TIQA: Father-son mirrors, un-othering, & radical peace work
“Depth. Clarity. Connection. In under 5 minutes, weekly.”
Here’s your weekly TIQA.
One Theme, one Insight, one Quote, and one Action — to help you show up more fully for yourself and those you love.
Take what’s useful. Chuck the rest.
The Theme
Over the weekend, I attended a men’s retreat centered on relationship intimacy, mindfulness, and nature where a powerful theme emerged:
When younger and older men come together in vulnerability and presence, it opens the door for deeper healing of the father-son wound.
I’ll share a personal moment from the retreat.
In a dyadic exercise, I sat across from an older man as we shared our attachment blueprints with each other — the stories we unconsciously agreed to believe as children, shaped by our primary caregivers:
Big boys don’t cry.
Boys are strong.
Girls are weak.
Good boys don’t get hurt.
Bad boys get the attention.
Etc.
I shared how, in my childhood, there wasn’t much space for my big, moody emotions.
My father, loving yet overwhelmed, would often say, “Lighten up, Ty. Lighten up.”
Over time, I internalized this as a core message:
I was too much — inappropriate, inconvenient, and bad.
But something profound happened that day in the yurt at Story Ranch outside Las Vegas, NM.
As I shared, the older man sitting across from me softly repeated my father’s words: “Lighten up, Ty. Lighten up.”
Because of his elder presence — his salt and pepper hair, weathered face, sparkling eyes, and loving paternal energy — something cracked open in me.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I shivered.
It was as if my younger self got another chance to hear those words, but this time without making himself the problem.
I asked him to say it again. And then again. Each repetition moving something soulful to the surface.
Then, through skill and intuition, he began to modify the phrase, speaking the unspoken words my father couldn’t say at the time — and that I couldn’t have understood:
“Lighten up, Ty. I don’t know how to manage your big emotions. I was never taught how to hold big feelings. I don't know what to do with you. I’m doing my best. I need you to be easier on me.”
Through his words, I felt my father's overwhelm, desperation, confusion, helplessness, humanness — and his love for me. Qualities I hadn’t grasped in this way until that moment.
I got another opportunity to reinterpret my father’s words — this time from the groundedness of being an adult myself, with the tools, capacity, and wholeness I now embody.
Something deep within me resolved. I could love myself more, and I could hold my father with more compassion.
In the coaching work I do, I often say that…
Most of our wounding happens in relationship — and therefore, we must return to relationship to heal them.
This is the medicine of men’s work. The gift of sitting in circle.
The invitation is to step into the roles of each other’s fathers, sons, and brothers as mirrors — so we can rewrite the stories we carry and reclaim the parts of ourselves we've abandoned.
Let us play these sacred roles for one another. Let us keep coming together.
Your unique presence may be the particular mirror that the man sitting across from you needs for his healing.
The Insight
This week’s insight explores how seductive and easy it is to participate in othering.
It’s easier to judge than to understand. Easier to label than to bridge.
We throw around reductive terms like “Trumpsters,” “liberals,” “illegals,” “boomers,” or “climate denialists.” These labels may offer temporary validation — but they come at a cost.
Labels soothe the ego but sever the heart-space required for real resilience to grow — both within us and between us.
Let's continue to fight for what be believe in — human rights, equality, health, etc — but let's resist the urge to subordinate those qualities to a label.
If we can’t come together — especially as men committed to leading with emotional depth and relational integrity — we won’t withstand the pressures of modern life and what’s coming.
Leadership demands the courage to resist the impulse to disqualify others and instead hold open space for collective discovery — even when it’s messy, unclear, or uncomfortable.
There’s no political party, doctrine, or ideology that can replace the living process of deeply listening to what life is asking of us now.
The Quote
When Carl Jung was asked about the odds of atomic annihilation in the future, he responded:
“I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves.”
The Action
This week’s action is to expand your capacity to hold and tolerate the discomfort of opposites in your nervous system.
Identify a political party, public figure, neighbor, co-worker, skin color, or belief system that triggers discomfort, judgment, or aversion in you.
Instead of rushing to offload your discomfort through distraction, criticism, or righteous "othering" — pause.
Feel it.
Track the raw sensations in your body: tightness, heat, constriction, numbness — whatever is there.
Raw sensation never hurt you. Don’t push it away.
Can you simply stay with the sensations, without acting on them?
This is what I call radical peace work from the inside out.
The more we practice this, the more capacity we build in our nervous system — and with that capacity comes clarity and choice in how we respond to challenge and crisis.
The future depends on our ability to sit in this tension, resist othering, and wait for true clarity and right action — all while keeping our hearts open.
A tall order, yes. But possible.
Want to share this issue of TIQA? Just copy and paste this link:
https://wholemanmethod.com/articles/tiqa-father-son-mirrors-un-othering-radical-peace-work
Until next week,
Tyler White
Relationship Coaching for Men, Couples & Families
p.s. ”Damn you’re cool!”