On Wednesday, October 28, Sir Patrick Stewart died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.

I found out the next day, on Facebook. Before I had really taken in what I was reading, I was crying. I cried as though I had lost a member of my family. It caught me completely off guard. I never met him. I never stood in a room and heard that voice in person. And still the loss landed in my body as something personal, and I have spent the days since trying to understand why. I think I understand it now, and I want to share it with you, because I suspect I am not the only one.

I grew up on science fiction. In the seventies I watched reruns of the original Star Trek, along with The Twilight Zone, Planet of the Apes, and of course Star Wars, plus more shows and films than I could ever list. So when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in the fall of 1987, I was a teenager, and I was there from the very first episode. The special effects looked astonishing at the time. The ship, the uniforms, and the computers that answered when you spoke to them all felt like a real glimpse of the future. I was fascinated.

What I could not have known then was what else I was taking in.

I have devoted many years of my life to healing childhood trauma, reparenting my inner child, and learning to regulate my nervous system. It sits at the center of my personal life and of my work. When I sat with my grief over Patrick Stewart, I finally saw something I had missed for nearly forty years. Captain Jean-Luc Picard was a father figure to me..

Think about who Picard was. He was a leader with clear boundaries, and he never needed cruelty to hold them. He was strong without being harsh. He listened. He was empathetic and compassionate, even toward his enemies. He quoted Shakespeare and thought deeply about what it means to be human. And he was a real person, with limitations and old wounds and a family he had trouble going home to. He could be stubborn. He could be wrong, and when he was wrong, he owned it.

For a teenager who needed to see more of what a safe, wise, steady adult looks like, that was medicine.

This is the part I most want you to hear, especially if you do inner child work yourself or guide clients through it. Reparenting does not only happen in therapy sessions or meditations. It can happen through a character on a television show. The young parts of us that formed their beliefs about safety and authority in childhood keep learning from what they repeatedly witness. When a child or teenager spends time, again and again, in the presence of a kind and steady authority, even a fictional one, something inside takes notes. A new template forms quietly. This is how a good leader behaves. This is how a father can treat the people in his care. A grown-up can be strong and gentle at the same time.

I did not choose Picard for that reason. Some part of me simply knew what it needed and kept returning to it.

The same was true of his crew. The Enterprise was a family, and it was a healthy one. Picard gathered his officers in the briefing room and asked for their counsel. Riker disagreed with him openly, and the disagreement was respected. Data, an android, was loved for exactly what he was while he tried to understand humanity. Worf, a Klingon raised by human adoptive parents, belonged there completely. Troi tended to everyone's emotional life, and Beverly Crusher and Geordi La Forge brought their own care and brilliance. Conflicts happened, and they were repaired. Each person's difference made the whole family stronger. Then the captain made the call and took responsibility for it.

If you grew up in a home where disagreement felt dangerous, or where love depended on being someone other than yourself, watching that kind of family every week teaches your nervous system that another way is possible. It taught mine.

Two episodes stay with me more than any others.

In "Family," Picard returns to his childhood home in France, to the family vineyard, after being captured and assimilated by the Borg. His older brother Robert has resented him since they were boys. The two of them end up fighting in the mud of the vineyard, and in the middle of it the strongest man I knew on television finally breaks down and weeps over what was done to him. The brother who resented him stays with him there in the mud, and by the end of the evening the two of them are laughing together. Every time I watch that scene, I see a man who was allowed to fall apart, and a family that could still stay with him while he did, for all its old injuries. A father figure who can come undone and then heal shows you that healing is allowed for you too.

In "The Inner Light," an alien probe knocks Picard unconscious, and in the space of about twenty-five minutes he lives an entire lifetime as a man named Kamin on a dying world. He marries, raises children, grows old, and learns to play the flute. When he wakes on the bridge, all of it is still inside him, and the flute stays with him for the rest of the series. I did not have the words for it then, but that episode carries one of the ideas at the heart of my work today. An experience lived fully in the inner world becomes real in the person who lived it. It changes who they are.

Star Trek never looked away from death, and Picard spoke about mortality with a grace I find comforting right now. In Star Trek Generations, a film in which he loses his brother and nephew, he stands in the wreckage of the Enterprise near the end and tells Riker that "what we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived." I keep coming back to that line this week.

How Patrick Stewart lived matters to me as much as the character he gave us. He grew up poor in Mirfield, in West Yorkshire, in a home where his father was violent toward his mother. He spent much of his adult life speaking openly about it, and he became a patron of Refuge, a charity that protects women and children from domestic violence. When he later came to understand that his father's violence was tied to the trauma he carried home from war, Stewart also championed Combat Stress, which supports veterans with their mental health. The man who played the father I needed had grown up without the father he needed. He turned that wound into protection for others. I cannot think of a better picture of what healing can make of a life.

Captain Picard will always be with me. I watch some version of Star Trek almost every day, and whenever I do, I feel like I am part of a family. I feel like part of a movement of people who believe the future can be kinder than the past. The teenager who found him in 1987 received something real in those years, and I still carry it.

If a character helped raise you, I hope you will let yourself grieve when the person who brought them to life is gone. That grief is real. It points to something you received, and what you received is still yours.

Thank you, Sir Patrick. Make it so.