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Emotional Resilience

Get Emotional: A Valuable Legacy from Father to Son

My father never taught me to understand my emotional needs. This led to disaster in my life, and I knew I wanted to model a healthier path for my son. I wanted to leave a better legacy to my children.

It was only as an adult, while in recovery from pornography addiction, that I learned the importance of recognizing and meeting emotional needs. I also discovered that my lack of addressing emotions was a root cause to my compulsive pornography use.

Emotional Skills to Avoid Addiction

Pornography is far more enticing than it was when I was a boy. As a father, I wanted my son to have skills that would enable him to avoid the addictive effects of pornography. I knew his best chance would be to learn to meet his own emotional needs through relationships. Reality had to meet his emotional needs in ways fantasy could not. He needed to know that emotions are good and expressing feelings makes men stronger. Avoiding addiction requires authentic connection with others.

Johann Hari  author of the New York Times best-selling book "Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs," affirms this idea, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” Dr Mark Laaser, certified sex addiction specialist and therapist, puts it this way, “Sex [and pornography] addiction is a relationship disorder.” Relationships brought me out of addiction, and I believed connectedness could keep my son from falling into it.

For a boy to understand that he has emotional needs, he must first learn to distinguish the different emotions he is feeling. When our son, Lucas, was in grade school, my wife and I would model expressing our emotions.

Emotional Modeling Scripts

For example, if  I messed up a project at work and my employer was unhappy with me, I would come home and express my feelings in words that Lucas would understand at whatever age he was. When he was especially young, that meant saying nothing more than, “I feel sad today.” As he got older I might share that “I felt like a failure” or “I felt unappreciated.” I would usually say these things to my wife, but made sure Lucas was in the room when I did. Then I would be sure to explain what had happened that left me feeling down.

After expressing my emotions, I needed to show my son what it looks like to process or work through them. In the example of doing poorly at work, I would typically hug my wife, then say something like, “Maybe I’ll call one of my friends and talk about it because that might make me feel better.” The point being, emotions are not to be stuffed but talked through with safe people.

By doing this I was showing him:

a) men have feelings

b) men can express feelings without anger

c) men can take responsibility for reaching out to find comfort

d) men can find comfort from sharing their feelings with other men.

Most importantly, I was showing Lucas that negative feelings can be coped with in positive ways.

My Son Internalized My Emotional Modeling

Lucas listened to me express my feelings long before he shared his own. Then, when he was in fifth or sixth grade, he came to me after school saying, “I just feel sad today for some reason.” I know this may sound insensitive, but I was actually very excited to hear him say that. He had internalized what I was modeling!

I hugged my son and said, “I’m sorry to hear that. There are days we feel sad; it’s okay to feel sad sometimes.” As parents, we don’t need to make our children feel better. I acknowledged and validated his feeling, all the while knowing this was the beginning of a new journey we would take together.

Read the next post by John Fort, Block Porn Interest: A Proactive Parenting Plan.

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