‘I am a strong man if I can deal with my feelings’: fatherhood, therapy and emotional becoming

This article examines how contemporary Danish fathers navigate shifting emotional expectations of fatherhood. Drawing on ethnographically informed interviews, we explore how men engage therapeutic vocabularies to reinterpret inherited emotional legacies and craft new paternal identities. Three intensive cases illustrate how therapy becomes a resource for developing emotional reflexivity, reworking boundaries between traditional and emerging masculinities, and fostering emotionally competent children. Yet, these shifts also generate ambivalence: while fathers embrace emotional openness, they maintain ideals of control and self-reliance and often distance themselves from their own fathers. We argue that the therapeutic culture (Illouz) reshapes fatherhood, producing new demands, ideals and affective separations.