Healing the Core Wound: How My Childhood Shaped Me as a Son, Brother, Partner, and Father

This deeply personal episode of The Aligned Father takes you inside the core wound that shaped host Lirec Williams through childhood, adulthood, and fatherhood. After years of shadow work, Lirec uncovered a belief born from harsh discipline and constant correction, the belief that he cannot do anything right. This episode breaks down how that wound shaped him as a son, big brother, uncle, father, and partner.

Lirec opens up about taking on his family’s problems as a child, becoming the emotional fixer, and carrying guilt and responsibility that pushed him into depression. He shares how leaving Houston created a gap in family relationships and how the pressure to be the strong one shaped his entire identity. As a father, he explains how this wound impacted his parenting of a teenage daughter. Every mistake felt personal, every behavior felt like failure, and conversations often turned into lectures instead of confidence building.

Lirec also dives into how this core wound fed people pleasing and over functioning in relationships, especially with an anxious avoidant partner. He personalized every conflict, tried to fix every emotional trigger, and carried resentment for responsibilities he never should have held alone.

Through real-life fatherhood experiences, emotional healing, and research based insights, this episode explores parenting resilience, parent-child relationships, attachment patterns, emotional intelligence, respectful parenting, and how fathers can move from fear to presence. You will learn how childhood punishment shapes your nervous system, why perfectionism forms in boys who grow up afraid to be wrong, and how to break the cycle so your children experience healthier forms of parenting and connection.

This episode is for dads navigating fatherhood challenges, mental healing, real dad experiences, co-parenting struggles, burnout, and the search for purpose. Listen if you want to build emotional safety, healthy masculinity, and generational healing in your family.

Chapters

• 0:00 Naming The Core Wound
• 3:55 Childhood Punishment And Internalized Shame
• 6:57 Becoming The Family Fixer
• 10:52 Collapse, Leaving Home, Loneliness
• 13:42 Shadow Work And Parenting A Teen

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:16

Today, I want to talk about something that I've been living through for years and something I've only recently had the language for. A core wound. And that has shaped almost every part of my life. This wound was not created overnight. It was planted in childhood, reinforced in my teenage years, and carried into adulthood without me even realizing it. It shaped how I showed up as a son, as a big brother, as an uncle. It shaped how I parent my teenage daughter. It shaped how I loved and relationshipped, and it shaped how I tried to fix things that were never mine to fix. And this wound is that I grew up believing that everything I do is wrong and I can't do anything right. And because of that belief, I built my identity on performance, fixing, pleasing, holding everything together, and even when it crushed me. Today I want to break this down honestly, not to blame the past or anyone in it, but to understand how it shaped me and how it shapes many fathers listening right now. If you listened to my last episode, you would understand where I believe my core wound came from. And I'm gonna re revisit that real quick so that we're all on the same page for those that are just tuning in on this episode. But I grew up in a home where discipline was often punishment. Mistakes were met with whoopings, anger, emotional shutdowns. There was no space to truly be all there is to be a human. There was no space to learn. It's not much of a space to develop confidence through exploration. When a child is punished for mistakes, instead of guided through them, they learn one thing. I am the problem. So when you add an additional layer of drug abuse and caretaking for addiction as a child, it makes it even further complex. It can become the lens that we judge we judge ourselves by. It became the filter for every relationship that I created after that. And it also became the pressure behind every decision. And psychologists call this the eternalized shame. It is what happens when discipline teaches fear instead of responsibility. And as a boy, I learned to stay on high alert, to anticipate issues, to fix things before they became a problem, and to avoid any form of disapproval. And because I never wanted to be wrong or do anything wrong, I became the one who always tried to make everything right. And it's not saying that I did only things to make things right. When I mean everything right, it means that I personalized everything in a way that I felt like I needed to fix it or make a decision to fix it or to alter it. When family member passed away, or you know, someone needed a listener, a problem solver, the one who tried to keep peace between any of my siblings and my parents. And when my siblings struggled, I stepped in, but my family argued, I tried to solve it. My mom, right today, calls me her professor. And when an adult had issues, I felt responsible even though I was a kid. And I think I grew up too fast. Not because I was mature, but because I was scared of being wrong. I carried my family's problems as if they were my personal duty. And it got to a point where I felt like I was the only one that cared. My family was going through a lot of struggles that I've gone through. And I felt like if they just only listened, they wouldn't have to go through the things that I go through or that I went through. So when helping them push me into depression, I thought something was wrong with me. And I fell into that depression because I thought, like, when the problems became bigger than I than me, it felt like I failed them. And when I there was a point in time where I lost my job and I didn't hear from much of my family at that point. Like my first job out of college, I didn't hear from my family much at that point. And I thought something was wrong with me. Not with the responsibility I had been handed, not with the emotional labor that was placed on my shoulders. I blamed myself. And eventually the weight got too heavy for me. And the first chance that I got, I was like, you know what? I can start fresh. I was in a situation where I could leave the city and I left Houston. Physically, it freed me, but emotionally, it left a hole. Because I didn't have anybody. I don't have anybody in this city that I live in. And I kind of built up friendships and things of that nature, but I don't have family. So a part of me wondered if leaving meant I fell them. Or if they felt abandoned. Or if a part of me, a part of me wondered if I walked away because deep down, I believe I could not fix what was broken. And and in shadow work, I learned something important. I was a child playing a grown man's emotional role. And when your inner child grows up believing he must fix everything, the adult version of you keeps repeating the pattern over and over again. Parenting a teenager has been one of the biggest mirrors in my life. When moments where she started acting out, I took it personally. And her behavior felt like a reflection of me. It made my core wound flare up. My mind went straight to self-blame. Like, what did I do wrong? Where did I fail her? But teenagers push boundaries, they make impulsive choices, they try on identities, they test limits. It is developmentally normal. It's not always a crisis. It's not always a commentary on us. Yet I treated every moment like proof of my failure. And when she came to me talking about her feelings, her choices, her fears, or her mistakes, I switched into lecture mode. Not because I wanted to control her, but because lectures were my armor, my attempt to fix, my attempt to protect her from becoming the version of me I never got to be. But what she needed was not a fixer. She needed a father who listens, who gives her confidence in her own decisions, who trusts her process, who understands her world without making it about himself. Shadow work taught me that I had been parenting from fear, fear of being wrong, fear, fear of failing her, fear of repeating cycles, fear of not being enough. But what teenagers need most is presence, not my perfection. Now, being in a relationship with an anxious avoidant partner pulled my core wound into the center of the room. Her anxiety needed reassurance. Her avoidant tendencies created distance, and together it became a roller coaster for us. Every conflict felt like confirmation that I was failing. Every trigger she had felt like something I needed to fix. Every emotional high or low made me question myself. And I took her on her emotional reactions as proof that I was not doing love right. I personalized everything. I overcorrected. I tried to keep the peace, even when it meant abandoning my own needs. And that is what people pleasing looks like in a relationship. It feels like care, but it is fear. It is the fear of losing love. It is the fear of being wrong. It's the fear of disappointing someone you care deeply about. And resentment grew. Not because she was difficult, but because I was trying to perform instead of partner. I was trying to fix instead of communicate. I was trying to avoid the feeling of being wrong instead of expressing my needs honestly. And it is the heart of the core wound. You stop being yourself because you're too busy trying to be what you think someone needs. And there's this part of me that I've learned that I needed to heal in the wrong time. I got deep into a relationship with someone, fell deeply in love with someone, but we could not make that last leap into a space where we both felt safe. And after going through therapy for so long, I started to realize like these questions that my therapists were asking me, I not only did not have answers for them, but I've never actually thought about them. So I spent time thinking about them and started to look at the life that I've created and strongly realize like I replicated the atmosphere of my childhood. Or being able to fix something from the first conversation of dating this person was off the back of a conversation about fixing or protecting or doing something that would cure that love language itch of act of service. But when I finally slowed down and looked at the truth, I realized something important. I was trained to believe that my worth came from fixing everything around me and not from being myself. Every role in my life became a performance. Son, brother, uncle, father, partner. Every role was shaped by one belief. If something goes wrong, it is my fault. But here is the truth I want fathers to hear. You're not responsible for everything. You cannot fix everything you were not meant to. You were meant to simply be human. Learn, live, and love. Mistakes are not failures, they are just information. They are a growth. They are a part of being alive. Now, if you've made it to the end of this episode and you were listening and you see your own story and mine, I want you to hear me clearly. You are not the problem. Your wound is the problem, and your wound is not your identity. You are allowed to set things down that were never yours. You are allowed to release the belief that everything you touch can break. You are allowed to parent without fear, to love without fixing, to be seen without performing. You're allowed to be human without apologizing for it. Healing your core wound is about remembering and rediscovering who you were before the wound was created. Your children need you, a relationship needs you, and you need yourself. Not the fixer, not the perfectionist, not the rescuer, not the performer. They need the man underneath all of that. And he has always been enough. Always.