If you’ve been through a separation, you might know the Sunday feeling.
My daughter was 10. My son was 12 when their mom and I separated.
I bought a house five minutes down the road — close enough to stay in their lives, far enough to feel its own kind of alone. We found a sad rhythm. One week on, one week off. Every Sunday at 6pm they showed up at my door with their laundry baskets full of clothes.
And the whole time, some part of my brain was running a story I didn’t ask for.
Is this the week they tell me they want to stay with their mom full time? Is this the week I find out what kind of dad I actually was?
My bully brain had very specific material. It didn’t just say I was a bad dad. It came with receipts.
I did work long hours. I did have business trips out of town. I wasn’t always fully present even when I was there.
Real evidence. Real failures. And my brain used all of it to build a case for my fundamental inadequacy as a father.
They’d be better off with their mom. After all, she raised them while I was away building a career I told myself was for them.
I didn’t argue back. I just stood there on the threshold of my new life and let it run.
Then one Sunday her mom walked them in and said, “Mikaela has something she wants to talk to you about.”
My stomach dropped.
Oh shit. Here it is.
My bully mind went into full overdrive.
See? I told you. Useless piece of shit as a dad. Now you’re going to pay for those extra hours at the office.
I looked at my daughter, trying to maintain a composure I didn’t have.
“What’s up sweets?”
“Well… the back and forth between houses every week is pretty difficult…” she said.
Oh fuck. Here it comes.
“I know, sweets. And I’m sorry.”
“So I was thinking… maybe we could do two weeks at a time? So we don’t have to go back and forth so often?”
Halle-fucking-lujah.
That’s it? That’s what she wants?
Suck it, bully brain.
She wasn’t leaving. She wasn’t unhappy with me. She had a solution. She was solving my problem, and I almost missed it because I was too busy listening to a story that wasn’t true.
What I’ve learned about the stories I tell myself as a dad
My bully brain doesn’t make things up out of thin air. That’s what makes it so effective.
It takes real evidence, the things I actually did, the times I actually wasn’t there, and it uses that evidence to argue for something much bigger: that I am fundamentally not enough. That the verdict is already in. That the debt I owe can’t be repaid.
What I have finally come to understand is that the story isn’t a verdict. It’s just a first draft.
The anxiety I carried every Sunday wasn’t insight. It wasn’t my conscience keeping me honest. It was my brain filling the void of uncertainty with the most painful narrative it could construct. That’s what brains do when they don’t have enough information. They make shit up. And they tend to make shit up in the direction of our deepest fears.
My deepest fear? That I’d failed my kids. That the years of early mornings and late flights and missed dinners had cost me the very thing I was supposedly building all that for.
Mikaela walked in with a scheduling solution. I had a funeral planned.
The Experiment: What I do now when my bully brain starts running
I will not tell anyone to just think positively. That’s not what this is.
What I’ve learned is that I am always working from a story. Always. The question I ask myself now is: did I choose this story, or did it choose me?
Psychologists call this Cognitive Reappraisal. It’s one of the most researched tools in emotion regulation, and the science is clear: when I actively choose a second story, my thinking brain comes online and my threat brain quiets down. Not because the situation changed. Because the meaning of the situation had changed.
Here’s what I practice:
I notice the story. I say it out loud if I have to. I name what my bully brain is actually telling me. Not a vague sense of dread, rather the specific words.
I call it what it is. A story. Not a fact. A story. A first draft written by a threat response that’s trying to protect me, not a judge handing down a life sentence.
I offer a second story. I ask myself: what else could be true? What’s another interpretation that fits what I actually know, not what I fear? My daughter wasn’t pulling away. She had a solution. Both stories fit the facts. I’d chosen the wrong one.
I choose. I pick the story that the most useful for me right now. The one that leaves me room to show up. And I move from there.
I don’t always get it right. I still catch my bully brain running old material on hard days. But catching it once, naming it, questioning it, offering something different, has changed how I experience the moments that used to undo me.
My kids don’t need a perfect dad. They need a present one. And I can’t be present when my brain is running a story about a catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet.
I’d love to hear what story my bully brain has in common with yours.
What’s the narrative it runs about your kids? About your worth as a father?
And what’s the second story you haven’t let yourself consider yet?
Bring it to the group. That’s what we’re here for.
