Some fathers cast long shadows. Especially absent fathers. Their shadows reach far, easily for three or four generations. Most of us live in a family legacy that contains some shadow material from the wounds of an absent father.

Father absence takes many forms. Death, divorce, alcoholism, workaholism, physical and sexual abuse, fundamentalism, emotional unavailability, spiritual rigidity, over-protectionism, depression, anxiety and worry. The list could go on. Father absence is sometimes complicated. One father will go off in pursuit of something important and leave his children. Another will stay at home and ignore what is of greatest importance to him, and thereby leave his children.

Every father is absent in some way, and absence casts shadows that wound. Around these wounds are losses, little ones and big ones. None of us escapes this. The grief we have over these losses is deep and tends to be unconscious both in individuals and in our culture. Alice Miller tells us that the only appropriate response, as an adult, to childhood losses is to grieve. Grieving helps heal the wounds of father absence. It is a way of "eating the shadow material," metabolizing it and moving on.

If these wounds are not healed they are generally passed on. The tendency of a father who has not grieved his own wounds to wound his children in similar ways is compelling. Even fathers who are awake to the wounds they carry and who have sworn they will never do to their kids what was done to them often find themselves repeating those same wounding behaviors. This is how the shadow of a father's absence becomes transgenerational.

What is not passed back is passed down. The alternative is for a father to grieve his own wounds. However, in our culture there is very little permission to grieve about anything, and especially about father absence. There is an unspoken rule that we remain silent about it. Loyalty encourages silence. As children we remain loyal for survival purposes. As adults our loyalty ceases to be useful because we need to leave our father's house. The denial of grief lengthens the shadow of father absence.

There is not enough father and there is not enough grieving. These two features of our culture cast shadows that mingle with each other, catching us in a sea of emotional, psychological and spiritual pain the full effects of which we have yet to fathom. If, however, a father grieves his own wounds, he gives permission to his children to grieve the wounds he himself has inflicted, and the shadow is shortened.

For the past ten years I have been working with men and women who have chosen to address their wounds from father absence. Our culture gives even less permission to men than to women to grieve. When I began offering a workshop for men called "Grieving Our Fathers," one of the most consistent declarations was, "if my father knew I was here talking about this, he'd be furious (hurt, sad, overwhelmed, pissed off, taking off his belt to let me have it, devastated, having a heart attack, confused)." And this list goes on. Rarely did a man say his father would be happy for him that he could talk about this openly with other men.

It took me until I was thirty-seven to begin talking about my own father's absence. What drove me to it was the pain of seeing that I was absent from my daughter and son because I was preoccupied with worry about work and family finances.

I had hidden my grief behind an idealized image of my father. He was the strong, silent rancher who braved blizzards to take care of his cattle. There was some truth in this image. It reflects the gift from my father in the depth of his care for the animals and the land. But behind this image was the father who was too busy and too worried about his cows to see that his son needed his care and his acknowledgment.

Idealization is one way to deny grief. Two other common forms of denial are contempt and indifference. When we break through our denial into the grief, something moves. In this respect, grief differs from self pity, which does not move. Grief heals by transforming our relationship to our wounds.

A father's absence can be humiliating and shaming. When we're little, the shame reservoir fills and overflows very easily, leaving us with a diminished sense of self. One of the reasons the shadow from father absence is so long and carries so far into our lives is that we form beliefs about ourselves in reaction to this absence, trying to compensate for it. If our father has not dealt with his shadow material, we carry it for him as our own shadow begins to form. Our personalities get organized around this complex shadow, and many negative habits and beliefs about ourselves are rooted here.

The good news is that it's possible to challenge these negative beliefs, which we do by disidentifying from them. Grieving is one of the most effective forces to support this disidentification. When our grief is unresolved, we carry our father with us. We live according to unconscious pacts we have with him, and we try to complete his unfinished business, often without knowing it. When we open to this grief, feel it and express it, we discover a path of healing and greater aliveness. Something profound happens when we share this process with others. We break out of our isolation, we feel our vulnerability and our strength, and we begin to leave our father's house. As we work through our feelings of loss, whether our father is living or not, we can experience a new and liberating sense of our separateness and our power. Paradoxically, when we stand apart from our father we can begin to accept and appreciate him for who he is and begin to accept whatever gift he offered to us.

Gary Whited, Ph.D., LMFT, is a psychotherapist and poet. He has trained for years with Thomas Yeomans in Spiritual Psychology. He has also trained as a marriage and family therapist, and as a hypnotherapist, and has an extensive background in Eastern and Western philosophy. He leads workshops in grief work in the US, in Norway and in Russia, and maintains a private practice in the Boston area. He welcomes your responses and can be reached by e-mail at: Gwhited@aol.com