Patritherapeutic: Can the Dad in Every Man Help Heal the Wounds of Patriarchy?

‘It’s the patriarchy” sighs my son at yet another item on the news about gender inequity. “More men behaving badly!” he mutters at reports of war, crime, greed and climate inaction.

It’s not easy to watch all these stories of injustice as caused by people of his gender. But it seems he can’t look away.

He knows patriarchal means “of the ruling father”. Like most parents, his mum and I give it everything we’ve got, to teach him about the world, to get him and his brothers ready for life among the smouldering rubble of patriarchy.

But we know they’ll inherit so much we can’t shield them from.

This world is the maddest thing about us, I know that from 22 years working in psychiatry, and the gender wound is among the biggest we carry.

Could that wound ever be healed such that gender differences and identities add meaning and belonging without…hurting anyone? Is there any hope left of that kind of healing?

Well yes. For me at least. Hope like that is why I am writing this.

I work in perinatal mental health.

Every day, with the same predictability as the news cycle’s latest casualties of so many gender-wounded millennia of patriarchy, I see men and women and non-binary people do everything in their power to see their little human as just that.

Little. Human. And needing us bigger people to unlock depths of humanity we didn’t know we had.

How can such bankable patterns show us such utterly different sides to our species? And can they possibly meet in some helpful way?

Amid the mess that is gender politics in 2024, I think we might harness a phenomenon like parenting, with its evolved ability to make synergy from human differences, to begin to heal from violence and other injustices.

And as we seek to reckon with masculinity’s wounds and redemptive possibilities, I see a deep untapped resource in fatherhood.

Crucially, I mean this literally and figuratively.

Literal fatherhood is my area. Over the last 8 years I’ve helped to found and nurture a community of researchers, clinicians and advocates at the Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium.

Our 2024 annual symposium was so delightfully overflowing with new faces, energy and ideas. Dads everywhere and those they matter to should take heart that their parenting matters to us, and so does their healing.

Because fatherhood heals, in both senses. Dads can heal themselves as men, and can help heal those they love and care for.

Most of the time, this works without some clever-mouthed psychiatrist explaining it at them. Most kids turn out ok.

And yet the world we let those kids loose into has so many problems related to patriarchy.

If we can do it for the kids, why can’t we do it for the world we’re leaving behind for them?

So to figurative fatherhood, which is where we think big. This is the 3am stuff, harder to pin down, but so essential to imagine.

If therapeutic means healing, and “archy” means ruling, then maybe we need a new word “patritherapeutic” to mean “of the healing father”.

Or more broadly, “men healing by nurturing”.

Yes, just as you don’t have to be a dad to be patriarchal, you don’t have to be a dad to be patritherapeutic.

Patriarchy has left everyone living with injustice, if unjustly distributed. The human project is teetering; it sorely needs men who dare to ask what healing is needed and to commit to it.

We need a kind of masculine resources boom, and rich deposits of this kind of care are right here, right now.

Most men make good-enough dads, an ability needed at home most intensively for a few long-and-short years. That life-creating goodness is what I mean by patritherapeutic.

It’s there in us men - dads or not - lifelong.

But with our individualistic competitive culture as is, what is not given to fatherhood is sold for a living.

Men I know are as tired of this as the women, distant though gender equity remains. Patriarchy smoulders on, burning energy that could be made patritherapeutic.

So how do you make a new word into new ways with old problems?

Well, alongside all old problems are old strengths. And one of the oldest strengths I know is listening. So I plan to get out into this wacky world and listen.

I want to ask people of all kinds about healing fatherhood.

I want to get a CEO talking about her dad, a suburban mechanic talking about his kids, an MP showing me their grandkids’ artwork. I want to hear an Indigenous elder talking about Country, an Imam talking about God.

Then I want to ask all of them about patriarchy and whether a word like patritherapeutic makes any sense, or would change what they do.

These collected ideas could help us reimagine what healing men can give the world my boys have no choice but to inherit.

I’ll let you know how I go.

Many thanks to colleagues and friends who have helped with feedback and encouragement for this concept in its development so far.

Please get in touch if you have thoughts to add, via www.dhirubhai.net/in/drmwroberts

(c) Dr Matthew W Roberts 2024