Letters to an Absent Father (with Podcast)
Jaden Ramsey is using the written word to reclaim his relationship with a man he never knew.
Calling all Men: Building on our Power to Relate course, Daniel Simpson and I are now offering monthly men’s groups, with the next gathering on Sunday January 21 at 1900 GMT. Sessions run for 90 minutes. For more info and to book a spot, click here. For more about our work, see Resonant World #57 for a short video we recorded with my wife Dr Genevieve von Lob, a clinical psychologist, conscious parenting coach, and creator of The HSP Revolution .
“I have spent my whole life placing traps and locks around this door so that I don’t dare think about opening it. But here I am, starting to disarm the traps.” — Jaden Ramsey.
Resonant World #60
Five years ago, Jaden Ramsey would have told you that growing up without ever meeting his biological father hadn’t really affected him.
Today, he’s writing a book of letters to the man who walked out on his mother before he was born, never to return.
In an early letter, Jaden writes:
“I’ll be honest, my heart is racing writing this letter. I’m not nearly saying the words I would like to. I feel that there is much more I want to speak to you, but it’s stuck in the dark, lonely, and closed cave of my heart. I have to reach deep to even find the door to this cave. I have spent my whole life placing traps and locks around this door so that I don’t dare think about opening it. But here I am, starting to disarm the traps I created — open to what comes when I crack that hatch open.”
(You can read more about Jaden’s book on his crowdfunder, and his bio is below).
Complex Layers
Jaden was a fellow student in the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training in individual, inter-generational and collective trauma, led by Thomas Hübl and his team of facilitators, which concluded with a final online retreat last month.
I’ve been privileged to witness some powerful moments in Jaden’s process, including a courageous intervention sharing how challenging it was as a Black man to approach the trauma fields of racism, slavery and colonialism in the overwhelmingly white cohort in the European wing of the training. (Resonant World#36)
Facilitated with enormous care, the programme is nonetheless mercilessly effective at showing us what we need to look at in ourselves, and Jaden soon began to contact the complex layers of experience left by his father’s absence.
Through the Timeless Wisdom Training and other opportunities for men’s work, including the monthly men’s groups I’m co-facilitating, I’m developing a clearer understanding of how profoundly the legacy of absent fathers — whether that absence is physical, emotional, or energetic — shapes our collective experience.
‘Not for You’
I grew to like and respect Jaden enormously during the training, and — keen to understand more about his book project — invited him to record a conversation with myself and Jacob Kishere, host of the SENSESPACE podcast, with whom I’ve been exploring a budding collaboration for more than a year. (You can also listen on Spotify).
Jaden explained how he saw the book as a vehicle for reclaiming the parts of himself that were sent into exile as a result of his father’s absence.
As he writes to his father in an early letter, the letters are “not for you”:
“So what you do with these letters is beyond me. I would love if they touched you, but that’s not why I write. I write to right my past. The words spoken here have only been ripples inside of me, letting them emerge frees me of my past. I will unload all that I have been carrying for both of us here. I hope you will understand that these letters are not for you.
“I am not attached to what they may bring. I simply know that I need to write them. I will tell you that I have had many struggles around finding out why I am here, what my purpose is, and how to bring that forward. I understand now that my feeling of swimming upstream in living my purpose is because I am only working at half capacity. Half of my energy is locked behind that door.
“Imagine living your whole life using one arm. Then you wake up one morning and realize that you have two arms that you can use. Just about everything gets more easeful. This is the sensation I walk into these letters with.
“So, there is excitement too. It means that I also awaken to so much potential. Right now, fear outweighs excitement. Fear of the sheer heartbreak I will have to face in writing these to you. For now though, I am happy I have started. What is to come, we will find out. I am open to finding out.”
By reckoning with the legacy of his father’s absence publicly in this way, Jaden aims to support anyone seeking to gain a deeper understanding of how their relationship with their father is affecting their life in the present. He also wants to catalyse greater awareness of the pervasive impact of fatherlessness in the United States, where approximately 18.3 million children — one in four — live without a father in the home. That proportion is almost twice has high among Black children — almost 50 percent of whom live with a single mother, according to data compiled by the America First Policy Institute.
Jaden told us:
“Through this process of our Timeless Wisdom Training, and really going into our ancestral and collective trauma, I’ve been able to I guess walk through doors I haven’t before in my life. And realise there’s many things in me that I would like to express to my father, that I feel like in doing so I can connect with him, and also let go of some things that I’ve been carrying my whole life.”
Jaden continued:
“His absence in a way also impacted and created me, so I am connecting with how him not being there also has influenced me, and created many situations in my life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So it’s a reclamation of my story and my belonging in a way, through these letters. It’s just been really touching, and also a really difficult process to muster up the strength to engage with a dialogue with him inside.”
Healing the “Father Wound”
I see the dialogue we recorded as one filament in the much larger mycelium woven by countless men and women engaged in work to heal what might be termed the collective “Father Wound” — and I warmly invite you to join us by listening. We broached territory I would have struggled to enter, even a few years ago.
Among the topics we address:
How a father’s absence can affect our relationship to our sense of “belonging” and “becoming”, and how our fathers live in us, as Jacob said: “closer than our skin.”
The deep sadness of not being supported by the “man who created me.”
The lack of conversation over what it means to be a father today.
The extraordinary insights documents shared by Jaden’s mother after he began writing the book provided into her attempts to convince his father to be part of this life, and how this deepened Jaden’s relationship with her.
How the inter-generational legacy carried by Black families in the United States affects father-child relationships.
The accumulated pain carried by Black male bodies after hundreds of years of oppression, and what that means for Black people operating in white spaces.
How Jaden’s mixed race heritage and varying experiences of race relations growing up on the West then East coast of the U.S. shaped his perspective on “whiteness” and “Blackness” — aligning with Bayo Akomolafe’s argument that the “colonial mindset” is the predicament. (Resonant World#6).
Parallels between the absence of the biological father and the societal absence of the spiritual father.
The numbing of men who went to war.
If any of this dialogue resonates with you, I’d love to hear more in the comments.
Jaden Ramsey Bio
Jaden Ramsey is a listener, facilitator, and instigator. A writer and mover whose words touch on what is essential. In his debut book, set to release late 2024, he explores the pandemic of absent fathers — both physical and emotional — in our culture. The exploration rests on the backdrop of the relationship with his father, which although non-existent informed who he has become. You can follow his work at his substack:
Resonant World now has more than 940 subscribers in countries from the United States and Australia, to the UK, Germany, France, South Africa and Colombia, to name a few. Of these, 23 are paying supporters — to whom I am profoundly grateful. I write this newsletter to serve the global movement working to heal individual, inter-generational and collective trauma — and any support readers can provide, by sharing, commenting, or subscribing, helps this work to reach more people. Thank you for your support!
Many of us in the Misattributed Parentage community have a slightly more circuitous road to travel. In my case, my parents kept my biological father’s identity a secret, likely because I was the product of an affair. I learned this at the age of 58 after taking a consumer DNA test after the death of my younger brother who suffered from a severe psychiatric illness. This led me down a rabbit hole of genetic genealogy and exploring my mother’s history as an adoptee who was raised by her grandmother. She also did not know her father and never had a relationship with her mother. Through my sleuthing I was able to identify my biological father as well as my mother’s. All had long passed away. My memoir is available in serialized form here: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnmoyermedlpcncc/p/my-mothers-ghosts?r=3p5dh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web