Training Week 11 - Fathered By God The Lover

🔥 Why the Lover Stage Matters

The Lover stage is about more than romance. It’s the time in a man’s development where his heart must awaken to intimacy, beauty, creativity, and vulnerability. It's about learning to enjoy life, not just survive it.

"If a man doesn’t learn how to feel, he’ll only know how to fight, fix, or flee."

Men in this stage learn to:

• Connect emotionally with God and others

• Appreciate beauty in nature, art, and worship

• Express affection and vulnerability without shame

• Heal from emotional detachment and soul-numbing routines

But most men never make it here. They’ve been trained to suppress, perform, or numb. So instead of growing into lovers of God, family, and life—they become masters of function, but strangers to feeling.

🧠 A Psychiatrist’s Lens Into the Lover Stage

While conducting my research I was curious as to how therapist, and psychiatrist see the lover stage and how it plays out in their therapy. 

Men arrive in therapy with:

• Emotional suppression (they don’t even know what they feel)

• Deep shame around intimacy

• Addictions used to manage emotional pain

• Marriages on autopilot or emotionally bankrupt

• A sense of “emptiness” despite external success

These symptoms all trace back to the same source: an unhealed Lover stage.

In psychological terms, this often looks like:

• Attachment trauma

• Emotional neglect

• Alexithymia (inability to identify emotions)

• Trauma held in the body

These men need to feel again—but they need a guide. Not just a therapist, but a Father.

🛠️ Healing Must Be First Spiritual and then Clinical

John Eldredge offers something rare: a redemptive framework for men to understand their inner ache. He teaches that God is a Lover and invites men to come alive in His presence. But clinical work allows for precision: trauma must often be healed through structured experiences, not just prayer.

The best healing combines both paths.

🔹 Contrast: Eldredge vs. Clinical Psychology

💡 Your Heart Metrics and the Lover Stage

Every man in Leader of Men tracks eight whole-heart metrics. Here’s how the Lover stage impacts them:

• Faith – Are you pursuing intimacy with the Father, or just performing religious duty?

• Mental Health – Do you know what you feel and why? Or are you numbing?

• Fitness – Do you treat your body as a temple for joy, or a punishment zone?

• Family – Are you emotionally present with your spouse and children?

• Finances – Are you driven by joy or anxiety and scarcity?

• Five (Brotherhood) – Are your friendships emotionally safe and nourishing?

• Job – Do you work from a place of passion or pressure?

• Business/Ministry – Are you building from love or proving your worth?

🧭 Next Steps: The Lover Stage in Action

Men, here’s what to reflect on this week:

1. Where are you emotionally shut down?

2. When did you last feel awe, beauty, or affection?

3. Do you believe you are lovable—not just useful?

4. Have you ever asked God to awaken your heart again?

Don’t rush past this stage. It is not weak to feel—it is a warrior’s next battle. And healing here doesn’t just restore your heart. It transforms how you father, how you lead, how you live.

👣 Stay in the process.

Stay in the questions.

Stay in His love.

We are not just building better leaders. We are restoring our biblical masculinity.