Porn Wasn’t My Problem — Fatherlessness Was

What happens when a fatherless boy meets pornography at eight years old, grows up angry, addicted, and suicidal—then hears a stranger say, “The heavens are open over you, God has called you to ministry”?

In this vulnerable conversation, Seth Watkins shares his journey from fatherlessness, porn addiction, and depression to freedom in Jesus, healing from abandonment, and a new legacy as a husband, soon-to-be dad, and minister of the gospel.

You’ll hear about:

• Growing up without a dad and feeling like “a menace to society”
• How early porn exposure created cycles of shame, lust, and loneliness
• Homelessness, anger, and the social anxiety porn produced in his life
• The rock-bottom moment when he considered ending it all
• The phone call and church encounter that literally saved his life
• How a prophetic word unlocked his calling into ministry
• Practical tools Seth still uses: accountability, software, community, and counseling
• How he plans to father differently and break generational curses

🔗 Links & Next Steps

• 🌐 Learn more about Dudes Without Dads: https://www.dudeswithoutdadspodcast.com/
• 📩 Share Your Story or Apply to Be a Guest: https://www.dudeswithoutdadspodcast.com/contact/

If this episode encouraged you, send it to a man who grew up without a dad. We’re breaking chains together.

#dudeswithoutdads #fatherless #christianmen

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

My dad and some of the crimes that he committed, and uh how life started to change after that. And I remember when I was eight years old, there was um a classmate who introduced uh pornography to me, and uh to be honest, I was immense. Like I was menace to society. It was it was a really, really bad cycle. What I struggled with a lot was lust. It really it produces like this social awkwardness, this insecurity that drives just this anxious feeling that just continues to build the effect that had on me. I came to the lowest point of myself where I even considered like, is it worth being alive? He says, Seth, the heavens are opened up above you. God has called for you to be destroyed.

SPEAKER_03 0:51

My life was just spyrolling downhill, depression, alcoholism, incarceration, death by despair. One guy who showed up is just Jesus. If you can give a man clarity and community, he can start to live out his perfect. You can break the generational curses of alcoholism.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Welcome to Dudes Without Dads, the show that trains men how to become the dads they never had.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

My name is Seth Watkins. I'm originally from Miami, Florida. I was born and raised there until I was about in eighth grade, and then uh had some family stuff go on, moved over to the Missouri area, and I consider Missouri and Kansas my home.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Awesome. Well, what I want to do is I want to go back to the beginning. Would you mind sharing a little bit about what your childhood looked like?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Oh, most definitely, most definitely. So both my parents, other immigrants, one from the Bahamas, one from Jamaica, and I have an older sister, she is two and a half years older than me, and then I have an older brother who is seven years older than me. So I was the youngest. So yeah, I was born in Florida, and uh all of us were together, but I kind of face the brunt end of my dad and some of the crimes that he committed, and uh how life started to change after that. There was some interesting works of him not being a citizen, him being a citizen, and then all those things kind of caught up to him with the crimes that he did commit. So when I turned five, he was deported back to the Bahamas. Something significant, a little bit before he was deported, he converted our family to Judaism. So I remember we'd go to the synagogue. I was young, just kind of doing what the family did. It wasn't anything that was super personal to me, but it was foundational through my childhood development. And as I continued to grow in elementary school and middle school, I often found myself acting out because my father was gone. We my mom was uh working under the table, doing the best that she could to provide for our family and my older brother. He'd pick up jobs and help my mom pay bills and different things like that. Um, and I remember when I was eight years old, there was um a classmate who introduced uh pornography to me, and I had no idea what it was at that point, I hadn't seen it yet, and it was just like this whole new world just opened up, and I just continued to get deeper and deeper and deeper into it until I found uh video pornography at like nine or ten, and that started a traject trajectory of a lot of negative cycles and habits. Um one of the biggest things I remember as a kid was never really knowing my place. I always felt like an outcast, always felt like I had to be loud to get attention. I was seeking for that that validation, seeking for nurture, looking back on it. And to be honest, I was a menace. Like I was a menace to society. I was a product of my environment. I hurt people, I was a I was always fighting, somebody was fighting me, I was fighting somebody, somebody was jumping me, I was jumping somebody. It was it was a really, really bad cycle. So I remember a lot of negative and lonely emotions in my childhood.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

You said your father was deported when you were around five years old. Any memories of spending time with your dad before you were five?

SPEAKER_01 4:41

I have a vague memory, but sometimes I wonder if it's real, but let's just go with it being real. I have a vague memory of like skipping rocks and going to like a park or like a creek or something, but that's really all that I can remember. With my parents being Caribbean, a lot of their disciplinary style was like take a stick off a tree or whatever they could pick up, they're gonna they're gonna beat you with. A lot of what I do remember my dad in person is he was heavy on education and teaching us, but also he was a disciplinarian, he was an authoritarian. So packed up, do anything, you're getting beat. So I just remember my dad coming home from long days of work and something happened, and my brother and I get beat. And I hate to say that's kind of the bigger thing that stands out from my father, but that's one of the main things I remember when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Well, talk to me about your relationship with your mom for a second.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Yeah, so in that time period of like elementary, there was a lot of labels that I believe were placed on me. I was a liar, I was annoying, I was not enough, or I kind of fill in the blank there. But it was more of my teenage years when it was about turned about 12, my mom started dating again. And she brought a new guy in the home, and he had his own struggles, his own demons, his own issues. And he was a drunk, an alcoholic, had kids of his own that originally we didn't know about, still married at the time. And we eventually started financially depending on him. But sometimes what he would do is he'd get drunk and he'd pretend to leave, pack his bags, and my mom she would be distraught, she'd like cry, and she kind of like would emotionally rely on me um around that time. So when I remember when I was younger, it was more of a I was just like the emotional, weird, annoying Seth and kind of left to my own devices. Whereas when I started getting into my teenage years, I kind of was that rock for my mom.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

When you look over the the history of your childhood, was there anybody that kind of stepped in as a father figure?

SPEAKER_01 7:05

I I think at times my my older brother tried. I think it would be wrong of me to say that he didn't try, but he was doing what he knew. And a lot of those things weren't positive. So that was fun too. More so when I became a Christian is when I started finding pockets of fatherhood. As the uh guy that my mom started dating, he wasn't the best role model, and I considered him a no model instead of a role model. In the church, they they they adopted me, and I'll get more into more of how that happened. I would find at different times youth pastors or men who would take me into their wing and just teach me things and just um pour into me. But there it took until about 14 or 15 until I really could say I started having what's the word I'm looking for, more sustainable father figures or longer-term father figures.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

When did you first realize that the absence of having a father was actually having an effect on who you were?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Ooh, that's a good question. Let's see. I remember when I was well, let's go back actually. When my dad got deported, and I was like five or six, I remember counting down the days that he was gone because like five, ten, fifteen, twenty days, odd dad's coming back, when's dad coming back? And eventually, like I stopped counting. So it kind of became normal that like dad wasn't there. Um, but I was always hopeful, like wanting to see my dad, like, oh, where are we gonna go to the Bahamas and see my dad? Or can we pack up our stuff and go? And and it just never happened. So I think I started getting numb to it, and I was like, okay, well, dad's not here. I don't know how my dad just gotta figure it out. And then when the guy my mom started dating came the pitcher, and there are times where he wanted to be a dad, or it was like, I'm not your dad, and it was like just a lot of this back and forth. But I really think when I hit not even high school, like, no, I'll say this, when I hit 16, I knew something was missing, but I wasn't able to fully grasp it. But it was until 19 or 20 when I had walked away from the Lord, and a lot of these things started coming up in my life that I thought I would never do, or the person that I thought I'd never become. And I was like, Well, where is all this coming from? So I think when I was like 19, 20, very early adulthood is when I was like, so there's a lot of things wrong here.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

How did you process things like manhood growing up without a father?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Yeah, so manhood, that's a really good one. So part of when how I got to Missouri was I had family on my dad's side who offered to take us in.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Real quick, do you have a story of growing up without a dad? Or you had a destructive or distracted father? If you think it would be of value to share your story on the Dudes Without Dads podcast, I want you to pause, go to the link inside the bio, and apply to speak on the Dudes Without Dads podcast. And then if you know somebody that would be an incredible guest, please share this show with them because we can do more if we do it together. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Shows that I watch, um, the way that I speak, it it wasn't it wasn't rough enough where it wasn't whatever their ideal of manhood was, it didn't meet to what they wanted it to be. So often I have this idea of myself as like, can I can I ever be a man? Am I good enough? Do I do I have what it takes? So I I think manhood, and even now, some things that I still have to work through is the feeling of validation or feeling like I need to constantly prove myself. So I think that's a little bit of the ways that I have understood manhood. And some of the ways that's helped is seeing strong men and strong mentors who have questions, or someone who could tell me that I'm doing something wrong, but actually have actionable steps or things that a man should do, especially a Christ-like man.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Yeah, that's good. When you process things like relationships specifically with the opposite sex without having a dad or a role model, how did you handle things like that?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

This is good. This is this is well, it's bad, but good. So growing up, my my family, especially the men, the kind of the I the mindset that they come from is honestly like a conquest. They want the most women, the prettiest women, and it's a numbers game. And growing up, I had a very, very, very poor view of um women. I remember spending time my one of my cousins at my uh grandpa's house, I might have been like 11 or 12, and I was helping them move and we were sitting in the U-Haul truck, and they looked at me and they're saying, you know, all you need to worry about is having sex, just as much sex as you can have. That's all you need to worry about. And I'm I'm 11, 12 here and this. I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's it's awesome. Kind of just distorting my view of even of what it meant to be with um be with a woman or things like that. And then the man my mom was with. I remember opening up to him one time and I was like, hey, how do I even like how do I even talk to women? Like I don't I don't know how to like I'm trying at school, but like I'm just weird or it's just not working. And his advice was terrible. It just was like, what you gotta say is, hey, you don't ma, you look fine today. Can I get your number? And that's all he told me. Um, so I I never had positive relationships described as like this is how you treat a woman, or this is the correct way to speak to a woman, this is how you view a woman. That so, one thing that really did impact me though, I'll never forget it. My youth pastor, he became more of my mentor as I grew older. One of my like first like relationships. I met a girl at a Christian camp, and we liked each other and ended up dating long distance, and she like sent me a bunch of letters in the mail, and I had never experienced something like that. And it was like open on this day, or open when you're feeling sad, and like she'd color something, and it would be like, I'm thinking about you, and it was it was really special, and it meant a lot. But at the time, I was like, What is this? And I showed my mom, and she was like, Oh, she's crazy! Like, she's crazy, you need to don't talk to that girl, and and I was like, Oh, yeah, she must be crazy. But I was like, maybe there's something more to this. So I showed my uh youth pastor, I was like, Hey, this is um some of the stuff that she sent me. Like, what do you what do you think? He was like, Oh, sad. He was like, I wish when I was your age someone sent me that. I was like, Why? He's like, Have you ever heard of the five love languages? I was like, No, and he broke it down to me. My mind was just blown. I was like, Words of affirmation, gift giving, quality time, physical touch. Um, and I'm missing one more. I'm blinking on it. But with that, I was like, Yeah, I've never oh, acts of service, acts of service. I was like, Yeah, I've never really seen my mom treated this way or treated well, and I don't even know if my mom has experienced some of this um in her own relationship, so it was never modeled to me. And then in my college uh years, well, actually, even before college, because when I was younger, I was the awkward, the weird, the ugly kid. So I often held those beliefs to myself, and I never really thought that that I was desirable, right? So then uh when I started working out and I joined the military, and women started to notice me, and it became like this eye-opening thing. It was like the first beautiful woman that ever noticed me. It was like, oh my goodness, I can't lose her. Like, I don't know if I'll ever be able to do this again. And it was like this insecurity that I that I held on to, and then it evolved positively and negatively at the same time, too. Where it became I slowly started to learn what women wanted to hear, and uh it was like cast my net wide, see what could land, and see it was just like this game of of chase, and it was like I started to enjoy that. I knew I knew how to get them interested, but it stopped there. I didn't know how to maintain a relationship, how to how to date a woman, how to love a woman. I came to a point in myself where it was just like really lonely, and there was a a thought process that I came into my mind because a lot of what I struggled with a lot was lust. And it was okay, hypothetically, if I had this woman, and but I'm looking at this woman, and then I had that woman, that cycle wouldn't stop. There's gonna be another woman who walks by. That that same thought process, that same desire is going to go to, but I've learned how to control that, I have to learn how to um to um discipline myself in that way. And it was different men in the church who had to teach me these things and the willingness to be vulnerable and say, these are some of the things that I'm going through.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

You mentioned you first started viewing porn somewhere around eight, nine-ish years old. Yeah. When you look back at the fruit that it produced as far as an addiction and an emotion, what would you say was the the biggest addiction that it presented? And then what was the emotion that it that that it also presented?

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Yeah. Um, let's see. I think the worst point was let's see, 15, 16. My family and my mom, my my mom, myself, my sister, we were homeless for about eight months living in a shelter. I'm still in high school, going from ninth grade to uh 10th grade. I was at the deepest point of my porn addiction at the time, and a lot of it was escape, um, sadness, more depression, anger. And it just continued to skew and thwart the natural sexual drive and sexual desire that God has given me. But it just brought it to such an unnatural level to where it was even it was difficult to even look and be around women. It was like that, those images, those videos, the amount that I was viewing, it really changed the chemistry of my brain and how I interacted with just people in general, whether it just be in classes or it really it produces like this social awkwardness, this insecurity, and it drives just this anxious feeling that just continues to build. It's like a cycle where you have an emotion and you want it, and I want it to escape. So I go to porn, and then I feel terrible after, and then I want to cope with that feeling, so then I do it again, and then I feel terrible again. Then I'm like, okay, I'll stop for a little bit, but then I feel this loneliness, anger, sad, and then it's just it's a continuous cycle that um was very destructive.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

I want you to think about the day, the memory, or the moment that was absolutely your rock bottom moment. Do you have one? Yes. Would you mind sharing your kind of the rock bottom memory or moment?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

I kind of have two. Um this was a little bit okay. Yep, I got it. All right, so right out of high school, I and my my last two high school that I went to, I played football there for two years. I had enough film to get recruited on the NAI level, but I injured my knee. I had a tore my MCO, partially tore my ACL. And it was like an eight-month recovery process. Luckily, no surgery. But I didn't have enough money to go to college still, even with the scholarships. So I started looking at the army, but then a marine recruiter came out of nowhere and was like, hey, you should join the reserves or the same things, that and the other. We can get into that too. But my faith fluctuated while doing my initial active duty training. A lot of ups and downs, and some great, great God moments in there. But also, I experienced the problem of evil in a new way, I experienced temptation in a new way. And uh when my training was all said and done, I came back home. But this was a new home because my family had moved, and I didn't grow up with the person that mom has been with, his kids. They were out of the picture somewhere else, and they moved in. So it was like I've been gone for a year and a half, and now I'm coming back to this after I had all these new experiences, and my faith is like really, really low, and I'm searching for a lot of validation, a lot of things within women. I found myself in a lot of sexual predicaments that I warned other young Christians about, like these kinds of temptations, these yeah, these temptations that arise and how to fight against them, how to how to battle them, how to having accountability. And I knew those things, but like I came to a point where I was like, I I don't need you, I don't want you, I want to do it my way. And part what led to that was I was playing football in my freshman year in college, and I had a pretty gnarly concussion that put me out for two months. And then I came back for a couple days, but my school was doing um like quarantine tracing. So if you were near somebody that had COVID, they'd put you in a dorm for like two weeks. And you'd come out like an hour a day and they'd bring you food. It's like prison, but not prison. And I told God after all that loneliness and the problem of evil and my childhood, like I'm done with you, I'm gonna do it my way. And I just found myself just so deep in sexual sin, whether it was my doing or even unwanted sexual experiences that happened to me and coming to terms with um the effect that had on me. I came to the lowest point of myself where I even considered like, is it worth being alive? And I contemplated suicide, I contemplated the who, what, when, where, how. But something in me was like, why don't you just call the suicide hotline and just tell them what's going on? And then I did. And it was honestly what saved my life. Also the Lord providing that, but they they were a blessing in that moment.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Can you point back to a moment in your story? And it sounds like you've had a handful of it, it almost seems like your story has this tug of war that's taking place in it. Was there ever a moment where you kind of just let go of the rope and then everything kind of changed? Um, do you have any transformational memories? Would you mind sharing that?

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Yeah, so it was actually quite near that same point where with the quarantine trace and living in the world and all those experiences. I came to the end of myself and I told God that he couldn't use me. I told God that he was done and there's no way. There's it, it's just it's over. I was like, okay, I'm gonna drop out of school, find a full-time job, and just work. And I told that to my uncle, but I also told him the only way I'd stay is if somehow I changed my major to ministry. But I had too much shame and guilt. I was so depressed and far from God, where even the thought of like submission made my skin crawl. It was just like, I am I know the story of the prodigal son, but I I I'm further like no way. So crazy, crazy happenings. I was dating this one girl at the time, and um, I went to go visit her in Minnesota. Church came around, she's like, I want you to go to church with me. I was like, no, and she's like, I really want you to go to church with me. I was like, okay, fine, I'll go. And never been to Minnesota before, never been to this church. And the pastor, the service, they're doing something called like an addiction panel. It was like a they called it teen challenge, but it was like a panel of men who had gone through this program, however long it took them to overcome their addictions, whether it was like hard drugs, um, sexual addictions, like you name it, they were talking about it up there, and and it really intrigued me. And again, I didn't want to be in church, I don't want to be there, and no one knew me. And at the end of the service, I felt this really strong prompting to go and talk to the pastor and uh say and to get prayer. And I was like, I don't really want to, but I it was strong, it was it was so strong. So I go up and I was like, Hey, can you pray for me? And he asked me what my name was. He says Seth. I said a few words, I told nobody nothing. I said, I've sinned in my life and I feel far from God. I remember I texted my uncle a while ago. I was like, Hey, I'm gonna drop to school, work full time. The only way I stay is that I would do ministry. So this pastor, he he's praying over me. He extends his arm like this, and he says, Seth, the heavens are opened up above you. God has called you to ministry. And I'm like, whoa, I just I started bawling. And the Holy Spirit gave him a word of knowledge, and it didn't stop there. And he said, Seth, I sense a spirit of abandonment in your heart. And he asked me if that was true. I said, Yes. He said, That has fueled your addictions and your struggles and your sins. You need to get back in the word.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

That's so good.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

You need to find Christian men to be brutally accountable with, and you need to find Christian friends to keep you along the path. He says, Seth, you are not a mistake. God has called you to ministry. And I just I was sobbing, like I was like nasty sobbing. Um he had to continue to pray for me. And at first, I was a little bit afraid to share this part of this of my testimony, um, because I was afraid of how other people might react. It's like different doctrines and different things. But this pastor, he started speaking in tongues over me, and it's not very common or practiced in this particular denomination. And when I came to Christ, it was in a Pentecostal church, so that wasn't unfamiliar to me, but it was just like, whoa, this normally doesn't happen at these churches, and I just felt that sin and shame and guilt, it washed away like a waterfall. And I was studying uh computer science at the time, and I remember I felt this the utmost piece to change my major to ministry. There was just too much hurt and sin in the relationship that I was in at the time. So we did end up breaking up, and uh I came back to my my campus, and I reached out to our university chaplain, reached out to our football chaplain, and I just shared my story and confessed and shared my sins and exposed the places that I was like, Man, I can't tell anybody that the Lord brought about healing, and it didn't stop there either. The Lord had led me to join and attend a deliverance ministry, whereas the same concept of confessing my sins and having men to godly men to pray over me and to just hear the hurt in my story to to encourage me. And one of the things that I I love this principle, there are things that I would tell them, and they were like, if you still um are around this woman or this girl, you need to go apologize to her. And it was like, not only am I learning to forgive myself, yeah, I have to take accountability in the places that I messed up.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Hey, I'm gonna interrupt the podcast. Hope it is adding value to you. And let me introduce myself. I'm Joshua Brown, founder of Dudes Without Dads. I'm a dude who grew up without a father, and he actually offered to pay for my abortion and not being my life. And so this podcast is birthed out of my desire to be the dad I never had, and then encourage other men to become the dads I never had. And just to be straight and to be blind, I need givers. I need individuals who believe in this ministry that believe that helping men become the dads I never had is a worthwhile pursuit. And I've got a giving link, which is a QR code on the screen, or you can go inside the show notes and just become a monthly supporter of the dudes without dad for your gift of anything over$20 a month. I'm gonna send you our season one, a dudes without dad shirt. Just let us know what size you wear, and I'll mail it uh to you. But that's all I've got, and uh again appreciate you taking time to listen to this podcast. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

God and that he can heal things instantaneously or over time. But I also believe in other methods too that can help be practical ways of healing as well. So whether it's a deliverance ministry or prayer or counseling or therapy, those are a lot of the things that helped me to uncover some of the things that I learned as a child, some of the things that I did being a product of my environment, um, having accountability partners. That's one of the most important things. Where if up to this day, if I'm tempted, I can text one of my buddies and be like, hey man, I'm tempted with this and that. Can you can you pray for me? Um or and I I think it's important in accountability, having someone that's on like the the same, I guess, level, for lack of a better word, but then having someone that's a few clicks ahead of me as well, and someone who is not afraid to to challenge me and to rebuke me and to to push me, but doing that in love, so that that's another thing that's helped. And vulnerability is one of the biggest things that has helped me to continuously heal from my past, but finding trusted people to do that, because I've just learned not everyone can hold some of those deeper things. So, for example, with my wife, before she became my wife, and over time I started sharing my story with her and some of the things that were like hurts, habits, and hangups. And I have two things on my phone. One is called Covenant Eyes, and the other is called Canopy, and they work in tandem. One's like a web blocker slash history recorder, in for lack of better words, and the other specifically blocks apps that you can download from the app store, and those won't solve any addiction problems, however, they are very helpful and comes when your heart starts to change and you're more focused on the things of the Lord. It's just another another tool in your tool belt. One thing that was really uncomfortable was being very uh open and honest with my wife. It was like these are the ways when I was a kid, when I was a teen, how I learned how to access porn. And these are the avenues and things that are that are tempting. These are the and just having having no do your doing your best to have no secrets, because a lot of those will continue to fester and grow, but being able to expose that the area that wants to be hidden that has been the most helpful to me and to guys that I have also helped as well. Yeah, so I I grew up under this, there's a phrase, children are to be seen and not heard. And I really dislike that phrase. And the reason being is I think that it implicitly teaches children that their voice doesn't matter. And it's not to say that like you have to be the center of attention and have your opinion be the end all be all, but more of learning how to speak up for yourself, learning that your voice does matter because you have to be your own advocate, really just creating an open dialogue with my children and being able to hear them out, to explain things to them to their level of understanding. Growing up, there was never really a conversation, there's not really a lot of understanding. It was if you're in trouble and you're getting beat, and say my mom asked me a question and I would respond, that response would automatically be back talking. So there was never any like you couldn't win. It was just learning how to keep the peace and keep everything bottled up for the sake of others around. And my hope for my kids will be not only will they love the Lord, but that they would be able to take care of themselves and take care of others, but be well-functioning members of society that knows opportunities of the importance of education, the opportunities that are out there, being able to take risks and being encouraging them if they if they fall, but also being that guiding force of like, hey, you're kind of veering off here, you know, we've got to correct that. But if they want to take a chance on something that's respectable but a little bit scary, I'm for it. I'm gonna support them, I'm gonna be with them, I'm gonna just have that genuine love and nurture. I feel like I missed out on a lot of that, yeah, and just speaking life over my kids. And I I do recognize that my mom and dad did the best they could with the resources that they had, but being able to acknowledge that that is true, yeah, but also there was a lot that was missed and neglected and not done well, holding both intention, and being able to be in a partnership with my with my wife and teaching my son and daughters how to love each other, how to how to argue well, how to deal with conflict. I I go on forever. There's just there's just so many things. Teaching them skills. One one thing my mom, and I love that my mom did, she uh thought us how to cook, and she was very into more like natural remedies, and a lot of Caribbean people are, but just passing that down, whether it's skills like music and giving them the opportunities to explore those things and just being together. There was a lot of division and go to your own corner growing up, and I know things won't be perfect, and I'll make mistakes, but I just want to recreate this idea of family to a more loving environment. My my my family, the way that they show love. My older brother, he's in prison, and I remember visiting him and talking to him, and I was like, How do I connect with the family? And my wife or my fiance at the time, she was like, How do I connect with the family? And my brother answered, Oh, in our family, we fight. That's how we show love. And I was like, I just I don't want to do that. That's that's not the way I want to show love.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

I have two final questions for you, and what I want you to do is I want you to close your eyes for a second. All right, I want you to imagine that you are 24 today, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:01

I'll be 24 in May.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

24 in May, which is just a few weeks away. I want you to imagine that you are your age today, and you're able to zip back into history when you are five years old, your your father's gone, and you're able to pull up a chair beside your five-year-old self. What would you speak into your five-year-old self?

SPEAKER_01 37:26

I think I think I'd give my five-year-old self a hug. I think I would say, you don't have to prove yourself to people. Anything else? I don't know if I'd understand this at five, but maybe.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

What are you gonna say say to yourself?

SPEAKER_01 37:55

I think it's okay to cry. It's okay to feel sad, but there will be better times. I think I say something along the lines of you don't have to be what everyone wants you to be. And you don't you don't have a word it, you don't have to go out of your way and try to get people to notice you and try because that'll only bring more more pain. But I think the biggest thing is giving myself a hug and just I love you.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

I've asked that question at the end of most of our shows, and yeah, for whatever reason, it's so hard to just get to the point of saying, I would tell him that he's valuable, God has a plan, you are loved, you're gorgeous, I'm proud of you. Just speaking that blessing over because dudes without a dad, we don't get the blessing of our fathers spoken over us. So going back and just speaking that blessing is powerful.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Yeah, I think sometimes I take those questions a little literally, and I'm like, would I understand this F5? Maybe about seven, you know.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Final question. And if your father was in front of you today, what would you say to him?

SPEAKER_01 39:27

What's interesting about this question is to this day, I still haven't seen my dad. He's made his way to Canada with other immigration issues. We talk every now and then, but there's still a lot of disconnect, or we truly don't know each other. But if he was in front of me in person right now, honestly, I think I would say, Dad, I forgive you for not being there, even though that wasn't fully your choice. And I think I would want to know more of his story, his his upbringing, his past, things like that. And I think there are still parts of me that that wants that validation and support from my father, something along the lines of trying to get that, but also being okay with the fact that I might not. So I don't know if that answers your question, but I think that's how I would go about it.

SPEAKER_00 40:25

Set you get final words. If you could speak anything into the life of somebody that's listening that resonated with your story, what do you want to say to them?

SPEAKER_01 40:37

I think I'd say a couple things. I think a lot of times, men, we want to do things alone and do things in a way where we don't feel weak. I would say push against that. And sometimes our weaknesses can lead us to our greatest strengths, but we have to be willing to confront those weaknesses. And also this um idea of like, oh, loner life, I can do it alone. Like we we need people. Great leaders have leaders, great pastors have pastors. Like we were designed for community, and then on the flip side of that, I would say don't let your past define you just because your mom did something somehow, your dad did something somehow, or historically, whatever your last name or lineage might mean, or like, oh yeah, we have done it this way. But God can change that for the better, and that you can be the chainbreaker and give the glory to God. And also, we've all been given different cards in life, whether it's your upbringing or your health, chronic illnesses, or something that's developed over time that has a more negative effect. Learning to trust God despite the deck of cards that we have, whether it's by your own choice or something that was given to you, learning how to trust God, learning how to adapt and to invite people in to make the most out of what God has given you.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Seth Watkins, thank you so much for being a guest on the Dudes Without Dads podcast. It's been my pleasure to capture your story and to share your story with others. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_00 42:27

We will see you in the future.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

See you.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

Forgiveness is more for you than I had ever for the first time in my life.

SPEAKER_03 42:36

It's just you, just you.