Healing Father Issues

  • Occupation: Non-Profit Manager 
  • Age: 27
  • Born in: San Francisco, CA 
  • Lives in: New York

My experience in Synergy was life changing and transformational. I couldn’t have envisioned what I would become without all those dark layers of my past around me. I was walking around guarded as a result of some experiences that happened earlier in my life, but in the last few months I have had major breakthroughs and found connection again in my relationships with men and with myself.

For the last 10 years one of my biggest aspirations was to have a genuine, connected relationship with my father who lives across the country in my home-state California. During the leadership journey my coach helped me through having weekly calls with him, which was no easy feat at first! With support I was able to observe how I showed up in relationships in the context of how I viewed myself (major key!). One day I told my father that I wanted to have a more connected relationship with him, and one week later, Dad ended up in the emergency room in a life-threatening situation. With support from Synergy I flew to California to be with him during this time.

The trip to visit my Dad turned out to be a roller coaster of physical and emotional frustration, anger, healing, love, courage, strength and breakthrough. For me it represented a letting go of anger, resentment, and the past… and in turn, solidifying a closer, more authentic and vulnerable relationship between us. One night I wrote him a 7-page letter as if I’d never see him again, which sparked a 2-hour conversation that I didn’t think either of us had the courage to have. It turned out there were a lot of assumptions/misconceptions I had about my dad and about choices he made in his life regarding our family. It was then I realized that I had never heard, or asked, for his side of the story. Everything shifted!

I have had major breakthroughs and found connection again in my relationships with men and with myself.

Towards the end of the conversation he gave me relationship advice about dating and trusting men, he told me about his new relationship, and we made a plan to go on a family vacation to Brazil possibly later this year for our birthdays.

The time and weekly conversations with my Dad has changed me forever, from the relationship with him to my relationships with other men more broadly.  I no longer feel like I have to be different for men to want to spend more time with me, or that all men are unfaithful. It has restored my sense of trust and authenticity with the opposite sex.

A few years prior to Synergy I had begun referring to myself as a layered onion; only my closest friends could see what was at the core of that onion, only after years and years of getting to know me. Now, I feel like I’ve shed 6 or 7 layers of rotten onion, ready to reveal to the world the bright light at my core. Thanks to Synergy I am a powerful, joyous and connected leader with the courage to be a healer and to be healed.

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