I grew up with a father who just loved to pretend he was weak! His favourite past time was to isolate himself from the rest of the family and then proceed to drown himself in self-pity!

As a young boy I have plenty of memories of my father in that state of being and I clearly remember feeling helpless to assist him in breaking free of this pattern.

Since the beginning of the previous century, when the systematic study of human behaviour acquired the status of a science, the importance the parents play in the development of the human personality and character has been emphasised many times over.

Today, it is well established that, from a very early age, we use our parents as “Role Models” and we develop lifelong behavioural patterns based on what we have learned in our early family environment, an environment that also teaches us the concept of self-discipline.

This is not the space in which to become too technical, so suffice it is to say that we acquire self-discipline in two principal ways:-

- From our mother we learn the basic values in life and 
- from our father we learn to discriminate, that is we learn to take out of life that which is beneficial and reject that which is destructive.

And it goes without saying that the discrimination we learn from our father pivots around the values we learn from our mother, because we could not possibly discriminate around values about which we know nothing!

What happens, though, when as boys, we grow up in a family environment with a father who is either plain weak as a male - or he pretends to be weak!!?

Unfortunately - or not - irrespective of whether the father is indeed weak or pretends to be weak, the effects upon the son are the same in both cases.

The boy will grow up manifesting three distinct forms of behaviour. In this article I have chosen to touch upon the first of the three forms, namely the sense of being disillusioned by life.

I grew up with a father who just loved to pretend he was weak! His favourite past time was to isolate himself from the rest of the family and then proceed to drown himself in self-pity!

As a young boy I have plenty of memories of my father in that state of being and I clearly remember feeling helpless to assist him in breaking free of this pattern.

As a result, my own sense of disillusionment manifested as a state of general apathy. I grew up believing that I am not important, that my opinion does not really count and that no matter what I did or accomplished, I could not possibly make a difference!

That state of apathy kept getting worse and, after a certain point, I developed a pattern of indulging in feeling help-less - as well as power-less. Then, as a young man, I developed quite a few patterns according to which I kept manifesting the ineffectual male, a concept we have already explored when we touched upon the first from the myths for the male, namely “Men do not cry”, ! http://www.institute-for-the-study-of-man.com/articles/item/112-quest-for-maleness-br-big-brother-and-men-don-t-cry which really means that the male cannot be helpless. In other, a little more technical, words I found myself deeply enmeshed in mother’s awareness.

The breaking free of those patterns is the work of a lifetime! Time and time again I catch myself manifesting helplessness as well as powerlessness.

Another distinctive manifestation is indulging in procrastination. Since I cannot possibly make a difference, why bother?

As a young man and as a young professional, I kept postponing things until the last possible minute! It goes without saying that under such circumstances it was not possible for me to be impeccable in what I did. More often than not, I was left with the impression that I had not really done my best; an impression that made me feel even worse about myself - and the vicious circle kept repeating itself!

When I first began working on myself and I came across the above concepts, on top of everything I’ve shared so far, I developed a very conscious blaming of my father - because he had been ... himself!

It made zero sense and yet it took me years to realise that upon my journey of self realization, and upon my hunting for knowledge of the self, I needed to develop those exact patterns!!!

The breaking free of those patterns was to be a part of my own Journey of Adjustment.

With warmth
Sotirios Galanopoulos