Helping Your Son Master His Energy

You made your way in the world. You know, better than most, the drive it took: the appetite, the refusal to be small, the energy that would not sit still. And lately you have seen that same energy in your son — except in him it is still raw, and turned the wrong way. The anger. The risk-taking. The drinking, or the drugs. Or a quiet, private war with food and his own body. It unsettles you precisely because you recognise it. It is your own fire, unmastered.

This work exists for exactly that.

The energy is not the problem

A young man’s aggression, his intensity, his hunger for more — these are not defects to be suppressed. They are the forces that, once mastered, become ambition, courage, and the capacity to build a life. The drive that turns destructive when it has no channel is the same drive that turns into achievement when it is given one. The task is never to break a young man’s energy. It is to help him take hold of it.

When the energy turns inward

Unchannelled, that force does not disappear — it turns back on him. Reckless drinking and drug use are, underneath, aggression aimed at the self. So is the control, or the chaos, of an eating disorder. So is the anger that quietly costs him friendships and opportunities. These are not separate problems. They are one energy that has not found its way out into the world, and so consumes him from the inside.

The crossing every young man has to make

There is a passage every young man must make, and some get stuck just before it. Early life is the mother’s world: the world where food is the first language of love, where needs are met, where it is safe to stay small. Growing up means crossing into the father’s world — the harder, more demanding world of challenge, separation, risk, and becoming someone of one’s own. A great deal of male struggle, including the disordered relationship to food and to substances, is a son who has not yet been able to make that crossing — who stays where it is warm rather than step out into the world that asks something of him. The work of therapy is to make the crossing possible: to channel the raw energy, and to offer the challenge in a form he can actually take up. The thinking behind this work sets it out more fully.

Why you matter more than you think

A son learns to enter the father’s world through a father who makes it safe, and worth entering. The fact that you are reading this — that you are willing to show up for him — is already the beginning. In the work itself, Dr Jacquet offers the steady, challenging, non-shaming presence that helps a young man take hold of himself and turn toward his own life. Not a copy of yours. His own.

A clinician who knows this territory

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst whose doctoral research addresses precisely this ground: the father–son relationship and its impact on a young man’s relationship to food, to his body, and to himself. Across twenty-five years he has worked with the full range of ways this energy goes wrong — addiction, eating disorders, aggression, and the loss of direction beneath them. It is, quite simply, his life’s work, and he holds it without judgement.

An honest word

Where a young man is genuinely at risk — an active eating disorder, serious substance use, self-harm — it is treated with the seriousness it deserves: clinically and, where needed, medically. The hope in this work is real, but never at the expense of taking real suffering seriously. This is about your son’s life, first.

Discreet, and for families who need discretion

The work is confidential — in person at Harley Street or online — and arranged with the privacy that families in the public eye require. If you recognise your son in any of this, the first step is a conversation: for you, and, when he is ready, for him.

Arrange a confidential conversation

This is one stage of a longer arc — Masculinity Across a Life, one energy from boyhood to the wise old man.