Inheriting Silence: Finding My Voice in the Shadow of My Father

Part I

The articles I’ve written thus far have explored the interplay of theology and psychology, drawing insights from Scripture to illuminate the shared human journey of faith, identity, and transformation. In this piece, I am taking a slightly different approach—one that is more personal. I feel compelled to share a part of my own story, not for the sake of self-disclosure alone, but as an invitation for you, the reader, to reflect on your own journey.

There is a sacred movement in the life of every follower of Jesus—from wounding to healing, and from healing to transformation. This is not a straight path, nor is it one without struggle, but it is a path marked by God’s redeeming grace. It is in this spirit that I offer this reflection, trusting that the vulnerability of my own story may resonate with the challenges, hopes, and possibilities in yours.

As we reflect together on what it means to bear the wounds of our past and to allow God’s Spirit to breathe life into those broken places, may we discover anew the truth of Paul’s words: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). Transformation is never an endpoint; it is an ongoing journey, one that God is faithful to sustain.

I am often reminded of Carl Gustav Jung’s well-known statement: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” When I was young and made acutely aware that I had no choice but to fulfill my father’s will for me to become a medical doctor—a dream he could not realize due to the challenges and sacrifices imposed upon him—I was far from familiar with Jung's work. In fact, Jung passed away when I was only seven years old.

I was an only child, a reality shaped by dynamics that were not fully explained to me until much later in life. Yet, even as a young boy, I bristled against it instinctively. I remember pleading with my parents to give me a brother or a sister, yearning for the companionship that seemed so natural to others. My cousins had siblings—brothers, sisters, or both—and I felt the weight of their absence keenly. It was a profound sense of diminishment and isolation, a void I struggled to articulate but carried with me nonetheless.

Even at a young age, I somehow understood what adoption was and earnestly asked my parents to consider it as a way to give me the sibling I so deeply desired. They essentially turned a deaf ear to my request, offering no explanation, leaving me to fill in the blanks on my own—a task I was too young and unequipped to manage. The silence only deepened the sense of longing and confusion.

I grew up with a deep awareness of being "different," shaped by the absence of siblings. This sense of comparison wasn’t born out of competition but rather from a persistent sense of lack—a quiet refrain of “I am not like my cousins who have brothers, or sisters, or both.” Spending time with them was a gift, a temporary balm for the ache of solitude. But each visit ended, and I would return to a home where I was the only child. Within my immediate family system, that reality created its own set of dynamics—expectations that I couldn’t always name but felt nonetheless, and an isolation that lingered in the spaces where I longed for shared experiences.

This early dynamic of comparison influenced how I came to see myself and my world. From a family systems perspective, being an only child may have shaped not only the roles I took on within my family but also how I internalized my sense of worth. From an existential lens, the absence of siblings highlighted a deeper longing for connection and belonging, leaving me to compensate in ways I only began to understand later. Competition entered the picture much later—manifesting in grades, achievements, and a drive to prove my value. But at its core, my striving wasn’t about outdoing others; it was about filling the quiet, persistent void that began in those formative years.

My dad's own wounding, though hidden from me at the time, manifested in his short temper, his relentless demands for perfection in my behavior, and his unyielding expectation—declared as early as my Kindergarten years—that I would one day become a medical doctor. This was not presented as a suggestion or a dream for me to consider; it was a directive for my life, one I was expected to accept without question. That is an overwhelming burden for a young child to process, though I didn’t fully understand its weight or its effects on me until much later. It not only left its mark on me emotionally but also shaped me into someone who developed a host of coping strategies—ways to navigate the constant pressure and compensate for my inability to stand up to my dad.

I lived in the tension of deeply wanting to be loved by my father while also deeply fearing him. As a child, this duality, while uncomfortable, felt like my version of “normal,” whatever that meant. Over time, this sense of normalcy shaped my understanding of relationships and identity, especially as I grew from a young boy into an adolescent. By then, seeds of rebellion—though I wouldn’t have recognized it as such—had already begun to germinate. What started as a love-fear relationship with my dad slowly evolved into a love-hate dynamic, one that would significantly influence both my inner world and my outward actions in the years to come.

Voicing my opinions—if they differed from my dad's—proved to be quite unwise, a lesson I learned the hard way. Over time, I didn’t just learn to keep silent; I became adept at suppressing the emotions and feelings that accompanied the experience of not being heard. I internalized the painful reality that my opinions didn’t matter, burying my voice along with the frustration and hurt that came from being dismissed. This suppression became a way of surviving, though it came at the cost of my own sense of self-worth and the confidence to express my true thoughts and emotions.

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way had been lost.” Dante’s words in The Divine Comedy perfectly capture the unsettling disorientation I experienced when I reached the midpoint of my life. Suppression, which had been my survival strategy as a child, now felt like a stumbling block, a barricade I could no longer ignore. Suppression, for me, was the learned skill of burying my voice, my feelings, and my fears, creating a carefully curated version of myself that I thought would be acceptable to my father and to the world. It was an armor of self-protection, yet it came at a cost. Beneath the surface of that armor lay an inner story, one I had crafted from fragments of my childhood: the unmet desire for connection, the relentless pressure to meet expectations, and the silent void where affirmation and understanding should have been.

This “self as story” became an intimate part of who I was, a narrative that shaped how I saw myself and others. But as I stood at the threshold of my own “dark wood,” I realized that this story, though familiar and even comforting in its predictability, was incomplete. It was missing the light of objective truth—the truth of who I was in God, and the truth of the wounds I had carried for so long without acknowledgment. What began as coping mechanisms—perfectionism, relentless striving, and emotional withdrawal—were no longer serving me. Instead, they were obscuring the deeper healing I needed.

Ironically, as I approached my thirty-sixth birthday, this reckoning took on cinematic clarity. It was 1989, and the film Field of Dreams had just been released. My wife and I went to see it on opening night, not knowing that its story would so profoundly intersect with my own. The moment came when Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, lay awake in the middle of the night. His wife, Annie (played by Amy Madigan), turned to him in the dark and asked if he was hearing the voice again. “No,” he replied, before confessing, “I’m thirty-six, and I fear I’m becoming my father.”

That line hit me with the force of a tidal wave. In that dimly lit theater, I had an unexpected meltdown, unable to hold back the flood of emotion. I watched as Ray Kinsella wrestled with the fear of living an unlived life, of repeating his father’s story—dying with his music still in him, carrying unhealed wounds to the grave. And in that moment, I saw my father’s life in a new light. I realized, with startling clarity, that he too had lived an unlived life. He had been shaped by his own unspoken dreams and deep wounds, carrying scars in his psyche that had never been tended to.

But it didn’t stop there. As I sat in that theater, I recognized that I was now standing in my own “dark wood.” I was facing the specters that lay hidden in the shadowy places of my own soul. The fear of becoming my father, of carrying his unresolved pain and patterns into my own life, stared back at me. It was a sobering, humbling moment—one that forced me to confront the narratives I had inherited and the ones I had constructed to survive. It was here, in this middle passage, that I began to see the truth: my father’s wounds were real, but they didn’t have to define me. The story could change, but only if I had the courage to face the darkness and allow God’s light to reveal what lay hidden in those shadowy places.

It wasn’t until much later in life, standing at my own “dark wood,” that I began to piece together the significant aspects of my father’s story—those defining moments that shaped his life and, in turn, influenced mine. As the oldest of six boys in a strict Italian patriarchal family, he bore a weight that I can only begin to comprehend. By the time he was twelve, my grandmother had endured not only six pregnancies but also multiple miscarriages. My father, concerned for her well-being, mustered the courage to confront his father, my grandfather, about it. “You’re wearing her out,” he told him, only to be met with a severe slap across the face and the admonition that it was none of his business. That moment silenced my father’s voice, likely for years to come, and left him with a burden he could never fully lay down: the tension of wanting to protect but being powerless to intervene.

That wasn’t the only trauma he carried. When he was still a boy, his youngest brother, Vito, died in a horrific accident at just under two years of age. Grandma had run to the store around the corner, leaving Vito in my father’s care. In those days, the floors were often washed with hot lye water, and a pot of boiling lye sat on the stove. Somehow, in a brief moment when my father turned his gaze, Vito managed to tip the pot over, scalding himself fatally. My father carried that trauma—and the guilt of it—with him all the way to his grave. It was a story shrouded in secrecy, one my father refused to speak about. If asked, he would grow angry and fall silent. But the weight of that moment, and what it meant for his young psyche, was clear in the unspoken pain he bore throughout his life.

How my father developed the desire to be a medical doctor is a mystery to me. He never spoke of the history behind it, only the intent. What I do know is that this dream, unrealized in his own life due to sacrifices and circumstances I’ll never fully understand, became the directive for my life. “You will become a doctor,” he would say, and there was no room to question it—not in his presence, at least. I often questioned it with my mother, caught in the tension of their differing approaches to life, but the weight of my father’s expectations was inescapable.

Music was another part of my father’s story, though it, too, was marked by both opportunity and heartbreak. At just eleven years of age, he was appointed organist and choir director for the Italian Protestant Chapel on Staten Island, started by my maternal great-uncle Frank. Uncle Frank’s vision for the church was extraordinary for its time: it served not only Italian Protestants in the area but also African American families and other ethnic minorities in disenfranchised neighborhoods. My father remained in that role for nearly three decades, faithfully serving until he was almost forty. But then came the blow that would sever his ties to the church—and, for a time, to God. One Sunday, the new pastor, a Princeton seminary graduate, hired a professional organist and choir director without informing my father. The dismissal was handled so callously that it devastated him. He walked away from the church, and in many ways from God, for an extended season. It wasn’t until years later, when I was married and in ministry, that he found his way back to Christ.

As I reflected on his story, especially in the wake of my emotional breakdown in that theater watching Field of Dreams, I began to see my father not as the unyielding authority figure of my childhood but as a deeply wounded man. He had endured more than any child should have to bear—losing a brother in a traumatic accident, being silenced by his own father, and carrying the weight of expectations within a family system that demanded resilience at the expense of vulnerability. His pain, while unspoken, shaped the way he approached life—and the way he approached me.

Standing in my own “dark wood,” I realized that my father had lived an unlived life. His music, both literal and figurative, had been stifled by trauma, guilt, and unmet dreams. And now, I stood at the same crossroads, facing my own specters and shadowy places, wondering whether I, too, would live an unlived life. Would I carry forward his wounds? Or would I find a way to heal—to rewrite the story I had been handed, holding it in the light of God’s truth? It was a sobering realization, but also the beginning of a deeper understanding—not just of my father but of myself.

In the quiet aftermath of that realization, I began to see how the stories we inherit—both spoken and unspoken—shape us in ways we often don’t fully grasp until much later in life. My father’s wounds were a lens through which I started to examine my own patterns, my own silences, and the ways I had both embraced and resisted the life he envisioned for me. But the journey through the “dark wood” doesn’t end with awareness; it requires us to wrestle with the questions of what we carry forward, what we leave behind, and how we begin to reclaim the music that has been stifled for far too long. In the next installment, we’ll explore what it means to face those questions and how the process of healing and transformation unfolds—not only for me, but for all of us navigating the tension between our past and the future we long to live.