One possesses nothing unless one has experienced it in reality. A purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows only the words and not the substance of the thing from inside. —Carl Jung
Three and a half years ago, when I was 58, my daughter Elli was born on Father’s Day, 2023. There is, of course, only a 1 in 365 chance of a child being born on Father’s Day, so the timing of Elli’s arrival was something special.
Up to that point in life I’d never been superstitious. We all experience rare events, like the crash of United Flight 173 in my Portland neighborhood when I was a boy. Such happenings, however unusual, have to be witnessed by someone, so why not me?
Still, I couldn’t shake the notion that Elli’s Father’s Day birth carried meaning beyond coincidence. As the days passed, I came to see it as a call for transformative action.
I’d faced a disturbing dilemma for years. Though I was at the height of a successful academic career, addictionmarital strife, and decades of misguided ambition were taking more from me than a career could deliver. Without reprioritizing, I knew Elli, sooner or later, would be raised without her father. I couldn’t imagine her experiences of future birthdays or Father’s Days.
What Science Tells Us About Fatherlessness
We’ve all heard the statistics. One in four children are raised without their father—a rate that’s doubled in my lifetime. Both boys and girls are affected, sometimes in similar and sometimes in disparate ways. Boys show more aggression and delinquent behavior, and report wanting more guidance as youth.
Girls engage in more self-harm and suicidal behavior, and experience teen pregnancy at almost eight times the national average. Both boys and girls are prone to early drinking and drug use, and many suffer from depression. Three-quarters of adolescents who don’t finish high school are raised in fatherless homes.
As a child clinical psychologist, I’d known these facts and more for decades. I’d trained with Everett Waters, a prominent attachment theorist. I’d learned how healthy emotional development depends on children’s secure attachments with their mothers and fathers alike. I understood the effects of paternal abandonment on girls’ capacities to form trusting, respectful relationships with their partners later in life.
My knowledge of social science convinced me to abandon my career to be a healthy and committed father. Although I knew intellectually I’d made the right decision, my training couldn’t prepare me for the wellspring of emotion fatherhood can deliver. Neither science nor English language capture deeply embodied human connections.
Lived Experience of Fatherhood
A few nights ago I put Elli to bed through our normal routine of toothbrushing, reading, and song-singing. After finishing our last verse, Elli gazed, head on her pillow and without words, into my eyes, and I gazed back into hers. This lasted for probably 8 to 10 seconds—nothing peculiar yet longer than typical in U.S. culture.
The experience was inexplicably profound—something I’d never encountered in all my decades of living. I felt small yet right-sized, as if standing on the edge of an expansive still lake on a cool, moonless night, peering into a star-filled sky. I felt connected, not only with Elli but with the world around us and the universe beyond. I felt no ambition, no urge to change, no disappointments, and no uncertainties. There was nothing to want or regret.
I pushed back tears, which Elli couldn’t possibly understand, overwhelmed with deep affection and gratitude. In mere seconds, a little girl, 3 years old, taught me something more profound than anything I’d learned in two and a half decades as a psychological scientist.
Eye contact may be the most powerful route to embodied human connection. When we’re open, something happens in an instant, usually outside our awareness. We gauge, even in strangers, their emotional state, and our nervous systems, whether subtly or strongly, respond. English language provides no words for this kind of human connection, but other languages do.
Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, a Lakota phrase, captures embodied human connection and our interconnections with all around us. According to Lakota wisdomMitákuye Oyás’iŋ—sometimes described as oneness—should be sensed before we engage further with others, even others we might disagree with. When cultivated, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ is accessible to all of us once we know where to find it. I’d read about Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ and thought I understood it, yet I didn’t until Elli was born.
What Science Can’t Explain About Human Connection
Science, despite its many benefits, can’t fully capture embodied human connection. Its objective measurement and declarations of winners and losers subordinate subjective experience, even when social scientists claim to value it.
Social science borrowed the scientific method from the hard sciences, where declaring single winners and rejecting subjective experience hold value. Einstein was right: Newton’s theory of gravity was incomplete, and no amount of lived experience is needed to understand that. In fact, it can only get in the way.
Psychology is different. Human needs, motivations, and understandings of the world around us are deeply subjective and varied. As a result, few if any psychological theories are always correct at the expense of all others. There are few zero-sum games in social science.
Instead, the ultimate utility of psychological theories depends on context, culture, and the subjective reactions, motivations, and apprehensions of the very people we seek to understand. These and all parts of the human psyche aren’t amenable to direct observation or precise measurement.
I was taught as a student that anything unmeasurable, even in social science, is inconsequential. If we can’t measure something, no matter how central it is to human experience, it falls outside the purview of science and isn’t necessary to understand. I recall, as if it were yesterday, my psychological methods professor’s disdain for anything subjective.
Social science has, by and large, failed to ameliorate humanity’s greatest dilemmas. Our most pressing personal ailments and social ills, including mental illness, addiction, violence, racismand war, are just as pernicious today as they were when we embraced the scientific method and marginalized subjective experience a century ago. Maybe it’s time to rethink that decision. Maybe it’s time for transformative change.
Source: www.psychologytoday.com
