Christian Shephard and the Parents We Keep Talking To

One of the strangest things about Christian Shephard is that he’s dead before LOST even begins.

And yet he’s everywhere.

He’s in Jack’s anger. He’s in Jack’s need to fix things. He’s in Claire’s story before she even realizes he’s part of it. He’s walking around the Island in white tennis shoes. He’s standing in hospitals and bars and memories. And years after his death, Jack is still having arguments with him.

That’s probably the part that interests me most as a therapist.

Because sometimes a relationship doesn’t end when the person leaves.

Sometimes it moves inside.

You Don’t Have What It Takes

One of the defining wounds between Christian and Jack comes from something Christian tells him when Jack is young: he doesn’t have what it takes.

Christian believes Jack doesn’t know how to fail. He cares too much. He takes responsibility for things he can’t control. And Christian seems to think he’s preparing his son for the world by hardening him.

But children don’t usually hear parental criticism as philosophy.

They hear it as truth.

There’s something wrong with me.

Jack spends much of his adult life seemingly trying to disprove that sentence.

He becomes a spinal surgeon. He fixes impossible things. He takes responsibility when nobody asks him to. On the Island, he almost immediately becomes the person everyone looks toward when something goes wrong.

From the outside, it looks like leadership.

Underneath it, there may be something much older happening.

See, Dad?

I do have what it takes.

When the Parent Moves Inside

This is something I see in therapy all the time.

A person may be 35 or 45 or 60 years old. Their parents may live hundreds of miles away. They may barely speak to them. Their parents may even be dead.

And they’re still having the conversation.

You can hear it in sentences like:

I should be doing more.

I shouldn’t need anybody.

I can’t screw this up.

I have to keep everyone together.

If something goes wrong, it’s my fault.

At some point, we don’t need the original person there anymore.

We’ve learned the lines.

This doesn’t mean our parents were monsters. That’s another story we sometimes tell too easily.

Christian certainly isn’t one.

He’s much more uncomfortable than that.

Christian Wasn’t Just a Bad Father

One reason Christian works so well as a character is that LOST refuses to make him simple.

He’s capable of tenderness and cruelty. He can understand someone else’s pain while completely failing to understand his own. He’s a gifted doctor whose drinking destroys his career. He loves Jack and wounds Jack. He can offer surprisingly good advice to strangers while making a complete mess of his own family.

In other words, he’s a person.

That’s important.

Therapy sometimes involves reaching the strange place where we can hold two things at once:

My parent loved me.

And:

My parent hurt me.

One doesn’t cancel out the other.

Growing up often means giving up the trial where we’re trying to determine whether somebody was ultimately “good” or “bad.”

The more useful question becomes:

What did I learn from being loved by this particular person?

And maybe more importantly:

What am I still carrying?

Jack Keeps Looking for His Father

After the crash, Jack sees Christian on the Island.

And he follows him.

There’s something almost embarrassingly human about that.

You can become a successful surgeon. You can become the leader everyone depends on. You can survive a plane crash on a mysterious Island.

And some part of you can still be a kid following your father into the woods.

Jack eventually finds Christian’s coffin.

It’s empty.

I’ve always loved that image.

The thing Jack has been chasing isn’t really there.

And yet the chase is real.

That’s how old family patterns often work.

We spend years trying to finally get something from someone who may no longer be capable of giving it to us.

Approval.

An apology.

Recognition.

Permission.

Some acknowledgment that says:

Yes. I see what happened.

Sometimes we get it.

Sometimes we don’t.

And eventually another question appears.

If they never give it to me, what happens to my life?

The Conversation Changes

This is why the final scene between Jack and Christian means more to me now than it did when LOST originally aired.

Jack enters the church.

He sees his father’s coffin again.

He opens it.

Empty.

Then Christian is standing behind him.

Jack turns around and asks the question that has been underneath so much of the series:

“How are you here?”

Eventually Jack understands.

He died too.

And then something happens that is almost shockingly simple.

Christian hugs him.

Jack collapses into his father’s arms.

There is no evaluation.

No lecture.

No “you should have.”

No discussion of whether Jack had what it takes.

The argument is over.

Maybe That’s What Jack Was Looking For

I don’t think healing always means forgiving our parents.

And I don’t think it means discovering that everything they did was secretly okay.

Sometimes healing is much less dramatic.

It’s realizing that you don’t have to keep presenting your case.

You don’t have to keep succeeding to prove something.

You don’t have to keep failing to prove something either.

You don’t have to spend the rest of your life answering a sentence somebody said to you when you were ten years old.

At some point, the question becomes less about what they thought of you.

It becomes:

What do you think of you?

Christian Shephard spends most of LOST as a ghost.

But maybe the most important ghost isn’t the man Jack keeps seeing on the Island.

It’s the voice Jack has carried around inside himself.

And in the end, Jack doesn’t defeat it.

He doesn’t argue with it.

He doesn’t finally prove it wrong.

He walks into a room, sees his father, and realizes there is nothing left to prove.

Then his father holds him.

And Jack lets himself be held.

Sometimes that’s what letting go looks like.