Creating the Father You Need

How do you get benevolent masculine power into your life?

Image: the Oak King, by Emily Balivet

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Creating the Father You Need

“When one has not had a good father, one must create one,” declared Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher was pointing toward our ability to consciously construct the guidance, support, and modeling we need to thrive.

What does it mean to “create” a father? Nietzsche understood that the father archetype serves functions beyond biological relationship. A good father who has avoided the curse of toxic masculinity might provide protection, wisdom, encouragement, standards worth reaching for, and belief in our capacity to meet them.

When this presence is absent, whether through death, abandonment, inadequacy, or abuse, we face a choice: remain haunted by the absence, or become architects of what we need.

Some methods for this creation are named below.

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Finding Flesh-and-Blood Mentors

The most direct approach involves developing relationships with admirable older men who embody qualities worth emulating. These mentors need not formally adopt the role of surrogate father. In fact, the relationship may work best when it remains organic, based on genuine mutual interest.

Examples: a teacher who takes special interest in your development, a boss who sees potential in you that you haven’t fully recognized in yourself, or a neighbor who offers guidance without judgment. These figures can provide the steady presence, encouraging words, tough love, or examples of integrity that a good father would offer.

What makes this work is specificity. You’re not looking for a perfect father substitute, but for someone who demonstrates particular qualities you hunger for: steadiness when your own father was erratic, or warmth when he was cold, or intellectual rigor when he was anti-intellectual. The relationship becomes generative rather than merely compensatory.

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Literary and Historical Fathers

Then there’s the possibility of finding paternal guidance in books. When you read the work of men whose thinking stirs you to actualize your own potentials, you enter into a kind of conversation across time and space. The author becomes a voice in your head—not in a pathological sense, but as a perspective you consult and a standard you measure yourself against.

This approach has particular advantages. Unlike living mentors, these literary fathers are endlessly available. You can return to their wisdom whenever you need it. They won’t disappoint you with human failings. Or at least, their failings are already known and integrated into your relationship with their work.

And you can curate an entire council of elders you need: Maybe Thoreau would inspire you with his independence of spirit and his exuberant love of nature. James Baldwin might help stir your moral courage and eloquent truth-telling. You can pick male voices that speak directly to your soul’s requirements.

The Imaginal Father

If you have a vigorous inner life, you can build a fantasy father in your imagination. This isn’t mere wish-fulfillment or delusional thinking. It’s an active practice of creative visualization, drawing on the same psychological mechanisms that make guided meditation, prayer, and certain forms of therapy effective.

This imaginal father can be constructed from pieces of real people, fictional characters, and your own ideals.

You might literally have conversations with this figure in meditation or journaling. You might ask, “What would he say about this decision I’m facing?” or “How would he want me to handle this challenge?”

The practice works because you’re not actually consulting an external authority. You’re accessing your own deeper wisdom and your knowledge of what a good father would do, which you have synthesized from countless observations and longings.

Casual observers might dismiss this practice as talking to yourself, but they would be making a superficial judgment. The character you’re talking to is wise and integrated. He holds standards and perspectives you need to hear. The imaginal father becomes a way of parenting yourself. He provides the encouragement, discipline, or permission that you need in any given moment.

For more inspiration about talking with spirits, go here: tinyurl.com/ConverseWithSpirits

Becoming Your Own Good Father

This might be the most radical approach: Cultivate in yourself the qualities you think a good father should have. This is Nietzsche’s suggestion taken to its logical conclusion. Don’t just seek these qualities externally. Embody them. Become the protective, encouraging, wise, and steady presence you needed.

This doesn’t mean only providing these qualities to yourself, though that’s part of it. It means developing them so thoroughly that they become available to others: to your children if you have them, or to younger people who might need mentoring. You might even bestow them on the wounded child that still lives within you.

What would this look like? It might mean:

• developing patience when your father was impatient;

• building reliability when he was chaotic;

• offering affection when he was withholding;

• learning to apologize when he couldn’t;

• creating the financial stability he never managed;

• pursuing the education he never valued.

Whatever specific lacks you experienced, you can address them by becoming their opposite.

This approach has a beautiful recursiveness to it. In becoming the father you needed, you heal the wound left by the father you had.

The Relevance for Everyone

Even if you had a pretty decent father—even if he was loving, present, and did his imperfect best—he wasn’t everything you needed. No human father can be. Every father is limited by his own wounds, his historical moment, his class position, and his particular psychology, talents, and blind spots.

That means everyone, regardless of how fortunate their childhood, faces the task Nietzsche describes. We all must move beyond receiving insufficient fathering to either finding it in new forms or creating it ourselves. This isn’t a betrayal of our actual fathers but a necessary part of maturation.

The father archetype ultimately represents the capacity to provide structure, protection, wisdom, and encouragement to ourselves and others.

Whether we do this by finding mentors, reading transformative books, engaging in active imagination, or cultivating paternal qualities in ourselves, we are participating in the same essential project: refusing to let absence or inadequacy define us, and choosing instead to become architects of our own psychological sustenance.

In this sense, creating the father you need isn’t a consolation prize for those who didn’t win the biological lottery. It’s a universal human task, part of the grand work of individuation. It’s a way for us to become fully ourselves by taking conscious responsibility for our own development, guidance, and discipline. We stop waiting for permission and validation from external authorities and learn to generate these internally, while remaining open to wisdom and support from others.

Is this what it means to truly grow up? Not to have had perfect parents, but to transcend even the best parenting by becoming capable of fathering ourselves and others with consciousness, choice, and love.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

WEEK OF DECEMBER 18

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): According to legend, the genius composer Mozart heard entire symphonies in his imagination before he wrote down any notes. That’s a slight exaggeration. The full truth is that he often worked hard and made revisions. His inspiration was enhanced by effort and craft. However, it’s also true that Mozart wrote at least five masterful works in rapid succession, sometimes with remarkably few corrections on the manuscript. They included his last three symphonies (Nos. 39, 40, and 41). I predict you will have a Mozart-like aptitude in the coming months: the ability to perceive whole patterns before the pieces align. Trust your big visions!

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In Greek mythology, Proteus was a sea god famed for his ability to change his shape endlessly to evade capture. But now and then, a persistent hero was able to hold on to Proteus through all his transformations, whether he became a lion, serpent, tree, or flame. Then the god would bestow the gift of prophecy on the successful daredevil. I suspect that in the coming months, you will have an exceptional power to snag and grasp Proteus-like things, Capricorn. As a result, you could claim help and revelations that seem almost magical.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In Florence, Italy, the Accademia Gallery houses several of Michelangelo’s sculptures that depict human figures partially emerging from rough blocks of marble. They seem to be caught in the process of birth or liberation. These works showcase the technique Michelangelo called *non-finito* (unfinished), in which the forms appear to struggle to escape from the stone. In the coming months, Aquarius, I foresee you undergoing a passage that initially resembles these figures. The good news is that unlike Michelangelo’s eternally trapped characters, you will eventually break free.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): To prepare you for 2026, I’ve gathered three quotes that address your most pressing need and urgent mandate. I recommend you tape this horoscope to your bathroom mirror. 1. “We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” —author Elaine Bellezza. 2. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson. 3. “The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” —Rebecca Solnit.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Nine hundred years ago, Sufi philosopher Al-Ghazali provided rigorous advice that’s not very popular these days. “To understand the stars,” he said, “one must polish the mirror of the soul.” Here’s my interpretation: To fathom the truth about reality, you must be a strong character who treasures clarity and integrity. It’s highly unlikely you can gather a profound grasp of how life works if your inner depths are a mess. Conversely, your capacity to comprehend the Great Mystery increases as you work on purifying and strengthening your character. Everything I just said is good advice for all of us all the time, but it will be especially potent and poignant for you in the coming months.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The sound of a whip cracking is a small sonic boom. The tip breaks the sound barrier, creating that distinctive snap. In my astrological reckoning, Taurus, life has provided you with the equivalent of a whip. During the coming months, you will have access to a simple asset that can create breakthrough force when wielded with precision and good timing. I’m not referring to aggression or violence. Your secret superpower will be understanding how to use small treasures that can generate disproportionate impacts. What’s your whip?

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GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Some Japanese potters practice yohen tenmoku. It’s a technique used to create a rare type of tea bowl with shifting, star-like iridescence on deep, dark glaze. The sublime effect results from a process that’s unusually demanding, highly unpredictable, and hard to control. Legend says that only one in a thousand bowls achieves the intended iridescence. The rest, according to the masters, are “lessons in humility.” I believe you can flourish by adopting this experimental mindset in the coming months. Treat your creative experiments as offerings to the unknown, as sources of wonder whether or not your efforts yield stellar results. Be bold in trying new techniques and gentle in self-judgment. Delight in your apprenticeship to mystery. Some apparent “failures” may bring useful novelty.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): A fair-weather cumulus cloud typically weighs over a million pounds and yet floats effortlessly. Let’s make that one of your prime power symbols for 2026, Cancerian. It signifies that you will harbor an immense emotional cargo that’s suspended with grace. You will carry complex truths, layered desires, and lyrical ambitions, but you will manage it all with aplomb and even delight. For best results, don’t overdramatize the heaviness; appreciate and marvel at the buoyancy.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Every 11 years, the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity. North becomes south, and south becomes north. The last switch was completed earlier this year. Let’s use this natural phenomenon as your metaphorical omen for the coming months, Leo. Imagine that a kind of magnetic reversal will transpire in your psyche. Your inner poles will flip position. As the intriguing process unfolds, you may be surprised at how many new ideas and feelings come rumbling into your imagination. Rather than resist the cosmic acrobatics, I advise you to welcome and collaborate with them.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The sculptor Louise Bourgeois was asked why she worked so often with the image of the spider. She said it was a tribute to her mother, who was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, helpful, and useful—just like a spider. In the coming months, I invite you to embody her vision of the spider. You will have the wherewithal to weave hardy networks that could support you for years to come. Be creative and thoughtful as you craft your network of care. Your precision will be a form of devotion. Every strand, even fragile ones, will enhance your long-term resilience.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Researchers studying music theory know that dissonance—sounds that feel “wrong” or create tension—is in part culturally determined. Indonesia’s gamelan music and Arabic maqam scales are beautiful to audiences that have learned to appreciate them. But they might seem off-kilter to Westerners accustomed to music filled with major thirds and triads. Let’s use this as our starting point as we contemplate your future in 2026, Libra. Life may disrupt your assumptions about what constitutes balance and harmony. You will be invited to consider the possibility that what seems like discord from one perspective is attractive and valuable from another. My advice: Open your mind to other ways of evaluating what’s meaningful and attractive.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In the Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States, Arizona bark scorpions are hard to see at night. Scientists who want to study them can find them only by searching with flashlights that emit ultraviolet light. This causes the scorpions’ exoskeletons to fluoresce and glow a distinct blue-green or turquoise color, making them highly visible. Let’s use this scenario as a metaphor for you. In the coming months, you may reveal your best brilliance under uncommon conditions. Circumstances that seem unusual or challenging will highlight your true beauty and power. What feels extreme may be a good teacher and helper. I urge you to trust that the right people will recognize your unique beauty.

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