John Thomas Abrahamsson

Empowering married, high-achieving fathers to break the cycle of anger and confidently ask for help.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Letting your kids see you grieve, appropriately, not overwhelming them, teaches them grief is survivable.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

I thought disappearing to grieve alone was protecting them. What it actually taught them was that grief is something you handle in private, alone.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

I used to hide every hard emotion from my kids, including grief. That taught them the wrong lesson.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Anger is loud enough to hide behind. Fear feels exposed, so most men reach for the mask instead of the actual feeling.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Underneath almost every outburst was some version of fear, fear of losing control, fear of failing someone I loved, fear of not being enough.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Every time I snapped, I called it anger. Almost none of it actually was.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Unexamined defaults become the next generation's rules, whether you meant to teach them or not.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

I didn't decide to do that on purpose. It just came out of me, automatically, the same rule I was raised with.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

I noticed I let my daughter cry. I told my son to toughen up. Same house, two different rulebooks.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Try this. Before you go inside, sit in the car for two minutes. Breathe. Leave the day where it happened.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Most of us carry the entire emotional weight of our day straight through the front door, with zero transition in between.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

You don't walk straight from a war zone into a dinner party. So why do you walk straight from work into your family?

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

That's the lesson that sticks, not the speech about handling emotions, the actual model of what handling emotions looks like.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

I used to think going quiet was me protecting my kids from seeing me struggle. What they actually saw was a man who disappears when things get hard.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Your son isn't learning how to handle conflict from what you say. He's learning it from what you do when you're upset.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

A real debrief is simple. What happened. What I did. What I'd do differently next time. Five minutes, honestly answered.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

At home, we just move on and hope it doesn't happen again. No debrief, no reflection, nothing learned.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

After every hard call, dispatchers debrief. We never do that after a hard night at home.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Tonight, when someone asks how you're doing, try the truth instead, even just a little more of it than usual.

[John Thomas Abrahamsson @tylerabe77]

Every time you say it when it's not true, it's a small withdrawal from an account that eventually runs out.