The Core Wound Fathers Carry: Healing the Fear of Getting It All Wrong

Many fathers grow up believing that mistakes mean failure and discipline means punishment. In this special episode of The Aligned Father, host Lirec Williams opens up about a core wound uncovered during shadow work, the belief that he cannot do anything right. This wound formed in childhood through harsh discipline, constant correction, and fear-based parenting. It now affects fatherhood, parenting choices, communication, mental healing, and the ability to let go.

Lirec explains how this wound fuels perfectionism, Over functioning, guilt and responsibility, and the urge to fix everything, even when it leads to burnout. He shows how this mindset impacts father and child relationships, parenting teens, parenting sons, parenting daughters, co-parenting, and the emotional climate of a home. Many fathers will see themselves in this story. They learned to avoid mistakes instead of learning from them. They tied their worth to performance instead of presence.

This episode blends real dad experiences, research-based insights, child psychology, and reflective listening for fathers who want to grow with confidence. It explores how early punishment shapes parenting styles, why some fathers react from fear, and how to move toward calm parenting, nurturing approaches, and daily parenting support. It also highlights the role of emotional intelligence, mental peace, and self-care in raising resilient children.

What you will learn:
 • How childhood punishment forms deep beliefs about worth
 • Why many fathers feel pressure to be perfect
 • How this pattern affects relationships and parenting resilience
 • Tools for emotional healing, reflective listening, and connection
 • How to shift from punishment to guidance
 • How self-love and mental healing change fatherhood and family empowerment

Key takeaway: You are not broken. You are healing. When you face your core wound, you build emotional presence, confidence, and peace in your parenting journey. This is transformational parenting in action. It strengthens your parent-child relationship and supports generational healing.

This episode is for fathers navigating real-life dad struggles, parenting challenges, co-parenting tips, and the search for pur

Chapters

• 2:28 Naming The Core Wound
• 4:53 When Teaching Became Punishment
• 6:27 Perfection As Survival
• 7:20 Fixing As Identity And Exhaustion
• 9:30 Throwing Away What Reflects Flaws
• 11:06 Fear-Based Parenting Patterns
• 13:37 Teen Triggers And Perspective
• 15:37 How Kids Inherit Our Reactions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:16

Hey brother, today we're gonna step outside of the Aligned Father series for a second and talk a little bit deeper, not as a coach or host, but I want to talk to you as a man who has been sitting with himself, a man who has been doing real shadow work, a man who has been learning where his pain started, how it grew, and how it still lives inside his decisions. I want to talk about a realization that hit me hard. Like it's something I've never really named until now. And I realized like I believe a lot of fathers haven't named some of the feelings that they have. And what we're gonna talk about is a core wound I've carried since childhood. And this wound shaped how I parent. It shaped how I love, it shaped how I react, how I forgive, and how I walk away, and how I try to make everything in my life perfect. My wound is this. I grew up believing that everything I do is wrong. Not sometimes, not when I mess up, but always. I learned to try to predict how my caregiver was. And when my caregiver would fluctuate or something I'm not quite ready for emotionally, it it it's it's it was always from zero to 100. And the things that should have been teaching moments became punishments. And I want to talk about punishments a little bit deeper, but let's just stick with that. The things that should have been teaching moments became punishments. The things that should have been guidance became fear. And my nervous system learned that being wrong meant pain. My heart learned that being wrong meant shame. And my mind learned that being wrong meant I was the problem. And when you experience that enough times, you stop seeing mistakes as lessons. You see them as confirmation of your failure. So I bel I grew up believing I had one job to never mess up. And when you grew up with that belief, you spend your adult life trying to outrun a childhood voice, a voice that says, if you get this wrong, you lose love. So how did it follow me into adulthood? So I learned, I learned how to be excellent, but not from confidence, from survival. My excellence became a guardrail. My success became my shield. Fixing became my identity. And I believe I had to be perfect at everything, or I was nothing. And if something connected to me looked wrong, I rushed to fix it. I made it my duty to fix it. Even if fixing it cost me sleep, peace, or my own well-being. If a decision went, if a decision went left, I would work myself into exhaustion trying to make it right. Because I fear on the other end of that decision that somebody didn't like is me not being loved. If something that I built started breaking, I would try to save it even when saving it was breaking me. And there's a truth in shadow work. You do not only try to fix things, sometimes you throw them away when they fail to reflect the image you need to see. And I did that too. If something felt like a reflection of my flaws, I distance myself. If something I love made me feel like I was failing, I pulled away to protect that old wound. So when you grow up, it can also show in your fatherhood. Fearing mistakes, you I parent from fear, not intention, not love, but fear. Fear that my child's my children are gonna grow up and be a thing that won't be liked or desired by society. Part of me wanted to be the perfect father, and I wanted to be present, patient, calm, wise, understanding, and strong. And when my kids made mistakes, my teenager specifically, it would trigger that old voice inside because she's almost an adult. So I'm like, I didn't do something and I didn't do something right growing up, and I'm looking for what did I do to like mess this whole thing up. And it's the one in my the voice in my head that said, This looks bad, you're failing. Look at your child doing these things, and I feel like I did something wrong in there, and a part of me wanted to give up. But here's what I learned most of those things are normal, even if they're dramatic and big in nature, it's normal for teenagers to do crazy stuff. And I had to like work my way to that. And I realized that a lot of my reactions weren't always about them, they were about the version of me that was still scared to be wrong or incorrect. And that's the dangerous part of the core wound. And my kids can inherit that unhealed belief. Not always my words, but often they inherit those reactions. So let's talk about how it shows up in relationships. Now, if you grew up believing your worth depends on what you do right, how you perform for a person, what you give a person, you carry that into every relationship. You try to overperform, you try to be everything to that person, you try to make sure the other person never feels disappointment because disappointment feels like danger to us. When conflict happens, you feel attacked. When someone points out an issue, you may feel unlovable. And when something goes wrong, you feel responsible for fixing it alone. And when you cannot fix it, you do what wounded men do. We shut down or we burn out, or we walk away to protect ourselves from feeling like the failure we were trained to believe we are. This isn't weakness, this is a conditioning, survival, if you will. But it comes from a cycle and it becomes a cycle in your life, and cycles do not break themselves. So here's the truth that most men need to hear. Brother, if any part of this sounds like you, let me tell you something I had to tell myself. You were punished for growing, you were corrected for learning, you were silenced for expressing, and you were hurt for being human. That does not mean you deserved it, that does not mean you caused it, that does not mean you must carry it. Your worth is not in perfection. Your worth is not in fixing everything. Your worth is not in what you produce. And your children do not need a perfect father. They need a healed one. They need a present one, a dad with a presence in their life. They need a man who knows how to forgive himself. So here's what I've learned on this journey. Healing starts when you slow down. When you stop trying to impress a childhood ghost, when you stop living in the anxiety of getting it wrong, you learn to pause, you learn to breathe, you learn to let things fall apart without believing it means you are falling apart. You learn that love is not earned by performance. You learn that mistakes are simply information, not definitions. It's not defining you. You learn that rest is not laziness. You learn that letting go is not failure. And you learn that choosing yourself is not abandonment. And most important, you learn that your children need your humanity more than your perfection. So, brother, your core wound is not your identity, it is your starting point. It is a place where the real healing begins. If you are carrying the same pain that I am, the journey is not to fix everything around you. The journey is to repair the story inside you. You are never meant to be flawless. You are meant to be present, you're meant to evolve, you're meant to fill, you're meant to lead with alignment and not fear. You are not broken, you are becoming. And that alone makes you a father worth learning from.