It's OK, Dad

Author: Majken Lorelei Matzau

He was a CEO in his early forties. Successful by any external measure. But when he came to me, he was exhausted and angry – a low-grade fury that had become the permanent backdrop to his life. It colored his relationships at work, and it had slowly eroded the warmth at home.

He himself could not explain it. He only knew that something was costing him enormous energy. Something old. Something he had never quite put down.

A Twelve-Year-Old Boy Alone

Through our work together, a memory surfaced that he had carried for thirty years without fully examining it. When he was twelve years old, his father was diagnosed with cancer. His mother had to work. And so he – a twelve-year-old child – became his father's primary carer.

Every day after school, he would sit by his father's bedside. He would try to get him to take his medication. His father was in pain, confused, sometimes resistant. And the boy – a child himself – tried everything he could think of to persuade him. To save him.

He could not. His father died that same year.

The Weight He Never Set Down

What the boy had carried from that room – unconsciously, silently – was guilt. A child's guilt. The irrational, devastating conviction that he had not tried hard enough. That if he had found the right words, the right moment, his father might have taken the pills. Might have lived.

This belief had shaped the man he became. The relentless drive to fix things. The anger when he could not. The exhaustion of carrying responsibility for outcomes that were never his to carry.

The Turning Point

In a guided meditation, I invited him to return to that room. To sit once more beside his father. And this time, to speak not as the man trying to fix the past – but as someone bringing permission rather than pressure.

The words that came were simple. "It's OK, Dad. You don't have to take the pills."

Something released in him in that moment. A grief he had never allowed himself to feel. A child's love that had been frozen inside the posture of a responsible adult.

A Different Man

In the weeks that followed, something shifted in his relationships. Not dramatically – there were no grand announcements. But the anger softened. The space around him opened. Colleagues noticed. His family noticed.

He had not changed his circumstances. He had changed the weight he was carrying through them.

This is what depth work with leaders looks like. Not strategies, not frameworks. Sometimes, simply returning to a room that a child never properly left – and finally, gently, walking out.

Stay tuned.

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