Fathers and Sons — The Patterns That Pass Down Without Words
The things fathers pass to sons are rarely spoken. They are demonstrated. Absorbed. Learned in the gaps between what was said and what was felt, in the texture of a man's presence or absence, in what he did when things got difficult and what he did when they didn't.
By the time a son is old enough to examine the inheritance, it has usually been running for decades. It feels, by then, less like something received and more like something innate just the way he is, just the way men are. IFS gently, persistently, disagrees.
My father played the piano
My father was a pharmacist. A gentle, intelligent man who retreated, in the way that men of his generation often did, into his own interior world. He would play the piano for hours beautifully, privately, in a way that communicated both his richness and his distance. He was in the room and not in the room simultaneously.
I grew up in a large rectory, surrounded by nature, the youngest of three brothers. It was a good childhood in many ways spacious, beautiful, full of the kind of freedom that rural England offered to boys in those years. But the emotional template being laid down quietly, without drama, through the daily reality of a father whose inner world was not available for sharing was forming me in ways I wouldn't begin to understand for a very long time.
I became, in various ways, my father's son. Not through any decision, but through absorption. The tendency often towards withdrawal. The preference for the interior over the expressed. The way that music, or nature, or solitude could feel safer than intimacy. The belief, running beneath everything, that one's inner world was essentially a private affair.
What passes between fathers and sons
In IFS terms, what happens across generations is the transmission of parts and burdens. A father who carries unexpressed grief passes to his son not the grief itself but a template a way of managing grief, a set of protective parts that learned to keep it contained. The son develops his own versions of those parts, adapted to his own context, without ever knowing quite where they came from.
This is not destiny. But it requires more than awareness to interrupt. Awareness tells you the pattern exists. IFS helps you meet the parts that are carrying it in yourself, and in some sense in the lineage behind you — and to begin the work of unburdening them.
The son who becomes the father
What makes this work particularly urgent, in my experience, is what happens when the son becomes a father himself. The patterns that were absorbed are now being transmitted. The withdrawal, the emotional unavailability, the preference for order and competence over mess and feeling these become the template for the next generation.
Many of the men I work with come to therapy not because they are suffering in ways they can name but because they can see, with increasing clarity, what their children are experiencing. A daughter who has stopped trying to reach them. A son who is angry in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar. A family that has quietly organised itself around one man's unavailability.
The U-turn is the moment of turning inward rather than outward, of taking responsibility for one's own part in the dynamic rather than reacting to everyone else's is where this work begins. It is not easy. For men formed as many of these men were formed, turning towards the inner world rather than away from it runs counter to everything they were taught.
But the alternative …continuing to transmit what was received, watching the distance replicate itself in the next generation … is, for most of them, no longer acceptable.
The pattern can stop. Not through willpower or good intentions, but through genuine inner work. That is what IFS makes possible.
And it is, in my experience, some of the most important work a man can do.
Jonathan Edwards is an IFS therapist and psychotherapist, Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society, based in Bloomsbury, London and Stroud, Gloucestershire.