove something to fathers who never asked for proof.
This is why compassion matters. Not because our fathers were
perfect, but because they were human. And because healing often begins when we
stop asking our fathers to become who they never learned to be.
Bowlby and the Gift of Presence
John Bowlby's work on attachment adds another layer to the
discussion. Attachment is not built primarily through advice, correction, or
instruction. It is built through presence. A child develops confidence not
because someone explains it, but because someone consistently shows up.
Presence creates safety. Safety creates exploration. Exploration creates
growth.
And perhaps this is one of the hidden lessons many fathers
discover too late — children rarely need perfect fathers. They need available
ones. The memory that shapes a child is often surprisingly ordinary: the
conversation, the walk, the encouragement, the laughter, the attention. The
moments that seem insignificant as they happen become unforgettable later.
Frankl and the Transformation of Inheritance
At this point, Viktor Frankl quietly enters the room. Frankl
always asks the same question: What meaning will you make from this?
Not "What happened?" but "What will
you do with what happened?" Two men can inherit the same wound — one
becomes trapped by it, the other transformed by it. Two men can inherit the
same hardship — one repeats it, the other redeems it.
Frankl's genius was helping people see that meaning creates
freedom. Not freedom from the past, but freedom in relation to it. The past may
explain us, but it does not have to define us. That may be one of the most
hopeful ideas in the entire debate.
The Inheritance Audit
This is where coaching enters the conversation. Awareness
without action changes very little. Over the years, I have found one exercise
particularly useful. I call it the Inheritance Audit — three simple questions
every man can sit with honestly.
The first question: what did I inherit that I should
keep? The discipline, the courage, the work ethic, the faith, the
generosity, the resilience. Every father gives gifts. Our responsibility is to
recognize them rather than lose them in the process of examining his failures.
The second question: what did I inherit that I should
improve? Perhaps communication. Perhaps emotional awareness. Perhaps
balance. Perhaps presence. Not everything needs rejection — some things simply
need upgrading. The raw material was good. The application needs refinement.
The third question: what did I inherit that should end
with me? The anger, the silence, the shame, the addiction, the fear, the
emotional distance. The patterns that no longer serve the next generation.
Every man eventually becomes a bridge. The question is what crosses it.
The Blessing We Leave Behind
After the debate, one thought stayed with me. Fathers are
constantly passing things on — sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally.
A child is always learning, watching, absorbing, interpreting, and receiving.
The inheritance is happening whether we notice it or not.
That means the question is not whether you will leave a
legacy. You already are. The real question is what kind.
One day, someone will sit across from your son or your
daughter and ask them about you. Not your income. Not your title. Not your net
worth. You. What story will they tell? Will they speak of fear or courage?
Distance or presence? Pressure or wisdom? Will they inherit your wounds or your
healing? Your limitations or your growth?
Perhaps that is the deepest lesson hidden within The Father
Question. Most fathers gave us something. Vs Most fathers failed to give
us something. Maturity is learning to honor both truths — to receive
the gift, to understand the wound, to extend compassion, and then to choose
consciously what happens next.
Every generation receives an inheritance, but every
generation also becomes one.
And sooner or later, every man must answer the same
question:
What have you inherited — and what are you passing on?
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