Shame after success: The quiet voice of the father

too, many have thanked you. My friends were happy. A nice amount of money was raised.” His pressed lips announce a but. “I think it was good for me too, my first appearance in years, I dared.” A short break. “But I made a mistake in three places. I’m sure most people didn’t notice it. It spoils it for me. Even though I know: I can be happy! Instead, I feel bad.”

Hearing and seeing Axel is not easy to bear. Once again, a person knows he has nothing to be ashamed of, and yet he does it anyway. Once again his knowledge doesn’t help him. “You’re basically telling me: I’m too hard on myself,” I begin. Axel looks up. “And you say, ‘I don’t have to do that.’ They’re mistakes that happen, and mistakes that haven’t stopped anyone from doing what they’re supposed to do, which is donate.” Just as Axel feels bad against his better judgment, I can’t stop telling him that against my better judgment. “And at the same time you notice internally: That doesn’t count, that shouldn’t have happened.” Axel says yes. “This is incredibly close to my heart.” “That’s exciting!” I reply to him. “Nobody says you have to be ashamed. Not the audience, not your friends! Not even yourself! And yet you’re ashamed. So I ask myself: Whose voice are you hearing? Whose word has so much weight?”

Axel’s reaction doesn’t match what’s right in front of him: a concert with satisfied organizers and audience. In this respect, one might think he is overreacting. But emotionally there is no overreaction if that means that the intensity of the feeling is “wrong”. We don’t just react to what beforebut also on what behind lies to us. “Then I have to tell you about my father today,” he smiles.

Reliable, but emotionally intangible

He was a simple man and spoke little. His mother set the tone. The father was at work or was silent. Axel always sensed that his father was struggling with himself. However, he never found words for his fight until his death. The son often had the impression that his father was standing on a threshold, wanted to say something to him and then withdrew again. “He also drank too much. Not a picture-perfect dad,” says Axel, dropping his right hand into his left. “He never did anything to solve his problems.” His words help me imagine part of his story. A father who is experienced struggling and in silence. Who has not been able to share with them what his loved ones resonate within him. This creates the image of a “bad father” who reliably provides a living, but is hardly emotionally tangible.

“And what does all this have to do with the concert?” I ask. “As I said, he wasn’t there most of the time. But when I practiced, he sat with me. My father wasn’t a musician, he couldn’t read music or play an instrument. But he had an excellent musical ear! He would sit in his armchair and get completely involved. He let the music carry him.” As he says this, Axel tilts his head slightly to the side, raises his arms as if to indicate the movement of a conductor, and closes his eyes. “That’s how he was there.” The gesture alone is enough to imagine a father with feeling.

“He didn’t miss a single mistake!”

There is no refrigerator here, there is a sophisticated son sitting here, who casts a sophisticated father with his body into sculpture. “And whenever I made a mistake, he would flinch.” Axel imitates this too, startles briefly and then finds his way back into the conductor’s position, only to startle again. “It was always like that. He was fully involved and noticed every mistake. Not one escaped him!” He twitches slightly again. “There was something wrong again; wrong again. He made that clear to me.”

We are silent for a moment. It seems to me that we are at a crossroads. It would now be easy to take the classic psychotherapeutic path: to sketch a parent as the background of the “inner critic” and to work out what Axel would have needed as a child. That would be obvious. And yet something inside me blocks it.

There is so much sensitivity in all the words and gestures Axel uses for his father. I don’t want to let that get lost. Presumably driven by this, I ask myself: “Did he ever say: ‘You can’t make any mistakes’? Like we fathers sometimes do when learning math – or much more strictly than you do with your children today?” Axel hesitates. “No. Not really. Like I said, he didn’t say much.” “Then it’s all about the twitching?” “Exactly.” “That twitch” – I assume the pose myself and demonstrate it to him. That may sound funny, but in our moment it is not.

What there were no words for, there was a gesture, and it is precise. “Yes, exactly,” he says. “When you were making music, you would notice when you made mistakes because of the twitching of your body: My father is in the room.” Axel nods. I stay in the pose and close my eyes slightly. “With every mistake you felt: He was here. You also said earlier that it was very close to you when you made a mistake in a concert. Maybe that sounds wild now: Maybe you can say that in these moments your dad gets close to you again.” Axel nods again. “Now the question is: What kind of closeness is this? For the boy who would have liked to know more about his father, perhaps a threatening one because he is afraid of losing the contact that is important to him.” Another nod. “Then it would be as if your father wanted to say with his twitch: ‘Don’t make a mistake, otherwise I’m out!'” I assume the conductor’s pose again.

“He didn’t care about me.”

“But he always came to listen, I guess.” Another nod. “Perhaps,” I say, “that’s why it meant something like: I am with you, I am close to you, I have no words to tell you that, but in music I understand you, I experience every note, every tone of yours directly, and I am very close to you and want to be very close to you.”

I look up, Axel is crying. It takes a while before he says: “That’s much better. My mother once said to me: You had a good provider, but a bad father. That’s not true. He didn’t care about me.” He cries again. Healing tears, I think, and notice how one slips into my buttonhole. “Wow, that’s really hitting me, my body is shaking,” says Axel. We look at each other. 30 minutes have passed since the conversation began. “But it’s good,” he clarifies. We are silent again. “I think we’ve achieved everything we can today. I’m very touched by all of this and I suspect it’s precious to you too.” Axel nods. “Perhaps we shouldn’t dilute your insight with more words then?” Axel agrees. As he leaves, he looks back again and adds one last word: “Thank you.” When his father hears that, he’ll probably cringe.