The experience of trauma can leave a wide range of different psychological symptoms in a person's life, including various forms of anxiety, intrusive flashbacks to the trauma, desensitization and avoidance of trauma-related stimuli, hyperactivity, and a variety of other symptoms. We can also identify a phenomenon of victims re-experiencing their unprocessed past trauma by re-creating the trauma in their present life. This phenomenon has been described in psychology as repetition compulsion. The traumatic experience tends to repeat itself over and over in a person's life, thereby impairing his or her ability to function normally in everyday life. It can also affect his relationships to a significant degree.

For the adolescent boy and future young man, the period of deep vulnerability is the time of identification and transformation of transformation of personality between the ages of 14-16 and the beginning of his young adulthood. He is no longer a boy, but he is not yet a mature man either. It is a period when he is not yet completely aware of what is happening within himself because he is not fully able to be in contact with it due to his juvenile vulnerability and immaturity. His father is often unable to help him effectively, because the son can also in many cases be in his expressions only an outward repetition of his father's unprocessed trauma, his denials, repressions, or projections.

However, a spiritual father can be the person who can guide him to the process of healing. He is not just a psychologist, he has an accepting relationship with the guided in which he is fully present, attentive, in which he creates relational security and provides understanding. He brings forth and transmits life (which must first exist within himself), empowering and supporting the spiritual life of the guided one. He becomes a role model, a significant relational person, a surrogate father and a guide. In this paper, the author, through a time-lapse prism of his 15-year ministry as a university chaplain and spiritual father of students and youth at the university, discusses the results of qualitative case studies and observations. Along with the most valuable insights published in his four peer-reviewed monographs and dozens of articles on the crisis of fatherhood, the crisis of male identity, and male spirituality over the period of 2009-2024, he offers some scholarly insights into how the "insoluble" repetition compulsion, combined with a good and mature spiritual fatherhood, can be the beginning of both rebirth and new life for a heretofore wounded young man who is the son of today but the father of tomorrow.