Father vs. Child Predators: A Powerful True Story of Protecting His Daughter ( The Hidden Third)

https://youtu.be/lLUOwQopiHg?si=uE9pRNUFPm2UZw15

Some men crumble quietly. Some men shut down, numb out, fade into the wallpaper. Me? I went full tribal war horn at sunrise. A spiritual alarm clock went off inside my chest and the Creator basically said, "Get up, son — we got work to do."

When I found out a grown man was grooming my daughter, it didn’t “hurt my feelings. ”No. It detonated something. Imagine the emotional equivalent of a Molotov cocktail thrown into a gasoline factory. That was me...spiritually on fire, emotionally feral, and suddenly speaking fluent father-protector in a dialect even wolves would respect.

A darker man might’ve tracked that predator down with a shovel. A weaker man might’ve folded. Instead, I did something worse: I started a movement.

See, people like to imagine that men’s purpose arrives gently...like a butterfly landing on your shoulder whispering, "Follow your bliss.” Yeah. Not mine. My purpose showed up like a drunk uncle kicking the door in yelling, "Get your ass up! Your daughter needs you, and so do a whole lot of other men!"

And here’s the funny part: From the very beginning, I started talking about something called Fathership Program. I was saying it before it existed. Before I knew what it was. Before I even had time to Google “How to start a nonprofit without losing your mind.”

I didn’t whisper it. I didn’t test-market it. I didn’t hold a little focus group with muffins and iced tea. No. I yelled it out loud like a man trying to baptize himself in his own future.

Because truthfully, I wasn’t just protecting my daughter ...I was trying to save myself. I needed a brotherhood. I needed emotional tools that didn’t feel like homework. I needed accountability, structure, purpose…and growling didn’t fix everything, apparently.

But nothing out there was built for men like me...men who love deeply, hurt deeply, and refuse to sit quietly while darkness hunts our families. There was no map. No manual. No Jedi scrolls.

So, like Robert Bly said, sometimes a man has to walk into the forest alone (Bly, 1990).

But I wasn’t just walking into a forest. I was charging into it shirtless, bleeding, yelling my daughter's name, and demanding the Creator show me what the hell to do next.

In Iron John, Bly talks about the “wild man” inside every male...the ancient, instinctive protector who knows how to suffer with purpose. I met that wild man face-to-face in the moment my daughter needed me. He didn’t shake my hand. He grabbed me by the throat and said, "If you survive this, you damn well better help other men survive their battles too."

David Deida says a man’s purpose must be bigger than his pain, or he’ll drown in it (Deida, 1997).Well… I was drowning. So I decided to build a boat. A glowing, spiritual, stubborn, father-powered boat — the kind that carries other men to shore when the waves get mean.

I called it Fathership Program.

And like all things sacred, it was born from pain, forged in chaos, and guided by something older than me...the Creator, the ancestors, the warrior lineage that refuses to let a man fall without a fight.

This podcast isn’t just a story. It’s the origin myth of who I became when life gave me no other choice. It’s the raw truth of how a father in crisis turned his war cry into a mission. It’s where purpose met fire, and fire met faith, and faith met responsibility.

Watch the podcast. Hear the real story...the dark, spiritual, gritty, funny, human truth. This is where Fathership truly began. And this is why I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure no man ever walks through that kind of fire alone again.

References

Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A book about men. Addison-Wesley.

Deida, D. (1997). The way of the superior man: A spiritual guide to mastering the challenges of women, work, and sexual desire. Sounds True.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning (I. Lasch, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)