Forgiving the Father You Actually Had - Season 1, Episode 5

Forgiveness is a must in ever relationship, including your father.  Giacomo went a long way to forging a new relationship with his father that started with forgiveness.

Check out A Week with My Father to see how it all happened, and keys to perhaps forgiving your own father.  Full episode on the Vimeo link below:

https://vimeo.com/170560264

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to the Quiet Strength Podcast. Fathers in a Failing World. I'm Giacomo Knox. We live in a time when the role of fathers is often misunderstood, sometimes ignored, and occasionally even ridiculed. Yet throughout history, strong fathers, sometimes loud but often quiet, have held families, communities, and entire civilizations together. This podcast explores acquired strength. Each episode brings together thoughtful conversations about fatherhood, responsibility, faith, forgiveness, and the challenges men face in raising the next generation. Some of these conversations are inspired by research, history, and emerging technology that helps us explore important new ideas in new ways. This is an independent production built by people who believe that strong families and strong fathers still matter. As the show grows, we are always interested in connecting with organizations and partners who want to help us support meaningful conversations about fatherhood and legacy. But at the heart of every episode is a simple question: What does it mean to be a good father in a world that sometimes feels like it's falling apart? This is a Quiet Straight the Podcast. Let's begin.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Welcome to the deep dive. We are uh really thrilled you're joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, we've got a lot to cover today.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Trevor Burrus We really do. Because you sent over a stack of notes recently that are honestly incredibly profound.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Aaron Powell Truly. It's some of the most relatable material we've looked at in a while.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Aaron Powell Right. And we are going to be focusing entirely on unpacking the complex, often unsmoken, and sometimes just incredibly fraught dynamics of the father-son relationship.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Aaron Powell It is a dynamic that almost everyone has a stake in, whether directly or indirectly.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Aaron Powell Exactly. So we're looking at your notes, and the mission here is to really decode that. We're going to explore, you know, why men struggle to understand their fathers, the generational gaps in how love is actually expressed, the uh incredibly heavy lifting of forgiveness.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Aaron Powell Which is a huge part of this.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Yeah, massive part. And how all of this ultimately ties into becoming a better parent yourself, or honestly, just a more grounded human being.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Aaron Powell It is a weighty set of notes to sift through for sure. And I want to set a very specific tone right out of the gate here.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Please do.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Aaron Powell Our goal today is not to argue over right and wrong parenting styles. We aren't here to, you know, put anyone's dad on trial. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Right, no pitchforks today.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Trevor Burrus Exactly. The sources you provided are deeply reflective. And we want to synthesize this information to uncover why this specific relationship is just so universally challenging. We are looking at the patterns, the psychology, and the transformative power of finally seeing our parents clearly.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Aaron Powell Outside of the mythology we build around them when we're kids, right? Trevor Burrus Spot on.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Moving past that childhood mythology.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Aaron Powell I love that framing. Moving past the mythology. And I want to tease a core question for you, the listener, to keep in the back of your mind as we navigate this deep dive today. What if the key to becoming a better parent yourself, or, you know, honestly, just becoming a more emotionally secure person lies in fundamentally changing how you look at the mistakes your own father made?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Aaron Powell That framing completely shifts the narrative, doesn't it? It moves the conversation from one of uh lingering passive resentment into a space of active personal growth.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Aaron Powell It really does. It puts the ball back in your court.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

But it demands a level of introspection that can be quite uncomfortable, liberating ultimately, but uncomfortable at first.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

Aaron Powell Okay, let's unpack this because the very first core theme from your notes highlights this widespread, almost cliche issue. Why so many men struggle to truly understand their fathers?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Aaron Powell It is a tale as old as time.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Aaron Powell It really is. It's often portrayed as this invisible, impenetrable wall between them. It feels like more than just a lack of communication. It's as if they were speaking two entirely different emotional languages. Why is that baseline understanding so incredibly difficult to reach in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Aaron Powell What's fascinating here is that it essentially boils down to a generational translation gap. The materials you provided really emphasize that the very definition of a good father has undergone a massive paradigm shift over the last few decades.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Aaron Powell Shift.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

We are dealing with heavily conditioned stoicism confronting modern emotional awareness. Aaron Powell Right.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

I was looking at the notes on those older generations, and it seems like their benchmark for success was totally different. What did that actually look like day-to-day for a father, say, 50 or 60 years ago?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Aaron Ross Powell Well, the primary language of love back then was almost exclusively rooted in duty and provision.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

Trevor Burrus Just keeping the ship afloat.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Exactly. Survival and stability. For a man of that era, putting food on the table, keeping the lights on, and ensuring the family had a secure roof over their heads, that was the ultimate expression of care.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Working 60 hours a week wasn't just a job. It was his tangible, undeniable proof of dedication. Physical exhaustion was literally the metric of his love.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Oh man, that is so true. It's like the classic dad trope we all know. He won't say I love you on the phone, but he will spend 45 minutes lecturing you about checking the tire pressure on your Honda Civic before a road trip.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Yes, or completely taking over the thermostat to save nine cents on the heating bill.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Exactly. Yeah. It's funny, but it's real.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Trevor Burrus, Jr. It is real, and that is the exact translation gap in action. He is saying, I love you and I want you to be safe, but he's saying it in the dialect of practical maintenance.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

Practical maintenance. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Now contrast that with younger generations. The expectations have evolved dramatically. Modern sons are looking for explicit emotional articulation. They want the words. They want the words, they want presence, verbal affirmation, and a level of psychological vulnerability that their fathers were actively conditioned to suppress.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Aaron Powell Which creates this massive painful disconnect.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

You have a son sitting there waiting to hear the words, I am proud of you, feeling totally unloved because he isn't getting that verbal validation.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

Meanwhile, the father is looking at the safe, warm house he provided, the college tuition he helped pay for, and thinking, how could you possibly not know how much I care?

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Both are operating from entirely different frameworks of attachment. The son feels a profound lack of emotional connection, and the father feels a profound lack of appreciation for his relentless sacrifices.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

It's like they're yelling at each other from across a canyon.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Exactly. And if we connect this to the bigger picture, it asks you, the listener, to pause right now and map out your own family tree.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

That's a great exercise.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Think about your grandfather's generation, your father's generation, and your own. How has that benchmark for being a good father moved across those eras?

SPEAKER_02 7:13

But let me play devil's advocate for a second here.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Go for it.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Is understanding that gap enough? Isn't it a bit of a convenient excuse to just say, well, that's how his generation was? Why shouldn't a son expect his father to adapt and offer some of that verbal affection?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Aaron Ross Powell That is a completely fair pushback, and the distinction between an excuse and a translation is vital here.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Okay. How so?

SPEAKER_00 7:35

We aren't saying the son's desire for emotional connection isn't valid, not at all. The point is recognizing that you are trying to run modern emotional software on hardware built decades ago.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Aaron Ross Powell Oh, that's a brilliant way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Trevor Burrus The hardware of that generation was built for economic survival and stoic resilience, not for emotional nuance. Recognizing that doesn't excuse the absence of warmth, but it recontextualizes it.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

It changes the motive.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Exactly. It wasn't a malicious withholding of love, it was a limitation of their vocabulary.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Aaron Powell So if they are quite literally speaking different emotional languages, how do you even get them in the same room to translate? That actually reminds me of something incredibly specific in your notes, a real-world attempt to force this translation.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Oh, the television pilot.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Yeah. You mentioned a television pilot created by Giacomo Knox called A Week with My Father.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Aaron Powell The inclusion of that pilot in your notes is such a brilliant grounding concept. It takes this highly theoretical psychological gap we're talking about and forces it into a practical physical space.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

I was so intrigued by this. The premise, for those who haven't seen the notes, explores the idea of adult children spending intentional, meaningful time with their fathers specifically to understand them better, moving back into their space for a full week.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

A full, uninterrupted week.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

It sounds simple, but the friction of that has to be immense.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

The friction is the entire point. What's fascinating here is the word intentional, that is the active ingredient. Think about how adult children typically interact with their parents.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

It's usually a holiday visit, a quick Thanksgiving dinner, maybe a birthday.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Right. And during those visits, everyone instantly falls back into the holiday autopilot.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Oh, totally. You walk through the front door and you instantly revert to being a moody teenager.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

And your parents revert to treating you like one.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Exactly. You fall into these deeply grooved behavioral ruts, you don't even realize you're doing it.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Precisely because those short bursts of time don't require adaptation. They just trigger muscle memory. You're playing a role. But when you carve out a prolonged intentional week, you strip away those traditional parent-child roles.

SPEAKER_02 9:43

Aaron Powell Because you can't keep the act up for seven days straight.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Aaron Powell You can. You aren't just the kid coming home for a meal, and he isn't just the mythic authority figure running the household anymore. You are two adult men forced to share space, share a bathroom, navigate the awkward silences over morning coffee.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Aaron Powell You actually see the mundane reality of their life. You see them struggle to open a jar, or you notice the daily anxieties they carry that you are totally oblivious to as a kid.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

It forces a humanization process. The physical proximity alters the perception entirely. You stop seeing dad, the provider, or dad, the disciplinarian, and you start seeing a multifaceted, aging human being with his own routines and his own limitations.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

It breaks the myth.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Nox's pilot is such a poignant example because it shows that understanding doesn't organically happen just because you both get older. It requires putting yourself in a vulnerable position to observe without the heavy baggage of childhood expectations.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

Here's where it gets really interesting, though. It's one thing to spend a week together, to see them as a flawed human, and to recognize the generational translation gap. But we have to wade into the deepest and honestly the most emotionally grueling part of the source material you provided.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

The heavy lifting.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Yes. The heavy lifting of forgiveness.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

This is where the theoretical becomes deeply, sometimes painfully personal. Moving from observation to actual forgiveness is an entirely different mountain to climb.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

Because the reality is understanding the generational context doesn't magically erase the psychological damage. If a father was emotionally absent or overly critical or struggled with addiction, the pain the child felt was real.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Very real.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Accepting that a parent's actions caused you harm while simultaneously trying to forgive them feels like a massive emotional contradiction.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

It is a profound tension, and it's where the source material introduces a very difficult paradigm shift. It brings forward the idea that many fathers were simply doing the best they knew how.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

Now, let me push back hard on that, because doing the best they knew how can sound incredibly invalidating.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

It can, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

If you were a son who is sitting in therapy dealing with the negative consequences of your father's best, hearing someone say he did his best feels like a massive cop-out. What if his best was actively harmful? Why should the son let him off the hook?

SPEAKER_00 12:06

That reaction is incredibly common and it is completely justified. This raises an important question about what we actually mean by their best. It forces us to reconcile two conflicting truths simultaneously.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

Okay. What's the first truth?

SPEAKER_00 12:19

The first truth is absolutely what you just said. Your feelings of hurt are valid, and the mistakes had a real, tangible, negative impact on your life. Forgiveness does not mean saying what you did was okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

It's not a free pass.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Not at all. So that's the first truth.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Aaron Powell So what is the second truth?

SPEAKER_00 12:36

The second truth is that the person who made those mistakes was operating at the absolute limit of their own emotional capacity. We have to look at their emotional toolbox.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

Their toolbox?

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yes. If a father was raised in a home where vulnerability was violently punished, or where anger was the only socially acceptable emotion for a man to display, he literally did not possess the tools to foster a delicate, emotionally supportive environment for his own son.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

He couldn't give what he didn't have.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Exactly that. True forgiveness in this context is an act of profound, almost radical empathy. It's looking at a flawed individual, recognizing their unhealed wounds, their blind spots, their generational trauma, and realizing that their shortcomings weren't a malicious, calculated choice to hurt you.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

They weren't plotting your downfall.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

No. They were a symptom of their own limitations.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

That shifts the narrative away from personalization so much. Because as a kid, if your dad is distant, you internalize it. You think, I am not worthy of his attention. I am not good enough to make him put down the newspaper.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Every child does that.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

But when you recognize his limited emotional toolbox, it makes it less about your worthiness and entirely about his incapacity.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

That shift from personalization to objective observation is where the heavy lifting actually occurs. But it requires grief. We rarely talk about the grief involved in forgiveness.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Mourning the dad you wanted versus the dad you got.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yes. You have to actively mourn the ideal father you wished you had, the one who would have validated you, understood you, nurtured you. You have to let that fantasy die in order to accept and forgive the deeply flawed man actually sitting across from you.

SPEAKER_02 14:14

Carrying all that resentment, constantly replaying the mistakes, it is exhausting. It takes so much daily energy to keep that wall of anger maintained.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

It drains you.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Letting it go feels terrifying because the anger almost acts like a protective shield, but taking it down is incredibly liberating.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Which leads us to the ultimate purpose of this deep dive. Why do this exhausting, painful work at all?

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Right. So what does this all mean? We've talked about the translation gap, we've visualized the friction of intentional time, like in Giacomo Knox's pilot, and we've debated the messy reality of forgiving a man whose best might have still caused harm. What is the actual payoff for you, the listener, to invest this kind of emotional energy?

SPEAKER_00 15:00

The payoff, according to the culmination of your notes, is entirely about the future. Finding a way to forgive one's father is presented not just as a nice thing to do for the old man, but as a fundamental prerequisite for helping men become better fathers themselves.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

Because if you don't do the work to understand and forgive, you are doomed to pass that exact same baggage down the line. It's the classic pendulum swing, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:21

The pendulum swing is so common.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

You either repeat your father's exact mistakes because it's the only model you know, or you overcompensate so drastically that you create a bizarre new set of dysfunctions for your own kids.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Unexamined resentment acts as an invisible anchor. It dictates how you react under stress, how you discipline, and how you show affection. When you harbor deep-seated anger toward your father's limitations, you are ironically still letting his limitations control your parenting. Wow. You are reacting to his ghost rather than responding to your actual child.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

But when you do the work, when you actively release that resentment and gain that objective understanding, you become a cycle breaker.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

A cycle breaker, yes.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

You look at your father's empty emotional toolbox and you say, okay, he didn't have the tool for emotional vulnerability. I'm not going to be mad at him for lacking it, but I am going to actively go out and build that tool for myself.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

By understanding the constraints your father operated under, you consciously choose to transcend them. You aren't reacting blindly to his legacy. You are thoughtfully constructing your own. You learn from the negative space. And there is a secondary benefit here that is equally profound. What's that? The grace you extend backward to your father is the exact same grace you will eventually need to extend to yourself. Oh, that's good. Because no matter how many tools you build, no matter how much therapy you do, you will still be a flawed human being raising a child. You will make mistakes. Developing empathy for his imperfections lays the groundwork for self-compassion when you inevitably stumble in your own parenting journey.

SPEAKER_02 16:55

That is heavy, but it is incredibly hopeful. We have covered a massive amount of psychological terrain today. Let's do a quick recap of the journey we just took through the materials you provided. We started by defining the generational translation gap, moving past the frustration of a father's silence to understand that older generations were conditioned to express love through provision and duty, while modern generations seek explicit emotional connection.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

We then explored how bridging that gap requires intentional disruption, using the concept from the A Week with My Father pilot to illustrate how forced, prolonged physical proximity strips away old childhood roles and allows adult sons to finally see their fathers as vulnerable, multifaceted individuals.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

From there, we tackled the immense challenge of forgiveness. We debated the friction of accepting that fathers were doing their best, ultimately recognizing that while a child's pain is entirely valid, the father's actions were often dictated by an incredibly limited emotional toolbox, not malicious intent.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

And finally, we connected that heavy lifting to the future. We saw how true forgiveness isn't about excusing the past, but about breaking generational cycles of resentment, allowing men to consciously build the emotional tools their fathers lacked and become healthier parents themselves.

SPEAKER_02 18:12

To you, listening, we want to validate your desire to dig into this material. This is a deeply personal, often raw topic. It requires confronting things we usually prefer to leave buried. But leaning into these insights and doing the translation work can lead to some massive aha moments in your own life. Changing how you view your past genuinely changes how you navigate your future.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

It absolutely does. And to leave you with a final thought to mull over as you go about your day, if true understanding requires accepting that your father was just doing the best he could with the tools he had, it raises an important question. When your own children look back at you decades from now, what are the well-intentioned mistakes they will have to forgive you for?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Hey, this is Giacomo. Forgive me, the episode ran a little shorter this week with the two hosts. Um This was uh the toughest aspect uh of shooting week with my father as I look back at the show and all the hard work we did and all the aftermath and my dad passing away about nine years ago, in fact, uh was going into the show and realizing I was going to have to forgive my dad for the things he actually did. The things I don't understand that he did. And really even any modern that is at the time, of course, shortcomings he had. Um the the latter proved to be darn near impossible. Mainly because Dad, you know, he was very sick with diabetes. He was unfortunately addicted to his own medication and had become very sedentary as he got older and just didn't want to do anything but you know, pleasure himself and uh take that every aspect of the world you could imagine. Food and uh pornography. And so when he became homeless and he lived with me in Dallas, I took upon his burden literally out of forgiveness. Now that was probably a mistake, it may have been overmatched ultimately. Um but forgiving that man was paramount. Not just to the show. The show, you know, the show did what it was going to do. The show did not get picked up by NBC as I really wanted it to do, or any of the network around the the world. But uh I wanted to go into the show knowing my dad from A to Z. And there are still some letters in between that A to Z that are missing over the years, and I am estranged from my father's family, so I may never get them. Maybe at the time uh this all comes to an end and I see my dad again in line to the throne, that I will understand and I'll have perfect forgiveness. And none of us will have perfect forgiveness while you're on earth. That's not the way things work. So, like I said, I went in forgiving my dad and saying, okay, um, whatever you did, dad, it happened when I was five years old. I can't possibly hang things over your head for 50. Yeah, 50, two, fifty-three years ago at this point. And that would be a cowardice if not. I think most people are afraid of forgiveness because it makes you vulnerable. We live in a world where you've got, you know, gotta be the alpha male, is the sigma male, or a boss be you know what, I say the word, but keeping this podcast as clean as possible. But in the midst of being a hard ass, you can be so cold you can forget that everybody's got their struggles. And so forgiving my dad, like I said, was paramount. And going into shooting the episode, and I was also producer. I was also you know, doing a scheduling, also doing the location of scouting. Uh putting all that aside and saying, hang on, uh I'm here uh to explore my relationship with my dad post divorce. Divorce post 30 some odd years we'd not seen each other and just enjoy the company much as I possibly could. And even now, because we did not have a well end to our relationship before he passed away, I still forgive my dad. I have to be very honest. And the last episode we talked about generational trauma. When you hear it coming out of someone's mouth who never told you to begin with, or didn't have the opportunity to tell you when he was younger and you were younger, you get that, oh, uh this is why you're this way. My dad acknowledged he had a lot of issues with his own father, and subsequently passed those issues down to me, this generational trauma going from one to the next, next to the next, until someone stands up and says no. And that's my goal for you. You're listening to this podcast, is you be the one to say no in your family. You be the one to say no to passing along the pr the pain and suffering, emotionally or physically, to your children that you may have received from your own parents. Okay, be well. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. For more information or to become a sponsor, please go to our website at www.newberryfilmworks.com. We'll get right back to you. Stay tuned for the next episode, coming up very, very soon.