Does She Have Daddy Issues? The Father Wound Most Women Never Heal.

All right, team, today we are gonna be talking about women with daddy issues, AKA the father wound, and understanding them and learning how to have better relationships with a woman that has been hurt by a father. So if a woman has never had a relationship with her father or she had a pretty terrible one with him for whatever reason, you're not necessarily dating a woman with a healthy image of men or masculinity. Aka a healthy image of you, you're dating a woman with a wounded pattern with regards to how she relates to men. And if she hasn't done the work to see that pattern, she can say that she wants love and connection and intimacy with you while constantly sabotaging it. She can crave a good man, aka you, while pushing you away and rejecting you. She can say that she wants peace and connection and ease while continually creating endless amounts of chaos. And this can all happen not because she's evil or she hates men or she's, you know, undeniably broken. It's happening because her nervous system and her neurology learned to respond to men through the lens or the filter of betrayal, pain, abuse, neglect, and abandonment. And this is what some of us have come to call daddy issues. And it gets thrown around like a kind of punchline, you know, a way to describe a woman who's difficult, clingy, she's complicated, she's hard to love. It's used to explain away the behavior of a woman who seems to need too much, who trusts too little, who blows up a relationship that's actually good. And here's the problem with that framing. I kind of take issues with it because I think it's lazy, I think it's reductive. Just like when I hear women say, "Oh, he's got mommy issues." I think it's just, that's more shaming and blaming than anything else. And the truth is that women that have daddy issues, that have a fatherhood wound, it's not a character flaw. It's not evidence that they're unequivocally broken. It's just a wound. It's a pain that they are carrying, a real specific, psychologically documented wound that forms in childhood when the relationship between her and her father has gone wrong. Right? When there's absence, when there's neglect, when there's abuse or emotional unavailability, emotional control, emotional manipulation. And then this follows her silently into her relationships until she confronts it, until she actually does something about it. And that includes her relationship with you. Now here's the catch that I want you to know right up front, 'cause this is gonna lead into what you can do. Women with, daddy issues, women with fatherhood wounds generally tend to pick certain type of men. And they generally tend to pick certain types of men that feed into their wounding, that reinforce the pain. Because the strange thing about us as human beings psychologically is that our trauma, our pain, our hurt tends to pick people that reinforce the cycle of hurt and pain inside of us as an attempt to some form of resolution. And so oftentimes you on the other end of that are enacting some type of this pain cycle, some type of this trauma cycle. And so I'm gonna talk to you about in this video is what produces a fatherhood wound or a daddy issue within a woman, and then what you can do to start to step outside of the cycle, not to necessarily fix her because that's not your responsibility. And that's actually part of the problem is that a lot of the times, hint number one, generally women with fatherhood wounds, they attract men that are the savior archetype. They attract men that want to fix her, that are trying to solve all of her problems, and this creates a never-ending cycle. So where does the fatherhood wound come from? Where does it actually show up? Well, for a woman, the fatherhood wound, in order to really get that, we need to know what the father does. For a young girl's development, because a father is not just a provider. He's not just the guy who pays the bills and shows up to dance class or to the school play. He is, for his daughter, the first man that she will ever love. And the first man that either sees her, sees her values, sees her strengths, sees her capabilities, and makes her feel safe. The first man that she can build safety and trust with, or the first man that she can't, the first man that doesn't build those things with her. He is the first template for what a man is and what she comes to expect from men, what love from a man feels like, whether men can be trusted, whether men are actually safe, whether she is worthy of a man's attention and care, and whether she has to earn love, whether it's given freely, or whether love is something that is going to be deployed for control. And when that relationship works, when the father is present, consistent, grounded, emotionally available, protective without being hyper-controlling, that young girl, that daughter, will grow up with a kind of inner security around men. She can tolerate conflict with a man without falling apart. She doesn't need constant reassurance from that man. She can be loved without being suspicious of that man or that love. And when that relationship hasn't worked with her father, this is where the wound starts to form. And the wound doesn't always come from the obvious places. Of course, it comes from the father who is completely absent, who's just not there, who went, you know, he, he He got incarcerated, he died young, sort of like a laundry list of things. But that father wound also forms in a house where dad is physically there, but he's emotionally absent or neglectful, right? You've probably heard me talk about ghost dad, this concept. He's there, but he's like this nebulous ghost that just sort of drifts around the house. The man who came home every night, but was checked out, drinking, cold, distracted, absent, who never really asked what she was doing, who never really took an interest in her life. So she constantly had to try and get his attention, to get his praise, to get his love, or who made everything about him. He could be this very large dominating force that she was terrified of. There was maybe abuse or the looming threat of abuse. He was wildly unpredictable, so she couldn't build that security, that safety, and that trust. He was warm one day and, you know, ballistic the next. So it also forms with a father who is very critical, a dad who's extremely withholding, maybe making his approval something that she has to earn. And so she continually learns that unless I operate within certain parameters, I'm not gonna get love and affection. And usually these types of fathers are the ones where two things happen. Number one, nothing's ever good enough. And number two, the standard of the bar continually moves. And that's very disorienting. It can also form when a father is extremely enmeshed with her, right? So he needs her to operate in a certain way. He's over-controlling. He's kind of immersed in her life and in what she's thinking and how she's feeling in ways that kind of feel what she would say gross. They feel invasive, they feel penetrative. And so what she learns is, "I actually have to protect myself from men because there's this kind of invasiveness." And maybe he wasn't sexually abusive or abusive in any type of way that was apparent, but there's this invasive, you know, he's reading her journal, he's going through her diary, he's, you know, constantly needing her to, understand exactly what he's feeling. And it's really a lot about his emotional connection. And maybe there is this kind of strange enmeshment where she doesn't really know, she can kind of feel like he's trying to make her his surrogate wife. So a lot of the times this dynamic shows up when she sees that her father and her mother have a bad relationship, maybe a divorce happens, or maybe it doesn't, maybe they're still together, but he kind of starts to talk to her about things that are inappropriate, Maybe he complains about her mom, that kind of stuff. But in every one of these cases, in every example, and it is relevant and important to understand the woman that you're dating, what her childhood was like. You know, what was the relationship with her father like? Was he kind of this overly controlling dominant force and she really had to fight for agency and autonomy? Was he the guy that was just like the smother father, you know, that was all encompassing and she just like couldn't escape from him and he was sort of inappropriate inappropriate with her in ways? Was he abusive? Was he neglectful? Was he gone? Having some context for that is going to be important for you to understand her behavior with you. But in every one of these cases, the same core injury occurs, okay? And that core injury is that the daughter, your significant other, your girlfriend, your wife, learns at a developmental age when she has no way to contextualize or protect herself from it, that love from a man is either unavailable, conditional, or dangerous. These are the 3 buckets that a father wound for a woman is going to fall into, okay? It's either unavailable, so there's no love from dad, there's no way to get it. It's conditional, so she has to do very specific things, and usually those targets are moving and almost impossible to meet. Or it's dangerous. So there's something about it that invades her, takes away her sense of agency, et cetera. And that experience as a young girl becomes the lens through which she perceives men that she's dating specifically. But even if you look at our culture in the West, I'm gonna do a separate video on this, it's become the way that women perceive men, period, full stop. There's a lot of women who have a kind of cultural father wound. And so it's not just, that this gets projected onto you as a man that she's dating, but it gets projected onto men within culture and society. And this father wound gets projected out into how they view men, period. So what do we need to know in terms of how this shows up in relationships? What are the actual things that you can look for where you're like, "Oh, there's the father wound. Here's how it's showing up in this moment." because what happens is you need to step out of the trap. A lot of the times when a woman is activated, where her father wound is activated, you could say her daddy issues are activated. And again, I don't really like that saying because I think, again, I think it's very reductive and kind of lazy, but for a lot of people they get it. But when her father wound is activated, there's very specific behaviors that she's going to deploy to try and reboot the system. And she's, again, she's not doing it consciously. It's her pain, okay? Because your pain has its own intelligence. So you can think about if you were betrayed growing up at a very young age and you had no psychological mechanism to have discernment about why mom or dad acted that way, which you didn't when you were a kid, there's gonna be certain behaviors that you deploy to recreate that cycle over and over again to try and resolve it, or simply because it's the familiar pattern. Again, another strange anomaly of being a human being is that we will choose the patterns that are familiar, even if they are hurtful, abusive, disconnective, leave us not getting what we want, over the patterns that are foreign, even if they are the patterns that we want. So depending on the specific nature of her original injury or wounding, it tends to express itself through 4 broad patterns. All right, guys, really quick aside. First off, thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the the channel. Uh, if you are wanting to go deeper, if you're a man that's working on himself in some way, shape, or form, you're wanting to be more self-led, you want to trust yourself more, you want to have a deeper level of self-worth, or maybe you're looking to improve your relationship, then I encourage you to check out the Man Talks Alliance. You can go to mantalks.com/alliance. We have over 1,000 men in this incredible community from around the world, men who are just like you, working to better themselves, to be a better husband, a better father, a better leader in your own life. So check it out, mantalks.com/alliance. And most women with a father wound will recognize themselves primarily in one of these patterns, though they may kind of oscillate between, you know, 2 or 3 of them. And I wanna be clear before I get into this, 'cause I've broken these down into actual archetypes, that naming these patterns is not the same as pathologizing women. Okay? Every one of these archetypes is a completely understandable adaptation to an injury. Okay? The wound was real and the adaptation that was created was a survival strategy. So, and yes, kids were very adaptive. So it might be a maladaptive survival strategy, but in that moment, it was a brilliant survival strategy that's just not working in your relationship with her, right? At the time, it was rational and it served a function, but understanding the pattern is not a way to dismiss her or label her. It's not, I don't want you to use this as like fodder to blame her or shame her. I want you to have this so that you have context to actually see her. Because I want to give you these archetypes so you can start to really get what it's like to be in her experience. Because it's very common that women with father issues, with, with daddy issues, attract men who have almost zero context for what she's experiencing. And it reinforces— for many of these women, it reinforces that fatherhood wound. It's like, "See, you don't understand me." So archetype number 1, let's talk about the different archetypes. This is how it shows up. Archetype number 1 is the approval seeker. This is kind of the most common version that we see that gets talked about. It's the woman who's, when she was a girl, her father was very withholding. He would withhold his love, his attention, any type of physical affection, praise, validation. None of it was really available, but only if and when, in very rare occasions, she performed well enough. She sort of outperformed expectations, whatever his expectations were. Good grades, certain compliance, good behavior, being easy or pleasant or undemanding, or she did very specific things where he approved of it and would validate her for that. And she learned that love is something that you need to earn, love is something that you need to seek, It's not something that you're actually given or inherently worthy of. And so in relationship, this shows up as an almost compulsive need for your approval and your reassurance. And she needs you to hear that you're happy with her pretty regularly, almost constantly. And that can feel weird for you, right? And when she doesn't hear it, when you're quiet, if you're distracted, if you're having an off day, if you're kind of in your head about shit that's going on with work or the kids or whatever's happening, happening, she reads it as evidence that something's wrong with her. She's failing and you're pulling away. She's not safe. The connection, the love between you, something's wrong because this is— she's about to lose you, right? 'Cause this is what her father would do. If she wasn't behaving in a way that he approved of, he would immediately withdraw love, withdraw affection. Maybe he'd go cold or silent for sometimes days. Days on end. And sometimes he would do this and she would have no clue about what she actually did wrong. So she was very much in the dark. And so unfortunately from the outside, this can kind of feel exhausting for you. You're fine, but she's in crisis. You don't have an issue, but she's sort of distraught. You went quiet for an hour and she's convinced that the relationship is ending. This is also usually the pattern where the approval-seeking woman will oftentimes have a kind of string of relationships with men that are really emotionally disconnected. You know, they will date men that are very much like their father at first. This is quite common. Or maybe she, you know, maybe she's with you in some ways because you can be quite emotionally distant or shut down. Or disconnected. And so it's kind of a repetition of a pattern. But underneath the surface, when she's kind of in this crisis, what's happening is a child who learned that love disappears without warning when you stop performing properly. And so she's not necessarily being irrational or erratic. She's protecting herself by constantly being hypervigilant to whether or not you are connected. Now, it might come across as clinginess, neediness, anxiety, anxiousness, etc. But one of the things that you need to have context for is that she has a hard time knowing whether or not you're okay and the relationship is okay. And so there are ways in which you can behave and operate. Having some patience with that is important, encouraging her to also start to self-reflect on whether or not everything's okay, 'cause she needs to start to have that discernment. Number 2 is the avoidant woman. And this is on the rise. As I've talked about, I did a different video about the rise of avoidant women, but this is the woman whose father was absent. He was physically gone, he was emotionally checked out, or his presence really made no difference. He was just kind of like, there, but she didn't really have a clue who he was. He didn't really take an interest in who she was, and that she learned at a nervous system, at a cellular level, and a neurological level that men leave, depart, are disengaged, or do not connect, and that relying on a man is a setup for pain. This is really at the core of what an avoidant woman feels, relying on a man is a setup. It's an actual setup, is a recipe for pain and hurt. And the safest thing that she can do is need nothing from anyone. And you've probably seen this narrative so rampant online in modern culture, specifically from modern women, right? I don't need a man. I don't, I don't want to have a man in my life. I don't want to, you know, I don't need a man to take care of me, that kind of stuff. Because to the avoidant woman, any type of reliance on a man is very, very challenging, confronting. It feels like a somatic, like a physiological threat inside of her to have to rely on a man in any way, shape, or form. And there's other complexities to that socially, from a feminist perspective, etc. But in a relationship, how this shows, how this shows up is through walls. She can be fiercely independent, almost like performatively independent. She'll pull away when things start to get close. She minimizes her own needs. She will kind of like refuse to let you meet her needs. You know, you might try and pay for something or buy her a gift and she sort of like, you know, will reject that. She'll self-destruct in a relationship that's actually going really well. Because intimacy to her feels like a threat. Again, it feels like a recipe, a setup for pain and hurt. If I let myself love you, you're going to let me down. And so the harder that you try and get close to her, the more that she retreats. And when you back off and you give her space, she might suddenly become available, you know, because now you are a safe enough distance. So for these types of women, The one of the healthiest things that we can do, and again, these types of women generally, they attract the nice guys, the needy guys, the overly people-pleasing guys that chase and pursue her in a way that repeats this cycle because she gets to constantly reject. She gets to be in the position that her father was in. And then when you start to detach a little bit and create some space space, suddenly she can relax and feel at ease. And again, she's not playing games consciously. She's not intentionally trying to mess with you. She's doing the only thing that ever really made sense to her based on what she was taught with her father, because this is what was modeled, right? She was modeled men leave, men are absent, men don't connect. So she abandons first on her terms, before you get the chance. Now, obviously, this can be a challenge to be in relationship with, because a woman, as soon as things start to get close, will pull away. And there are certain ways to work with it. We're gonna keep truckin'. Number 3 is the rescuer. The rescuer is the woman who had the father who needed saving, okay? He needed saving. Maybe he was an addict, maybe he was emotionally unstable, maybe he was a wet noodle in his marriage. And, you know, her mother walked all over him. He was depressive and she kind of became his caretaker. She became like a surrogate mother to her father. And she grew up organizing his life. She grew up sort of organizing her, her life around him, around managing him, you know, his emotions, his life, his needs. And her needs became second to his or weren't allowed to exist at all. And this creates this kind of rescuer that sees love as a service, right? She learned that love is service. I have to do things for you. And that's really the way that for these types of women, they keep men in their life. It's by making themselves sort of indispensable to his survival. And in relationships, she'll gravitate towards men who really need her. And so if you're in a relationship with a rescuer, the hard part is that it's likely a sign that you are somebody who feels broken, that you feel like you're struggling. And men with these kind of obvious wounds, the obvious pain that's underneath the surface, the needs that you have, she can really pour herself into that. She can be on this mission of, "Don't worry, I'll take care of that for you. I'll take care of this for you. Have you thought about doing this? You know, oh, I researched the jobs that you could apply for and look at, I sent you an email with 10 different," you know, that kind of stuff. But it's really a kind of compulsion and it's a compulsion because she needs somebody to fix. So oftentimes the women that are rescuers, are with men, and maybe this is like you, who feel like they need saving. And so part of the— it's part of the get out of jail card that you're going to need to deploy is, number one, you're going to need to realize that you're with that type of woman. Number two, you're going to need to really come into contact with the fact that there's a part of you that is wanting her to rescue you and save you and fix your problems and solve things for And number 3, you're going to have to really step out of that. You're gonna have to start to develop rigorous agency, routines, discipline to start to take care of yourself. And that way you step out of this cycle. But if you're a stable and functional man and you start to date this type of woman, she may, she may kind of find you somewhat boring, you know, because there's no task, there's no job for her to do. Or worse, she might unconsciously try to create instability. She might undermine you or sometimes attack you to make you feel like there's something wrong with you so that she has something to do. And the wound here is that she never really learned that she could be loved without being useful. She could be loved without having to take care of you and that she is enough without fixing you. So this is kind of, that's kind of like the female version of the people pleaser and the nice guy, right? If you're a nice guy, this probably feels very, very similar to you. Now the last archetype is the tester. And this is the woman whose father was really inconsistent. That's, she's, when you hear her describe her dad, it's going to be a laundry list of inconsistencies. And, you know, sometimes he was warm, sometimes he was cruel, sometimes he was there, sometimes he was gone. But it's really about unpredictability. And paradoxically, the most addictive kind is this unpredictability because the nervous system is always on high alert. So the woman who had the unpredictable father is going to be always in this state of needing to seek out and wait for the next signal, like, what's gonna happen next? What's gonna happen next? And so it can feel like in a relationship, like she's constantly testing you. She's constantly trying to see, are you stable? Do you love me still? Do you wanna be with me? She'll push a boundary to see if you pull away and you hold them. She'll start a conflict to see if you're gonna stay and stay grounded and not get reactive. She's gonna threaten to leave to see if you chase her. And it can feel like she's trying to destroy things that you're building together, especially when you are starting to build when you're starting to build consistency together and solidness, it's going to feel like she's testing and trying to undermine all of that. And it's not happening intentionally. It's happening unconsciously because her nervous system and her brain is so used to— this is the cycle, this is the pattern— unpredictability. And so stability and predictability feels boring. It feels foreign. And oddly enough, it can feel like a threat. So she's trying to answer the question in that behavior, in the testing behavior. She's trying to answer the question that her father never really settled for her because a father is meant to provide at the end of the day, stability, emotional stability, physical stability, intellectual stability, stability of presence. And so what she's really trying to test is, are you going to settle? Stay? Are you actually safe? Can I test the waters and have you love me regardless of the methods that I deploy? Now, obviously, there's, there's like a within reason to this, right? Like sometimes the testing archetype of women will cross thresholds that are deal breakers. They're non-negotiables, right? They'll step out of a relationship They'll act in ways that are really terrible. And so the cruelty of this pattern is that the tests often trigger exactly the outcome that she fears. So this is a, you know, this is like a predictive mechanism, right? It's a predictive model. She pushes you away and away and away until you finally go away. And she takes that as confirmation that reinforces what she already believed. Not necessarily wanting to see that she produced that outcome, right? That she really— that, you know, men can't be trusted to stay, but she, you know, can't necessarily see, oh, I pushed him away. So sometimes here's the thing with the tester is that she doesn't need you to pass every single test. It's not— it's not about you getting every single test right. She needs you to be consistent enough and to sometimes call out the pattern. Hey, this is— it really truly feels like you're pushing me away in this way. Or, you know what? Feels like you're testing me. And sometimes you're going to need to say, don't do that. Stop it. Stop trying to test me. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. I can see what you're doing. I love you. And that's enough. And sometimes that is enough to snap her out of it. You need physical connection. You need eye contact. It can't be a threat. It needs to be said with love. All of those things. but sometimes you need to be just call out the behavior. Hey, I can tell that you're testing me right now. Say what's happening. So here's what you can actually do if you are in love with a woman who has a father wound. So if you recognize these patterns, number one, you can depersonalize this because a lot of men personalize the shit out of her behavior. You can start to realize, number one, you're not the cause of the wound. All right, you didn't do that. And number 2, you cannot heal it for her. These are the 2 big traps that men fall into with women that have father wounds, all right? The first trap is, "Oh, what did I do that's causing this?" And they're racking their brain and they're looking at their behavior and it can be very disorienting and confusing and frustrating. And then what you need to do is you need to realize, "Oh, I didn't cause this. This is getting projected onto me." And number 2, you need to step out of the cycle of trying to heal it, fix it, save her, salvage it, et cetera. You are not responsible for fixing her or saving her. Again, with many of these archetypes of women, they draw in the classic nice guys, the classic people pleasers. They draw in the men who it activates your savior method, right? Maybe I can be good enough. All right, so here's what you can actually do. Number 1 is be consistent, not perfect. A lot of the times alongside of the nice guys and the people pleasers that get drawn in, the savior, the men with the savior complexes, which I was one of those guys for sure, they also seem to attract guys that are perfectionists. You know, you probably have a pretty strong inner critic. And you expect yourself to be perfect in a relationship. That's a recipe for disaster. Let go of trying to be perfect with her. It's okay if she's disappointed. It's okay if she's a little anxious. It's okay if she's a little worried. It's okay if she's pushing you away. Be consistent and not perfect. The single most healing thing that you can do for a woman who has any type of fatherhood wound, any type of daddy issues is to be as consistent as possible. And it's almost like being boring in the best way. You know, it's the only way I can describe it. It's like you're boring in the best way. Show up when you said you're gonna show up. Do what you say you're going to do. Be the same person on Tuesday as you are on Sunday. Be the same person that you are at work, at home. Have consistency. Be the same person to her when she's anxious, when she's relaxed, when she's loving, when she's on the defense, whatever it is. And I know that sounds simple, and it is relatively simple, but it's harder to execute than you might think. Because again, women with father wounds and daddy issues are often operating in a way that's trying to elicit a very specific pattern and response from you so that they can stay stuck with that wound. And when you do not comply with that game and you are just you, you're just consistent, it allows her system to start to settle and it allows a new story to start to emerge. Because for a woman with a father wound, a natural human inconsistency, any type of human inconsistency reads as abandonment. Right? So she's looking for any type of inconsistency in you. Every withdrawal, every small mistake sort of confirms the story that she already had. So you don't have to be perfect. You just need to be predictable. And for you as a savior, as a nice guy, et cetera, this is going to be some great work because it's going to help you heal and it's gonna help you to develop the skills skill that you likely need to feel good about yourself, to get out of the nice guy cycle, the people pleasing cycle that you are usually deploying. Number 2, as I mentioned before, very briefly, name what you see without making it a diagnosis. Name the behavior, name what you see. One of the most powerful things that you can do in a moment of activation where you can feel She's pulling away from you. She's being overly needy. She's spiraling. She's testing. She's shutting down. She's coming at you sideways. It's name what you actually see underneath the behavior. No, you're not. It's not you're acting crazy. Ah, here we go again, right? It's not retreating into cold silence or shutting down. It's something closer to, Hey, I can see you're really scared right now, and I want you to know I'm not going anywhere. Hey, I can see that you're really angry right now, and I want you to know I'm okay with that. Hey, I can see that you're really worried or anxious right now, and I just want you to know that's okay with me. I'm here, I'm not going anywhere. So you kind of have to tell which archetype of woman that you're with and what pain she's in, and kind of architect a bit of a response to what you see, right? I can tell that you're, you know, hey, I can see that you're testing me right now, or it really feels like you're testing me right now. That's okay. I want you to know I'm not going anywhere. So the statement should always be twofold. The statement should be, here's what I see. Seems like you're anxious, seems like you're testing, seems like you're pulling away, and then follow it up with some consistent predictable behavior. I want you to know I'm not going anywhere. I want you to know how you feel is all right. Just reminding her, I'm good. Whatever you do, remind her, I'm good. Number 3, hold your limits. Hold your limits, your non-negotiable, your boundaries, and do them with love. This is what a lot of men miss when they are with a woman who has father wounds, because it feels counterintuitive to the man, if you want to actually help the woman that you're with heal from her fatherhood wound, you cannot let her run you over, okay? 'Cause again, remember, a lot of women that have fatherhood wounds, who do they really attract? They attract men that are either completely disengaged, that reinforces that fatherhood wound, or they attract the nice guys, the people pleasers, the saviors, that's you. And so a lot of the times what happens with men that are the nice guys, the people pleasers, the saviors, what do you do? What do we all do when we're in that space? We give them an inch and they take a mile. We don't actually set boundaries and hold them. So you can't capitulate when she starts to spiral every single time. You can't abandon your own needs and your own boundaries in order to attempt to keep her calm or to try and keep the peace between the two of you. The big thing that is going to be important for you to start to build up a tolerance for, and I really want you to hear this, is to start to be okay when she's not. Be okay when she's disappointed. Be okay when she's testing you. Be okay when she's anxious. Be okay when she's pulling away, right? Here's what psychologically matters about this. A woman with a fatherhood wound in part is looking for proof that the men in her life have a deep sense of self and that they won't disappear under pressure, or that they're not going to smother her, that they can actually hold their ground, that they are their own independent person with agency, and that agency isn't going to come at the cost of the love between her and you. It's not gonna come at the cost of her agency. So that can hold their ground lovingly and firmly at the same time. So you need to be able to hold your ground lovingly and firmly at the same time, right? So a man that doesn't have any limits, a man that's there to serve, to save, to just people-please, who absorbs everything, agrees with everything, tolerates everything, he does not feel safe to her. And some women that have a fatherhood wound will attract these type of men. They will attract men who do not stand up for themselves. And he feels like a mirror, and you can't attach to a mirror. So hold your ground. When her behavior crosses a line, say, say so, right? Calmly and clearly and plainly and without cruelty and without harshness and without accusation. It's not a time for a punishment. It is a statement about fact. I love you, and I'm not okay with how you just talked to me. I love you, and it's not all right to treat me like that. I love you, and I think that we need to take a pause in this conversation because what you're saying is crossing a line. So that type of statement is coming from a loving, grounded place. And what this tells her is there's a real person here. That I can trust. Someone with, someone with edges, someone with values, and someone with a sense of self that doesn't collapse under fear. And that is exactly what paradoxically makes you feel safe to her, because there's something for her to really hold on to. There's something for her to push up against that doesn't move and that doesn't leave. So what I want to leave you with is this: The woman in your life who has a fatherhood wound, she's not damaged goods or broken beyond repair. She's not also a project for you to try and fix and solve. She is not your burden that you signed up for by accident. She is a person who was really failed by the first man that she was with. And she's trying to get a sense of what safe trustable, secure love actually looks like. And some of the behaviors that she's deploying probably don't feel great for you. They probably come out sideways. And for many of you, they probably activate your own shit, right? Your nice guy stuff, your people-pleasing tendencies, your savior issues. But the truth is that you get to have the opportunity to grow into a, larger version of yourself, a more stable, more consistent, more grounded version of yourself. And that might mean that she leaves. That might mean that she's so committed to her patterns and her pain and her cycle that she leaves. That's okay. You have to be willing to let her walk away. This is the hard part about love, and it's the hard part about choosing somebody that has pain in them, which we all do, by the way, you have to be willing to allow her to choose her pain and her cycles over you. And when you do that, if you love her and you really love her and you understand what you're actually dealing with and you step out of this behavior of collapsing or shutting yourself down completely, or trying to save her from what's going on, then things begin to shift because you become a more secure, more consistent, more predictable partner that allows her to experience love in a safe, secure, and trustworthy way. Now, that does not guarantee that she will stay and that she will choose the relationship, but it does mean that you have a higher probability of then becoming somebody who will attract a safe, secure, trusting loving relationship and partner. And you have to use discernment about how long you are also willing to stay in that container of relationship and that quality of relationship. I'm also not saying that you should use the relationship for this, like, personal development quest, but it is a place. If you're in a relationship with a woman, you're married to a woman that has this wound, or you're dating somebody and you really you know, love her and want to be with her and you want to make it work, then you can use this as the grounds to deploy some of the strategies that I've talked about to build the consistency and the predictability and the stability in yourself that will make you a man that you respect more. And that is the quest. That's the actual path. Because as you do that, you'll also notice for yourself that you might come to a place and time in the relationship where you say, "Actually, this isn't acceptable for me anymore," and you can make a different choice for yourself. So thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to man it forward, share this episode, maybe with a man that you know that's in this type of dynamic, maybe with your significant other to have a conversation. If she's recognized, "Actually, yeah, I do have a fatherhood wound, I do have daddy issues," then this is a great podcast for the two of you to share. So don't forget to man it forward. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Goes a long way. So thanks so much for tuning in. Till next time, Connor Beaton signing off.