Looking for helping to improve the following sentence (in bold). However, he also knew that his father had his own emotional burdens to carry, so he could not say anything to intervene. In the above sentence, I don't think i have quite made it clear who's who. I mean, when I say "his father had his," do you understand that the father was the one with the emotional burdens and not the "he" at the start of the sentence? And when I say, "so he could not," do you understand that the "he" here no longer refers to the father but to the first "he"? PS: The reason why I started the sentence with "he" is because I've already used the person's name in the sentence before. I thought repeating "James" over and over again make it sound... not nice?
It's pretty clear to me when taken in context. The 'his' in "his emotional burdens" obviously refers to the father while the 'he' in "he could not say anything to intervene" refers to the son. Elementary English, really. You're just overthinking.
As long as you're not crazy excessive about it in the rest of the paragraph, it looks fine. If you are being excessive about it, I believe the saying, "show, don't tell" should be used.
Easy way to make this sentence flow better is to replace the first "he" with his name. Example: However, John also knew that his father had his own emotional burdens to carry, so he could not say anything to intervene.
I mean, grammatically, yes, the second "his" is technically an ambiguous pronoun because you're technically not supposed to have the same pronouns refer to different people in the same sentence. However, most native speakers will understand what you mean. You could also vary sentence structure to get around this: However, knowing that his father also had emotional burdens to carry, he could not say anything to intervene.
Focusing purely on the he/his/him issue, I would only make minor changes, since it can be easily understood, even without outside context. Specifically, I would change it to: "However, he also knew that his father had their own emotional burden to carry, so he could not say anything to intervene". The only change is that I am changing the term for James's father's from "his" to a more removed "their", so to prevent any possible confusion. This results in, for this sentence only, all the he/his/him to refer to James, while the other indicative pronoun, "their", being used to indicate the father in question. I'm not certain if others would consider this use of "their" to be 100% grammatically correct, but it solves the issue you were having without retooling the entire sentence or changing its structure in any way.