The 5 Father Wounds and How to Fix Them

I don't want to be anything like him. I wanna be exactly like him. I wanna live up to his expectations. I don't want my anger to be like him. I don't wanna treat my wife or my girlfriend like him. I promise to never raise my sons the way he raised me. All of these sentiments and so many more are the result of some type of father wound. And for most of you, for many of you that are watching this, you will have experienced some type of pain from your father that is directly getting in the way of how you do relationships with your significant other and with your kids, with other men in your life, with your colleagues. So in today's episode, I am going to be walking you through the main archetypes of father wounds, breaking them down into specific categories. I'm gonna be outlining how those wounds were created, how they show up in your current-day relationship. And then I'm gonna give you a step-by-step plan that you can deploy to start to heal those wounds, to break free of the cycles, the patterns, and the behaviors that result in that pain, that are causing you even more pain and dysfunction in your life today. So I'm Connor Beaton. This is the Man Talk Show. Let's dive straight in. But first, don't forget to like, subscribe and hit the bell notification goes a long way. And as I've said before, in the age of AI slop, I think that more people are going to intentionally choose their content, and I hope that you do the same. I choose the content that I want to watch intentionally. And if you like my videos, if you like my content and you're looking to learn, then subscribe and hit the notification instead of being a zombie and consuming a bunch of garbage. All right, Have you ever caught yourself? Have you ever caught yourself in a relationship where you've done something, you've said something, and you walk away from that and you think, where in the actual hell did that come from? Why did I say that? Why did I do that? Maybe you shut down when your significant other criticizes you. Maybe you can't seem to commit even though it's a relationship that you want. Maybe you feel out of control with your anger, or maybe you feel a kind of impotence in terms of being able to get your needs met. And no matter what that looks like, at the core of it is likely your dynamic and your relationship with your father, the imprint of your father. So let's talk about defining a little bit of what the father wound is. 'Cause the truth is, you're not gonna find father wound in the DSM-5. It's not a clinically diagnosable thing. However, It is one of the most consistently observed patterns in developmental psychology, in trauma therapy, in relational work, and it is something that I have seen in so many men over the 12 years of working with men. It's what a lot of therapists come across, and modalities have been named for decades around working with these processes. And so the simplest definition I can give you is that a father wound is an emotional and psychological injury. It's an emotional and psychological injury that results from a father being absent, a father being inconsistent, overcritical, abusive, and emotionally unavailable, okay? So it's an emotional and psychological injury. And when I say psychological injury, I mean that it's an injury that influences the development of your personality, of your identity, and the lasting impact of that injury can really leave an imprint on you that directs your behaviors, your actions, and your choices in unconscious ways. It can impact how you relate to others. It can impact how you're motivated. It can impact the goals and your level of ambition, and ultimately it will impact what you believe, what you believe you deserve. So the father plays a very specific and irreplaceable role in your life, especially as a child developmentally, whether the mother relationship was strong or not, your relationship with your father is going to have a massive impact on a few different areas. And these areas are vital, especially for you as a man. So psychologists, through decades and decades of research, have really identified that a father's primary role is helping their child to develop a sense of identity, to reinforce a sense of competence, and to help that child find a deeper sense of belonging in the external world. So identity, competence, and belonging. So your sense of how you perceive yourself, your ability to have skills and competency in certain areas, and your ability to fit in the world are all going to be dramatically and directly impacted by your father. And the father figure is often the first figure in your life that represents the outside, right? The mother in the first 18 months to 3 years of your life, she's really like, she is a part of you, you are a part of her. For the first 18 months specifically, a baby can't can't really differentiate between itself and mom. They are kind of the same world, but father is the first real experience of outside, of society, structures, standards, authority, and the world beyond home, the world beyond the body. And through the father, the child really learns a number of things. It learns, am I capable enough? Am I competent enough? Am I functionally enough? Am I enough as I am? Do I have what it takes to do what I want, to pursue what I want? And am I worth being proud of? Do I matter socially? Can I contribute something of meaning and value? And when a father is actually present and sort of persistent and consistent and emotionally engaged in your life, you as a child will have actually developed what's called a secure base autonomy, a secure base of autonomy. And all this means is that your individual sense of self, this sort of felt sense of what it means to be you, to be worthy, to be capable, regardless of the outcome, starts to settle in. So it's not about whether or not you win or lose. It's not about whether you are right right or wrong. It is about you having a secure sense of autonomy and self that is independent from your performance, from the results that you are actually getting. And this is a very first foundational crack for a lot of men, is that they lack a secure base of autonomy when the father is neglectful or absent. So when a father is absent, cold, hypercritical, wildly unpredictable, the question starts to emerge within the child of, am I enough? Am I okay? Or is there something wrong with me? And so that starts to unfold. Am I enough starts to become a question versus something that is lived. So kids that have secure fathers will come out feeling, I am enough. I don't have to question that. I know I am. I know I'm good enough. I know I'm capable because this dynamic with my father was there. When it's an unanswered question, am I enough? You start to have this experience as a young man, as a boy, as an adult of, I don't know if I'm good enough. I have to perform. I have to constantly check. And so this can happen for a number of reasons, right? Dad is, busy, dad is, you know, he's there, but he's emotionally absent, he's trying his best. And the father is really the person that depending on your relationship with him, you might have the strongest tendency to protect. So a lot of the men that I've worked with that have some type of a father wound, one of the main first challenges is that they are very protective of their fathers. And it's hard sometimes for a man to register or acknowledge that his father caused him harm in some ways. And you can hear all of the justifications. Oh, he was just busy. He did his best. Oh, you know, it wasn't that bad. Little Johnny's dad was beating the crap out of him. You know, my dad just, you know, nothing was ever good enough for him. So it really wasn't that bad. But maybe, Maybe that is all true, right? Maybe your dad did do his best. Maybe he was just busy. Maybe it wasn't that bad, but your nervous system doesn't really grade on effort. Your nervous system doesn't say, "Yeah, he was just doing his best. Yeah, he was just busy. Yeah, it really wasn't that bad." Your nervous system registers the truth of what you actually experienced. And so the imprint on you experientially in your nervous system and in your psyche might be very different than the excuses that you have made for your dad. Now, I wanna make one thing clear. We are not trying to take the totality of our problems and blame them on our fathers, okay? That is not what this is about. What this work is about is differentiating who you are from him. It's being able to create space and distance from what happened, by acknowledging the truth of what you experienced. That is the aim. So in some ways, the work that I'm about to lead you on and that you are about to embark on is about liberating both your father and you from any discrepancy or liberating you from any patterns that have been unhelpful between the two of you that have bled out into your life. All right, guys, really quick aside. First off, thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the channel. 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. So here's the thing, I'm gonna walk you through the different types of father wounds now that I've given you a little bit of an idea of how it starts to form, 'cause it really starts to form through neglect, through abuse, through criticalness, through those types of behaviors, right? He's there, but he's not really there. So here are the main archetypes, and some of them are archetypes that I have created based off of the amount of work that I have done with men. So if you do reuse these archetypes, please just give credit where credit is due. The first archetype is an archetype that I created called the Ghost Dad. And the Ghost Dad is some version of there, but not there. He might have been completely absent where he was like, you know, he literally was just a ghost in your life. You didn't know him. He wasn't around. He wasn't connected. He didn't seem to take an interest in your life. He was vacant from your family system. Or a ghost dad can be the dad who is physically present, but is kind of, I mean, he's essentially emotionally or psychologically unreachable. You can't feel him. And you can think about this this part is like the emotionally absent father. So there's ghost dad in the sense that he was just gone entirely. And then there's ghost dad in the sense that he was there, but you didn't really know him. He doesn't really know you. You can't really connect to him emotionally or psychologically. You can't access his emotional realm. And you couldn't really show what you were experiencing, right? He maybe couldn't say, "I'm proud of you." he couldn't really get into your inner world or vice versa. You didn't really know what was happening inside him. And he kind of felt mysterious. So a lot of ghost dads are, this is the hard thing for a lot of men that had the ghost dad, that have this wound of the ghost dad, is that they say, yeah, well, you know, John's father, he was gone and he wasn't that bad. My dad was around. But when you really dig into it, it's that your dad was there, but there's a lack of presence, there's a lack of care, there's a lack of interest, there's a lack of knowing. A big indicator that you had a ghost dad is if you answer the question, does my dad know me? And the answer is no. Did my dad know me growing up? And the answer is no. Did I know my father growing up? No, even though he was there, right? That's the ghost dad. So many men that have the ghost dad, it gets developed early on where you're trying to connect, you're trying to plug in, you're trying to get a sense of like, who is this guy? What does he expect from me? Does he love me? Does he want me? Does he care about me? And the more you try and connect, the more elusive he feels, the more elusive the relationship is. And the more you try and get him to know you, the more disappointed you feel. Deal. The next one is the critical father. And the critical father is usually the dad where nothing's ever good enough, right? You bring the 95-percenter home and he's like, where's the other 5%? And he's deadass, as the youth like to say, he's dead serious, right? He's not joking around. He's like, where's the other 5%? Like, what is this? And so second place was losing. And he really operated, this critical father operated in a way of, Constant correction, constant comparison, constant evaluation of every single behavior with almost no celebration whatsoever. So these fathers sometimes believed that what they were doing was building resiliency in you, right? They're like, I need to prep you for a world that's fucking hard, man. I need to prep you for a world that's brutal. And so in his mind, he thinks he's doing the right thing, or it's just what he received. And what they would actually be building, unfortunately, is a child who would become a man that believes that love is conditional, and that condition is perfection. The worthiness is predicated on your ability to perform. And how this will show up in your life today is that very often you will be acting in a way where everything needs to be perfect, where in order to receive love or let yourself actually receive goodness in your relationship, that you think you need to be perfect. You are constantly trying to perform. You're very fragile in terms of receiving feedback or criticism. If you're, you know, you've probably become some type of a high achiever, or you procrastinate, you know, endlessly in your life, because that voice of your father is still in your head, criticizing your every move. And so he's carrying on this legacy inside of you, taking up rent in your psyche, and you feel disabled from being able to take the action and live the life that you want, because all you can hear is his voice pulling you down. So the critical dad, the critical father, usually produces a man who relationally is either needing, feels like he needs to perform. So you feel like you need to perform to get love, be perfect to get love, and/or you're very, very fragile and brittle when it comes to any type of feedback or disappointment or criticism. The next archetype of a father wound is going to be the volatile or the abusive dad. He's wildly unpredictable. He's loving one moment and he's explosive and maybe abusive in the next moment. He uses fear and control as an active mechanism, right? So he's try— he uses the threat of physical abuse. He's maybe verbally abusive or emotionally abusive. And what can happen is that children raised in this type of environment, develop a kind of hypervigilance. And so they are usually disconnected. If you grew up in this environment, you're usually a bit disconnected from your own internal experience and hypervigilant about external experience. And the introspection that you have is, how do I control my behavior in order to survive and fit in in this space? And so you're constantly reading the room, You're constantly scanning your significant other to figure out like, are they okay? Are they all right? Have I done something to make them mad? You're always monitoring for threats. And that is an extension of what you grew up with. And a lot of the times it's about managing somebody else's emotional state, because if your father is volatile and abusive, he's out of control of his own emotional state. and you learned, "I have to tailor my behavior, my decisions, my actions to try and quell their emotional storm or deal with what they're dealing with." And in adulthood, what that looks like for a lot of guys is anxiety. It's people pleasing. It's almost this eerie ability to read other people's moods and predict what they're thinking and feeling. Because as a child, that skill kept you safe. So in your relationship, what this looks a lot like is that sort of anxious, "Are you okay? Are we all right? Is everything okay?" It's this ongoing conversation of trying to ensure that you're doing everything right. And again, you can be very fragile to any type of criticism, any type of disappointment, because that means that, you are in danger, really. The next father wound is the enmeshed father. This one gets less talked about because the other ones are just more prominent, right? The ghost dad that's completely absent is very prominent. The ghost dad that's there, but was sort of psychologically or physically disconnected is very prominent. And then the sort of critical father and the volatile and abusive father, those are all much more common, but the emeshed father is also something that some men have experienced, and that my guess is that the young men watching this video will have experienced more of. This is the father who is too close in the wrong ways. He made his child kind of like an emotional partner, sharing adult burdens, complaining about the marriage, complaining about finances, These are usually the dads that do not have great friends. They don't have other men in their life. They are deficient in male relationships. And so what they do to you as a boy is that they turn you into their best friend. And this can be really confusing because a lot of men that I've worked with that grew up with the emesh dad, what they say is like, "Oh, we were best friends." You know, like we did so much together. And when you dig in, what you get to the heart of is what that boy was receiving is that that dad had nobody else in his life. He didn't have other men, he didn't have other friends. And so some of the conversations that his father would share with him, some of the feelings and whatnot, were really that dad oversharing and putting a kind of burden onto his son that is unexpected. And children, kids from these dynamics, especially young boys from these dynamics, they often struggle with boundaries. So you end up having very porous boundaries. You know, you accept behavior from your significant other that you maybe shouldn't. You enact, you sort of go along with things and do things with your significant other that you don't really want to do. You allow them to behave in ways that maybe are detrimental to you, to your identity. There's a kind of underlying feeling that your own needs are somehow disingenuous, they're dangerous, or maybe they're even selfish. This is a very common trait for a man that grew up with an Amesh father, because the dynamic between you and your dad with the Amesh father is that his emotions, his needs, they sort of took precedence in the relationship. And he inadvertently kept himself in this position of not power necessarily, but this kind of childlike, my needs are more relevant than yours. And the thing that feels tricky about it for a lot of guys is usually these types of dynamics with the enmeshed father, it's like, well, but I didn't have the abusive dad, but my dad was present. We would go fishing. You know, I have all these good memories of spending time with my dad, but the issue is that when you drill down into some of these things and you drill down into the conversations and you drill down into the relationship itself, oftentimes that boy's needs were not prioritized. It was a unidirectional, single-directional dynamic where the father is talking about himself, his life, his disappointments, what he wished he had done. The relationship that he had with his father, what he needed more of, you know, that type of stuff. And so what ends up happening is that the relationship becomes more about that father's needs, his emotions, his perspective of the world, and the child, you as a boy, if you had this type of father, never really get to individuate into your own man. So what happens for a lot of men is that a lot of young boys that, that grow up into men who had this type of father is that they end up repeating almost identically the same patterns of their dads because they haven't individuated to become their own man. So they hold a lot of the similar beliefs, ideologies, perspectives, desires, needs, maladaptive behaviors, frustrations, angers. And so the ameshdad can be a little bit more sneaky, insidious. The next one that I wanna share is the spineless dad. This is the dad that's there. This is the dad that you get to know, but he has no ability to stand up for himself. Maybe you watched your mother just really run the show. It was hard to respect him as a father. You know, he was constantly deferring to your mother. Likely, it's that a lot of men that I've worked with that have grown up with the spineless dad have had the very overbearing mother, the mother that is just not so much the smother mother, but the devouring mother. She is all-consuming and she runs the show and she's this force, and the father kind of cowers. What you see and what you witness is a man who communicates to you through his actions, I can't protect you. And for a child, that is concerning because the father is the role of protection. And that's what helps the individual's identity start to form. That's what helps your identity and your personality start to form as you take risk, as you go out into the world, as you start to really encounter social circles and hard social dynamics. Generally speaking, men that grew up with the spineless dad, they have a lot of social challenges, a lot of social anxiety, a lot of hardship actually feeling like they belong. You might get into a relationship with a woman and the dynamic's almost identical where she's just kind of like this overbearing, hyper-masculine woman that is sort of controlling the relationship and you feel like you're lacking the ability to stand up for yourself. and in many ways you're repeating the pattern. You also might find that it's very challenging for you to feel like you belong in the world because that part was interrupted. The last one doesn't really get talked about, but I've seen this one far too often, and it's heartbreaking, but I'm gonna share this one, but this is less common, and this is the good enough but gone too soon father. This is the guy, this is the, the boy who grew up with a dad who suddenly passed away. I've worked with a number of men who have had this, and this can be, you know, you have a dad, he's there, you have some good memories of him, but, you know, before your preteens, he got cancer and died, or he had a heart attack or a stroke or some illness. And the grief here is real. You know, it's also, disenfranchised, meaning that the world doesn't really give you permission to mourn. A lot of the times what happens to boys in these types of dynamics and situations is that they're— it can really collapse the family system and they're left in a kind of survival state. So a lot of men that I've worked with in this dynamic, when I start to work with them, it's a lot of, I'm in survival state, I haven't really had a chance to grieve my father's passing because I didn't know what that looked like, because it's a very hard thing for the psyche to encounter depending on where you were developmentally. You know, if you're 5 years old and your father dies, if you're 12 years old and your father dies, it's a very challenging thing to encounter developmentally. And because everybody in your family system will have been going through it, There's a number of different ways that this can show up, but for most men, what it looks like is that you reach a kind of wall in your relationship where things will be going well, and then something will happen where you developmentally feel like you're that kid again, like you're stuck back at that age of that 6-year-old or that 12-year-old that suddenly feels like the rug's been completely pulled out from underneath them, You're not really too sure what to do. You feel disoriented, lost, confused, et cetera. And it feels like there's nobody there that you can really rely on. So that becomes a core wound, and that can cause you to pull away in a relationship, have things be really going well, but then any type of, you know, major conflict or disconnection that happens, and it feels like you move into this terrain of, I'm completely by myself. So how does this all show up in your adult relationships? I'm gonna break down some of the main ways that a father wound will show up. I tried to give some insight into how it will show up with each wound, but I'm gonna give you the core principles that, the core behaviors that most men display when they have a father wound and what it looks like in relationship. The first big one is what I've called approval hunger. Approval hunger. There is a kind of insatiable thirst and hunger for approval. So if your father was critical, he was emotionally withholding, he was kind of a ghost, he didn't really get to know you, you will likely have spent a disproportionate amount of time in your adult relationships in a constant low-grade search for validation, for recognition. And it's almost like there's a, you know, if you've ever heard Gabor Mate talk about the hungry ghost, it's almost like there's this hungry ghost inside of you that is just trying to do everything in its power to try and get validation from your significant other, from bosses, friends, coworkers, family members, you name it. And oftentimes you're not aware that you're doing it. It just feels like you're caring about what other people think. But underneath that is a child who never really got the validation that he craved for from his father. And because of that, his internal sense, your internal sense of competency and capability never really fully got to develop. And this is the last part that's super important because it's gonna be something that you need to action. The internal infrastructure of recognition never gets to form. When we have a father that isn't willing, is unable, or is ineffective at giving praise and validation, recognition, or the dynamic between you and him is such that you do not trust the praise or recognition that he's giving you, that internal infrastructure of giving yourself recognition will be interrupted. it will be stunted. And so I'm giving you a hint at what you will need to work on here, which is starting to develop an internal system of self-recognition. The second wound, the second part of this with the father wound, how it shows up, is a commitment wound. And for many men, especially guys that had the absent father, the emotionally unavailable father, this creates a kind of a profound sense of ambivalence about intimacy and what that looks like. Intimacy and closeness can't be trusted. Closeness feels like a threat. It feels dangerous, not because it's not something that you don't want, right? Of course you do want it, but because on a deep level, there is a part of you psychologically, emotionally, and somatically, your nervous system, that's waiting for it to be taken away. So think about how often, you know, if you were a boy that, you know, your dad was sort of loving and kind, but as soon as he'd get upset, he'd shut down, he wouldn't talk to you for days, he'd pull away, he'd become, you know, sort of aggressive and verbally abusive or physically abusive or whatever the case was, that level of connection would be taken away and that would interrupt your desire for commitment. It would interrupt your trust of a, an ongoing long-term relationship because it was constantly taken away. Consistency was taken away. So commitment will look like and feel like a risk, and risk means potential loss. And the loss, your nervous system knows is devastating, right? When that connection, when that intimacy was taken away as a boy, when your dad would shut down or whatever his behavior was, that was devastating. And so in your adult relationships, what this looks like is one foot out the door. You're in the relationship, but emotionally you're not super there. You're not really putting yourself on the line. Like you're letting yourself love, but you're like, I'm not gonna actually let myself be in love. Or I don't really know what that looks like or feels like. That can usually be a good sentiment from a guy that has commitment issues. Or it literally feels threatening in your body. You might find yourself ending things as soon as they start to get real, as soon as they start to feel like they're working really well, or you find yourself repeating this pattern of getting into a long-term relationship, but when things start to get closer, when things start to work well, that's when you pull away. Then there's rage and control. For a lot of guys, one of the main wounds that they'll carry is a high amount of anger and a high predisposition towards controlling in a relationship. And so an unprocessed father wound, especially with a dad where there was a lot of anger, does not disappear. It starts to look for exits and outlets to be expressed. And sometimes it comes out in a relationship as like disproportionate anger, right? Where you just, you get, you fly off the handle about something that is, you know, is so small and seemingly insignificant. You blow up over these small things. And other times it really turns towards control. You need to try and manipulate, coerce, control the outcomes. You need to try and dominate the relationship because powerlessness as a boy was so devastating to you. You felt powerless with dad. You felt powerless to protect yourself. You felt powerless to get your needs met. And so you have learned this maladaptive strategy of I will manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal, and coerce my way into getting what it is that I want. Now, again, none of these things are things that you need to beat yourself up about. We're just talking about how it shows up. The next piece is the people pleaser who can't be honest. This is a main, this is a huge, huge, huge part of the father wound is that you become a man who's constantly trying to please other people, but oftentimes you are lying to try and get your own needs met. So if your father's emotional state felt something like you were, responsible for managing, you had to kind of caretake, you had to, you know, figure out constantly where's dad at and am I safe, am I okay, you will have turned into somebody who avoids conflict, who has learned that how I get my needs met is by making sure that you're okay. So let me people please you first. And then how I get my needs met is by trying to manipulate things into what I want. And so oftentimes this is what Dr. Gleiber calls The COVID contracts, right? You will do things for that other person so that covertly you hope that they meet your needs in return, but it almost never works. The last piece, and there's a couple other ones that we could talk about, but the last piece I'm gonna talk about is difficulty with authority. So a big father wound is that you lack authority within yourself. You lack the authority to say no to yourself. You lack the authority to say yes to yourself. You struggle with the authority to move yourself as a man towards the things that you ultimately want in life, or you re— and sometimes you have both, and you really struggle with outer authority, especially other men. You might see people in government, people in positions of authority at work, police, et cetera, as a kind of evil villain because there's a projection of your disdain towards authority onto those people. And the father wound, really shapes itself in terms of how you relate to other men. This is one of the most common things that I see in men that have a father wound. It's, they say something along the lines of, "It's very hard for me to trust other men. I don't have as many male friendships. It's hard for me to make male friendships." That is because at the core, there is a mistrust that that man is going to take advantage of you or use you or, some version of that, especially if you see him as an authority, which is challenging because you will avoid building relationships with men who could genuinely teach you to shift and move through some of the challenges that you have in life, that would genuinely push you and challenge you and hold you accountable to the change that you need to make. But bosses, mentors, male friends, father figures, all of those types of guys are going to be seen as a threat and seen as something that you need to move away from. So if your father was this kind of like authoritarian figure, you may look at authority as naturally abusive, naturally power hungry, naturally bad. It's interesting how many men I have worked with, when I talk about this notion of, how you lead yourself, as in part being able to reconcile your relationship with your inner authority, actually developing some level of authority within yourself, within your own life. And how many men that is very confronting, because at their core, what they feel like is that authority is never healthy. Any type of authority is bad or wrong. And these patterns can play out in all elements of their life. So what do you do about it? How do you begin to shape and resolve these father wounds that show up in your dynamics? The one last thing I wanna say is how these show up in your relationship. I've given some tips about that along the way, but with women specifically, if you have these types of father wounds, there can be a myriad of problems. The biggest one is that you do not trust yourself and you have to deploy all kinds of maladaptive behaviors and strategies to both try and get your needs met and appease or please that woman. And on the other side of that, there is behaviors where you are trying to constantly please them, you're trying to constantly meet their needs and sort of, relinquish yours or set yours aside. And you can fall into this pattern of repeating the patterns of your father or trying to live in opposition to them in such a way that you are embodying some other tenet of his that is dysfunctional. So a lot of these behaviors will be you being emotionally disconnected if you had a ghost dad, from your partner, seeking out constant emotional connection to try and reinforce that you're okay, right? One end of the spectrum or the other. You might find yourself like completely shut down, never really sharing your emotions, seeing sharing your emotions as a threat, or you are so needy to get her to emotionally be connected to you because that was the only way that you could feel safe with your dad. and it's the only way that you can feel safe in getting to know him. So those are just a couple of the ways that we show up in the relationship. The other pieces is that you likely lack that authority. You lack the decision-making prowess, we could say, the willingness to just make clear and concise decisions, the willingness to say, here's exactly what I want our relationship to look like, here's what I want our home to look like, here's where I want to travel and vacation. "Here's where I want to go to dinner." All of those things will be internally correlated with you being an authority, and those will be things that you reject, that you avoid doing. And because of that, she can't really trust you. So the big impact on women, when women are with a man who has some type of a father wound, the big impact is trust. She will really have a hard time feeling safe with you and being able to trust you, because there will be many different ways that you are acting and behaving that are untrustworthy and that feel unsafe to her, because what she will be feeling is you aren't reconciled with yourself as a man. You don't trust men, you've been hurt by men, and therefore you are so worried about being another man that hurts other people that that is consuming so much of your psyche that it's dictating a huge amount of your behaviors in a very unconscious way. And what she will feel is, it's hard for me to feel safe. It's hard for me to trust you because you see men, you see men in a threat, you see men in leadership as being bad or wrong or harmful, or you just don't even know what it looks like to be a healthy, secure, grounded man because of the vacancy, and so that's hard for her to trust as well. So what do you do? The first step, step number 1, is name it. Before anything else, you have to be willing to call it what it is, not my dad, wasn't around very much, or, you know, he did the best that he can. None of that kind of stuff. You have to come in direct contact with the truth. Not, it wasn't that bad, but the honest reckoning. It hurt when my dad did this. It really messed me up when my father would say this. It really was confusing when my dad was there but I couldn't grab ahold of anything. And this wound has been driving my behavior in this way. So really starting to name it. And again, part of healing the father wound is letting go of protecting your father, but also letting go of blaming your father for all of your life's woes. For men that have a father wound, there's an extreme dedication to both of these, an extreme dedication to, I have to protect him, it really wasn't that bad. And on the other side, it's, he is at fault for everything that's happening in my life right now. I'm the victim of what he did. And so it's the letting go of both of those polarities. So we have to name which one we fall into. We have to name that, you know, you are either blaming him for how your life has looked and you've been blaming him and he's been the, the villain in your story for your whole freaking life, or you have to name that you are protecting him above your own health and wellness. You have been protecting him and the image that you hold of him, which is keeping you in this place of dysfunction. And so that naming, it's an honest acknowledgement of what you actually experienced, what your dad was actually like. What is the honest version of him? And that doesn't mean that you diminish the great parts of him. If there were great parts of him, that is true too. Name that as well. But you can hold that he was great in some ways, and you can hold that he was really harmful in other ways at the same time. And you have to be able to name them, okay? And it's more powerful than most people realize because you can't heal what you can't identify. And for a lot of guys, when it comes to the father wound, the big challenge is actually doing this first step. It is naming and admitting the impact that their dad had. Because to admit the impact that your father had is to admit to the pain that it caused and to admit to the behavior that it likely created that has been causing a storm in your life. Step number 2 is grieve it. So the work that a lot of men will resist is once they name it, once they start to come into contact with the truth of the impact that their father had on them, it's to grieve what was missing, to grieve the pain that was caused, to feel into the sadness of like, man, my dad was around all the time, We spent all this time together and I don't even know who he is. And I still to this day feel like he doesn't know who I am. And to actually grieve and honor the impact, the experience, and the emotion, not as weakness, not as a kind of disloyalty, but just as a truth, because grief is not a weakness. Grief is a kind of technology of the psyche that allows us to process real loss and learn from it. So oftentimes we can't move forward, we can't learn until we grieve, because grieving reveals something, uh, and it puts us through a process that strengthens us in a way. And so a lot of men are holding on to anger or holding on to ambivalence and avoidance as a means of avoiding the grief, avoiding the truth of what was sad, what was hard, what felt, what really hurt you. So start to really go through a process, and you can do this with a therapist, a men's group, a coach, a counselor, you know, maybe on your own, but start to give yourself space to grieve. And you might wanna ask yourself, what was sad about my relationship with my father? What did genuinely hurt me? That I've had a hard time letting myself feel. Because the loss is real. And if you don't grieve it, it will still show up. That sadness, that grief, that worry, that fear, that anger will come out sideways in your relationship, with your significant other or with your kids. Step number 3, once you've named it, once you've grieved it, you can separate the past from the present. And this is one of the most important steps to do so that you can start to create discernment between what happened in the past and who you are now. What happened in the past and what you want to create now, right? When your partner criticizes you about something small and your normal response is to react from this really defensive place, 'cause it feels like dad is criticizing you, to create some space from the past to the present. She's not my father. I am safe to experience criticism. It's okay for me to get feedback. And you start to allow yourself to learn to say, this is happening right now, but what I'm feeling is from before. This is happening right now. My wife is criticizing me. My girlfriend is disappointed in me. My significant other is telling me that they want to know more about what's happening inside of me. This is happening right now, but what I'm feeling inside, the resistance, the defensiveness, the hostility, the whatever it is that you're feeling, that is from the past. The feeling is from the past. So you start to create some discernment and separation between what's happening now and the emotional response, because 9 times out of 10, The emotional response is from the past. Oh, I gotta make sure she's okay. I gotta meet her needs first before I can get— That's all from the past. And the gap is about creating and interrupting the pattern that is automatically playing. Because remember, when you have a father wound, it creates a behavioral pattern that automatically plays under certain criteria and circumstances. And what you want to do is interrupt that pattern. So based on your father wound, based on the behavior that it produced, you wanna interrupt that pattern. The next thing, step number 4, is find reparative relationships. Get into a men's group, get around other men where you can be honest, where you can be transparent, and where you can start to reconcile and talk about the wounding that you experienced, the pain that you experienced, but also start to really experience a new quality and caliber of relationship with other men, where you can actually trust them, where you can feel safe with them, where they can confront you and challenge you, and it can be accepted, and it doesn't have to feel hostile. It doesn't have to feel like something that you have to protect yourself from. So you can do that with a therapist or a counselor, I really recommend a solid, solid men's group. You can check out the ManTalks Alliance. We have exceptional men in there doing exactly this type of work, but find a really good group of men where you can repair your internal relationship with men and masculinity. Number 5, this is the last piece, is set out on a journey to become the father that you needed. This is a kind of reframe that can really change everything. So the question you wanna write down is, what did I need from my father that he couldn't or didn't give me? What did I need from my father that he couldn't or didn't give me? And again, this isn't about shaming him or blaming him. It's about specifically identifying what was it that you needed that you as a man can begin to give yourself now? Did you need consistency? Did you need patience? Did you need playfulness? Did you need exploration? Did you need to be seen? Did you need to be told, "I'm so proud of you right now"? What was it that you needed? Did you need him to recognize you and validate you? Once you identify that, then you have a path forward for the exact skills that you need to create. Maybe what you needed from your dad was to watch him stand up to your mom, if you had the spineless dad, right? To be able to set a boundary, in the family, and so maybe that is an action that you can take within your own relationship. Whatever it is, start to identify, here are the core things I really needed from my dad, and those are the things that you need to develop within yourself. That is the path forward. So whatever you have discovered that your work is, I encourage you to write it in the comments below. Let me know how this landed for you, what stood out to you, what feels really true for you if you've made it this far. Please take 10 seconds to comment in the comment section below. Which father wound do you carry? Maybe a little bit about how it shows up in your relationship and what are you going to do about it? I really mean that. What are you going to do about it? Because the father wound requires some type of action. You have to take action. All right, till next week, Connor Beaton signing off.