A core wound I see often in my work is that of the Father Wound. This is the experience of growing up with a father who was absent, emotionally stunted or simply unable to offer interest in you or care for you. It is a profound experience that heavily shapes the way people move through the world. What I often see are the compensating strategies that have kept us safe throughout the years. Over achievement, hyper independence, hyper vigilance and over functioning. Often on the outside people look like they are crushing it, but on the inside they feel hollow or totally discombobulated.
Most of the people I have worked with who have this deep wound are usually incredibly high functioning and they have built their survival around a strategy of brilliance of some description. Often they were a parentified child and had to provide that masculine ‘container’ in the family system. Almost like a partner to their mother. This feels really weird for most people now as adults, as it should, it is not in ‘right relationship’ systemically.
When I talk about the father wound we aren’t just talking about a particular event or specific memories of childhood; but rather an internal structure that drives adult behaviour.
Often the core wound is deep existential shame that is felt in a deep sense of unworthiness that gnaws at our bones. It is the legacy of a child who learned to be loved they had to perform and to be safe they had to shrink themselves or hide. They became a ‘junior detective’ always assessing the mood of the room to predict the environment. If a child’s survival skill is to please the father, then their No becomes a weapon that threatens their survival. We stop having a No to keep the peace, to be the calm waters in the family system. Often this calm is the only thing that stands between a child and an overwhelming sense of shame.
Digital Art, Kellie Stirling
The father wound shows up in adult life as:
Over achievement - Effort = survival so rest often feels dangerous. Behind this is the belief system you are only as worthy as your last big accomplishment. Many people switch between extreme productivity and then collapse that requires deep rest. They often find themselves recruited into organisations that feed off their prodigious creativity and output and have very few boundaries themselves culturally. So they get into a continuous ‘give more’ and ‘stretch yourself more’ loop, that burns most people out or leaves them bitterly resentful at best.
Poor boundaries - They often don’t feel safe to say no. Actually often I find they are incredibly compassionate to people they work with and their friends but they don’t demonstrate the same care for themselves. Because they did not receive attuned care from their father, they grow up fawning and managing others emotions at their own expense. This is because their nervous system perceives boundaries as a threat to primary attachment. The caring gaze was never demonstrated to them and the nervous system doesn’t learn to turn this caring gaze inward. The treat themselves like the people they are trying to save or impress, rather than the person that they actually are.
Attraction to unavailability - in relationships these people are often attracted to people who are emotionally unavailable. People who ‘give them crumbs’ of themselves in the relationship. What is familiar feels safe. It is what they received off their fathers, it is what feels normal. It is not normal. When we unconsciously seek out partners who cannot meet us emotionally, we are recreating a childhood struggle to earn the love that was never fully given to us.
We often minimise or maximise our experience. This shows up as black and white thinking about our parenting experiences that we received. We minimise it by saying it was not that bad and we forgive our parents and pretend it didn’t happen or we go the other way and over inflate it. We minimise our sadness. The reality is our inner child, maybe our 6 year old self, doesn’t care about a father’s reasons for not showing up. But as adults, we can acknowledge the underlying drivers. We can have both, two things can be true at the same time. We can learn to hold the tension of my father was wounded and he didn’t show up for me as a child in the way a parent needs to.
We can tell the truth of our experience to our coach, therapist or friends and acknowledge our experience and grieve the loss of the childhood that we never had. And, we can acknowledge that often our fathers were like this for a reason. They are often repeating a pattern that they experienced (ancestral trauma); the cultural context, many fathered in times where fathers weren’t expected to be emotionally present or to be able to be with their own emotions. Then there are some fathers that due to their own traumatic experiences got completely cut off from their emotional lives.
One cultural meme that I find quite disheartening is when we talk about ‘Daddy daycare’ like it's some hugely wondrous thing that a father is looking after their kids. You aren’t a babysitter, you are the parent. Lets call it what it is - parenting.
How do we work with all of this?
This is not just a mind thing, it is body too. The father wound lives in the nervous system, we have to work somatically with it. We have to start to learn to feel safe in our body. Notice where we feel collapsed, where we feel tense. In fact what I notice when people start to feel safe is that they often realise they are carrying a wound that is not theirs at all. When we work through all these sensory experiences, we start to uncouple what is tangled up together that is not ours to carry.
We work with our inner child parts. The wound lives in our inner child and we have to find what that part of us needs. Our adult self learns how to support our inner child parts. We are reparenting ourselves. We move from reacting to our environment to being able to witness ourselves when our childhood wounding is touched and we then can become more intentional and choiceful in how we show up in life.
We move really slowly and titrate these experiences because they are deep, old and big. We move slowly and in small pieces, building capacity in the nervous system to be with emotions so we don’t get flooded by them.
Often to stop the fawning - the people pleasing and appeasing - we have to do some good boundary work and build capacity for healthy aggression in the body. Learn what a Yes and a No feels like in our body. The more we build up our No, the better we also get at taking care of ourselves. But most importantly we don’t become the dumping ground for everyone else's emotions because we build up compassionate boundaries to keep them out.
Remember you are not a fawner and people pleaser because you are weak; this is actually an incredibly sophisticated survival strategy. The goal isn't just to get better at boundaries, it is also to decouple your worth from your performance.
If this resonates with you, ask yourself this question. What would happen to you internally if you said No to something today. Is there a fear that if you don’t perform you will be judged as not being worthless?
What would happen if you scheduled some time for yourself? How would your body feel to be still for 30 minutes?