A Christian Counselor on Co-narrating: Helping Teen Sons (and Fathers) to Tell Their Stories, Part 3

Part 3 of this 4-Part Series

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My Dad intuitively understood something that eluded his own father, perhaps because it was so absent in Dad’s experience as a son: that lost ancestral art of marking my own boyhood with rites of passage.

The author with his Dad: as an infant (above), a snow-suited toddler (next), and playing football together (last).

Backyard camp-outs. Late-night Narnia readings. Father-son 5K races punctuated by diner pancakes. Hallway sock fights – firing rolled-up socks from behind pillow forts. (A tradition now reprised with my own kids.) Also, our legendary living-room wrestling matches: furniture cleared out, sweat-soaked undershirts, nails grinding flesh pressing mettle. My cheeks rubbed raw by his bristle and aftershave. How I reveled and took refuge in – and raged against – his strength.

And, birthday letters. As an adolescent who sometimes kept Dad at arm’s length, I’d still find those letters under my pillow every November. Carefully typed words of affirmation that named why he was proud to call me his son – including the ways I was quite different than him.

Co-narrating With Action Words

These rites-of-passage, in which a father bestows a sense of masculinity to a son, can help to mitigate the traumatic, shame-hardening effects of what psychologist William Pollack calls the “Boy Code.” As outlined in my previous article, the socialized, gender-stereotyped, tough-guy norms of the “Boy Code” pressure even young boys into a premature separation – from family bonds, and also from their core emotional selves.

In my experience as a Christian counselor, a boy’s retreat behind a mask of stoicism, anger, performance or acting-out behaviors is often hastened by anxiety and shame stemming from a Code-sanctioned question: Do I have what it takes? While a boy’s “individuation” (or self-defining process) requires answering this question for himself, and at times pushing others away, he is not meant to answer it alone.

Dad was not perfect, thankfully, and he imparted his strength even by naming this. But he also made it a point to face this question with me – through both action and words. These are two hallmarks of what Pollack calls a “generative father” (more on this in Part 4). It’s what I’ve called a “co-narrator”: a man’s sharing his story with a vulnerable authority and emotional honesty, so that a boy finds language to become his own storyteller – beyond the Boy Code.

Shutting Down: The Brain on Shame

Such words are hard to come by. Neuroscience has spotlighted the biochemical impact of shame-induced anxiety: how it floods the neocortex (the brain’s language center) with the stress hormone cortisol. In short, shame robs us of words.

The systematized shaming and toughening process of the “Boy Code” is so subtly pervasive, Pollack notes, that by the second grade, “boys seem far less attuned to feelings of hurt and pain in others, and begin to lose their capacity to express their own emotions and concerns in words” [italics mine].

If you recall in the narrative prelude to this series, my Dad – as a second grader – effectively dissociated, or unconsciously shielded himself, from the shameful trauma of losing his mother to illness. This was largely because his father failed to “language” this experience with him, and to acknowledge his own grief and loss as a widower. It took many years for Dad to make sense of his second-grade teacher’s odd story about a boy who hadn’t cried at his own mother’s funeral: “Wait…I was that boy.”

To which I’d add a footnote: Dad is still that boy. Or, that boy is an estranged part of him who gets activated, or feels abandoned, under stress. We all have these split-off, less developed parts of ourselves that we hide away and fend off with coping tactics – but which inhibit our ability to connect with others more intimately, as it doesn’t seem safe to share our fuller selves.

Male Membership

Pollack says, “Boys become so skilled at pushing this trauma out of their memories that it is not until years later, as adults, that they remember what they went through.”

What is this work of remembering? For me, it’s the work of fathering – of rites-of-passaging and co-narrating.

Consider this: the Old Testament Hebrew word for “remember,” zakar, shares the same root with the word for “male.” I’m reminded that men in particular need to be intentional about marking. not just the heroic triumphs in their stories, but also the tragedies – as a way of re-membering, of putting words to, the lost or diminished parts of themselves. Recall how the Israelites of the Old Testament marked their wilderness trek with stone altars, to which they returned. I imagine these stones of remembrance helping fathers to narrate for sons the story of God’s care and provision in hardship.

A former clinical supervisor of mine, S. David Lutz, wonders if God tasked Adam with “naming the animals” in Eden as a metaphor for a more important job, one that’s a growing edge for many men: that of naming, owning, and narrating their emotional experience.

Dying to Know

As a Christian counselor, I’ve sat with hardened Iraq War veterans who are suddenly ambushed by tears – when detouring, quite unexpectedly, into the splintering, forgotten trauma of their fathers’ emotional absence. It’s the same father-longing experienced by boys I counsel who are facing the combat of middle adolescence.

As men, we’re all dying for a co-narrator — for someone to truly know and re-member our stories with us.

Boys do have a certain ritualized need to idolize superhero-type figures. It’s a normal, archetypal way of discovering his strength. But when these action heroes are over-identified with, or vehemently rejected, it reveals a boy’s need to gird and brace himself for the Boy Code’s counterfeit demands. What keeps the “do-I-have-what-it-takes?” question in check is a boy’s connection with older men who let him know that it’s okay to fail, and possible to fail well.

The Hero’s Limp

The late psychoanalyst Erwin Singer observed how “active striving” is essential for psychological survival – but only if that action carries with it the very real risk of failure. And, only if a man risks allowing this heartfelt loss to mark him for good – by taking him down into his emotional core, where he learns to accept and listen deeply to himself. For this, he needs a co-narrator.

In reality, boys are looking, not just for glossy heroes, but men with Jacob’s limp. Men who have wrestled with and embraced their tragedies as a creative, meaning-making force. Men of action and words. Jacob’s dark-night struggle with the angel in the Old Testament left him an empowered, changed man – a man marked the rest of his life by a blessed limp.

Loss and Longing

My Dad named and blessed my storytelling heart. However, in the throes of my adolescence, there were times he was at an utter loss for words with me. The words not given by Pap, his withdrawn father. Dad grew to find surrogate fathers and mentors who nurtured his true pastoral and teacher’s heart – but they could not completely backfill the gaping hole of his father-loss. Like many driven young pastors, he sometimes over-compensated for his unrecognized father-longings with long hours care-taking for a congregation.

The trauma-related survival skills Dad had learned growing up – his accommodating conflict-avoidance, his disavowed anger – also carried into his parenting. In essence, his unnamed father-wound at times limited my ability as a boy to navigate, regulate, and language my own emotional world.

What if Pap had shared his tears with my Dad as a boy, instead of hiding or simply discharging them? What if Pap had shown his face to Dad, and put words to his grief, anger, and anxiety?

For me, these questions are no longer begging for answers so much as they’re creating deeper connections – to my past, to myself, and to the men around me.

Christian Counseling: Safe Passage

The final part of this series is a parental primer outlining the role of a “generative” father, whose actions and words create the safety a boy needs to explore his world. Professional Christian counseling can help you, as a father or son, to become more emotionally available, grounded and self-aware.