The Quiet Lessons That Made Me the Father I Am: What Therapy, Love and Forgiveness Have Taught Me: A reflection on fatherhood and emotional literacy by Aaron Tait

Every now and then my wife Kaitlin and I drive up through the hills behind Byron to see Chris, a gentle seventy-something country doctor and therapist. Our two boys come too. We sit together in a small timber room with open windows, the smell of the ocean drifting through, and we talk about the things that make a family a family, the little tensions, the big feelings, the things we forget to say.

Chris once asked me to place my hand against Kaitlin’s and notice the difference between when I’m pushing and when I’m allowing her and the boys to push back. It sounds simple, but for someone raised in the military, learning to lean back instead of lean in has taken years.

I grew up tough, in a family of three boys and a long line of Navy men. By seventeen I was in uniform myself, deployed to the Persian Gulf in the hours after September 11. I left Australia a boy and came home with a shaved head, ten extra kilos of muscle and a mind that couldn’t settle. The only tools I knew were endurance and control.

It has taken therapy to be the man, husband and father I am today, though I use the term in a broader sense than most. I have had many “therapists” along the way.

There was the Army psychologist who quietly gave me a name for what I was feeling and gently nudged me toward leaving the military for a while to take some time. And there was Kaitlin, a bohemian Californian I met on a beach in Spain. She was lying on the sand, reading Love in the Time of Cholera, her hair sun-bleached and wild. I didn’t know it then, but she would become my greatest teacher. We fell in love quickly and deeply, and she healed me with her calm and her kindness. Sometimes all you need is love.

A few years later we found ourselves running a high school for street kids in Tanzania. On the night we were leaving, one of the boys came to our door to thank us for changing his life. As he stepped into the darkness, he turned and told me that he forgave me, for Iraq, and for the fighter I had been. I still remember the way my chest cracked open. Sometimes all you need is forgiveness.

There have been other teachers too. A shaman who poured me a small cup of ayahuasca on my fortieth birthday and led me through a night that stripped me bare. Everything I learned in both the darkness and the light of that experience had to do with my sons. Kaitlin often says there was a father before that night and a father after.

Now, it is the four of us in that small room with Chris, learning new ways to be together. We are building tools to communicate, to let each other lead, to create more space for softness and honesty. Nothing in our family is broken. We simply want to make a good thing stronger.

But family therapy is only one part of this story. What it really represents for me is the ongoing work of keeping my heart open, to love, to learn, to the lessons that come from every person who crosses your path. Kaitlin and I are trying to raise our boys to see that growth never ends, that love is something you keep tending to, and that strength can look like listening.

I often think about the kind of man I might have been if I’d learned earlier that I didn’t always have to be the captain - that strength can also mean slowing down, listening, and letting others steer for a while. Maybe that’s what fatherhood is. Making sure my sons grow up knowing that love and leadership aren’t about control, but about creating space for everyone to be seen and heard.

All of these teachers,  the psychologist, the boy in Tanzania, the shaman, my wife, and our children, have shaped who I am. Each one has helped me soften. Each one has shown me that life itself is the therapy, if you are open to it.

Family therapy hasn’t just made me a better husband or parent. It’s taught me how to be still, how to listen, and how to build a home where everyone’s voice counts, including mine.

Aaron Tait is the author of Far Horizons (Hardie Grant, October 2025), a memoir about service, healing and homecoming.