Latest / The Unexamined Life / Episode Two... The Father Wound: Why We Love the Way We Do
Transcript
- Laurel: Hi, thanks again for joining me here for what is the second episode of my podcast Working Title: The Unwritten Life, The Unexamined Life. Might be one of the two, might be none of the two. Again, this is all new to me, so working my way through the creative aspects of it. So here we are, episode two, the father wound. So the father. The first man that we knew. I think a lot about fathers. I think a lot about fathers for some personal reasons, which I am going to share later on in the podcast. But also because I didn't grow up with my father. And so when people speak about their fathers as one does that grew up with an absent parent or a challenging dynamic with a parent, we often reflect on our own. Journey with our parentals. So I think about fathers. I think about my father. And I also just think that, like, not just about our actual fathers, although, you know, we certainly all have them, right? We didn't come here without a dad. I've been thinking about just the idea in general of the father, the place that he. occupies in our psychology and in our families and in the stories that we tell about ourselves, about who we are and what we can expect from other people. And I've kind of been curious about how a relationship that begins before we have language can continue to influence us decades later, even when we believed we've moved beyond it. And this comes up a lot in my work with clients, naturally. In the last episode, I talked about the stories that we inherit. So this idea that there are family narratives, there are invisible loyalties and patterns that can quietly influence our decisions without our conscious participation. And today I I want to explore one of those. Relationships just a little bit more closely. And this is the father wound. And that's a phrase that's kind of gets used quite a lot, particularly in conversations about relationships and healing. And it's kind of popular in the pop psychology trends. And I sometimes I think that we use these phrases so frequently that we forget to ask. What they actually mean, because not every difficult relationship with a father produces the same psychological consequences. And not every woman who struggles in her relationship is necessarily struggling because of her father. Human beings are far, far, far, far, far more complicated than that. But our earliest relationships definitely do matter. And they definitely help to organize our understanding of closeness, safety, belonging, authority, and our relationship to love. And our fathers, whether present or absent, loving or emotionally unavailable, predictable, unpredictable, can occupy Definitely a significant place in that development. So I'd like to explore this from several perspectives today. one is the attachment theory, which I'm certain most listeners have heard of. The other is the developmental psychology framework, and there's more. Family systems is an interesting framework to look at any of these dynamics from. And then of course my love and current healthy obsession family constellations work. So I want to share something from my own life. because I have spent nearly two decades working as a psychotherapist, but I've also spent a considerable amount of time of my adult life really trying to understand the patterns that I've lived myself. there's this phrase in psychotherapy that we can only really take our clients as far as we've taken ourselves. So my commitment to personal growth as a means to further under my s understand my own self so that I can bring people to the depths of places I've gone myself is a pretty hardcore commitment of mine. So those are two different kinds of education. There's the personal education where I take myself, and then there's the professional education that I do to bring things to my clients. And sometimes the second one is considerably more expensive. and I'm ever committed to investing in everything that I can to understand our patterns and our functioning and to bring clarity to myself and the people that I work with. So The father that we actually had. Let's go back to this. So this is really establishing this part one of this podcast, this theme of the father that we actually had. When we talk about the father wound, I think it's important to begin with the actual father, not the symbolic father, not the archetypal father, not some generalized idea of the masculine or masculine energy. The man who was there or who wasn't there. The man who spoke to us in a certain way, responded to our emotions in a certain way, showed affection or withheld it, offered reassurance, or potentially left us trying to work out what was happening. Because children are extraordinarily attentive to their environments. They may not understand the circumstances of the adults around them, but they notice everyone. They notice tension. They notice when someone is available and when they aren't, and they adapt. And I grew up with instability, and that experience shaped my relationship with safety. I did not meet my father, truly meet my father. until I was eighteen. Supposedly in the course of my conception to turning 18. Supposedly he visited me twice. I think one was when I was very young and one was when I was about nine. But I actually have zero recollection of that time. And I think I maybe just have one photo to prove that it happened, but I don't have any actual memory of it. So, what I can say is that I really grew up without a father. And what I can say is that when safety is uncertain in childhood, it can become an organizing principle in adulthood. So it's not necessarily that not having a father inherently means that you're unsafe, but there is a a feeling within the child. The child knows that. They're being raised by one parent, and that parent is the mother. There is an energy that is not available within the family system when everything is coming from the mother or from a single parent. So children in these circumstances, in a way you could say, they're learning to anticipate and to read situations. They're learning to think ahead. And why are we doing that? Well, we're becoming remarkably capable, often because we're watching a single parent who has to be incredibly capable. There's no rest for that parent. There's no residing in the comfort of somebody else has got it. And so as children, we become capable. And capable is a really interesting thing because it often is like very much applauded and very much adjusted. Admired without anybody asking what made it necessary. And that's a really important discernment. So a child who learns to manage uncertainty, she or he may become an adult who can hold a great deal together, highly functioning. She may become responsible and resourceful, highly attuned to the needs of others. But what she may also find Interesting and extraordinarily difficult to tolerate is the possibility that something she has built could fall apart. And so this is one of the places where childhood adaptation can begin to look like adult personality. And we say, I'm just someone who needs stability. Or, and that's true, you know, perhaps we are, but it is worth asking, what does stability mean to us? What are we prepared to sacrifice for it? And whether we sometimes confuse what is familiar with what is genuinely safe. So that's an important discernment. So if we move now into looking at the father in our life through attachment theory, attachment theory has some interesting things to tell us. So attachment theory gives us a very useful starting point. And there is a British psychiatrist or psychologist, and his name is John Bowby, and he's a psychoanalyst, and he proposed that children develop internal expectations about relationships through their early experiences with caregivers. Then comes along Mary Ainsworth, and she later helps us establish ways of studying attachment patterns through observations of children and their caregivers. And now at its very simplest attachment concerns, what we come to expect when we need someone. That's the very basic idea of attachment theory. What can we expect when we need someone? Will they respond? Will they be available? Can I express distress without losing connection? Can I move into the world? and return to a relationship that feels responsibly secure without being punished for leaving. These expectations develop through repeated experiences, and they are not determined by a single conversation or one difficult afternoon or even one imperfect parent. They are not fixed for life. I think that last point is really particularly important. Particularly as a psychotherapist that works with clients every day. And this guilt and this shame and this fear that they have. Am I screwing up my children? Am I screwed up? There is this tendency in popular psychology to speak about attachment, attachment styles, like almost as if they were personality types. I am anxiously attached. He's avoidantly attached. As though we have discovered the final explanation for every difficulty in relationship. It's oversimplified and it really doesn't make sense. It's not helpful. We're far too complex and multi-layered as human beings for that level of diagnostic simplicity. So attachment is far more nuanced. People can behave differently across relationships, and our expectations can change through later life experiences. Still, and however, those early patterns can be powerful and they can be continuing throughout the course of our life. So just for a moment, imagine a little girl and her or imagine yourself as a young child. Her father is affectionate and engaged sometimes, but emotionally distant at other times. She may begin to pay very close attention to the conditions under which affection is available. What makes him pleased? Because when I please my dad, I add a little extra something. What makes him withdraw? Because when I do something and my dad withdraws, I notice all these ways I start to feel inside: guilty, bad, shame, wrong. How can she maintain his attention? Now imagine that that girl now, 35 or 45, she's in a relationship with someone whose emotional availability is similarly unpredictable. He's there, he's not, he's there, he's not. And she may be emotionally skilled at interpreting small changes in mood. So she may work very hard to restore connection if she's sensing that he's pulling away. And she may experience enormous relief. when the other person becomes affectionate again. Not because she's consciously wanting an inconsistent relationship, but because her nervous system has learned something about how connection works. The uncertainty is familiar. The effort is familiar. The relief is familiar. The familiarity can be mistaken for intimacy. And this is not a universal explanation for romantic choices, but it is one and just one possible pattern worth examining. So now moving quite along these different frameworks, we can start to look at the difference between love and recognition. So one of the questions that I return to in my work with clients and my own work with myself is this. Are we drawn to someone because they are genuinely right for us? Or because something about the relationship is recognizable? I'll just say that again. I think it's an important question. Are we drawn to someone because they are genuinely right for us? Or because something about the relationship is recognizable? So those are not always the same thing. We may be attracted to people who evoke qualities we admire, like humor, intelligence, kindness, creativity, strength. But we can also find ourselves drawn into relational dynamics that produce an old emotional experience, trying to be understood by someone who rarely understands us. Trying to be chosen by someone who remains ambivalent. Trying to make a relationship secure through our own effort. And sometimes the unconscious hope is that this time the story will end differently. This time I will be loved consistently. Now remember, these are unconscious hopes, unconscious drivers. This time I will be important enough. This time the person who withdraws will stay. Psychodynamic psychology has long, long, long, long, long been interested in repetition. Meaning the ways people recreate familial, familiar, sorry, familiar, relational experiences. Sometimes while attempting to master or resolve these. But I want to be a little careful here. I it would be far too simplistic in my mind to suggest that women choose difficult men because of their fathers. Like again, I just don't in my life and in my work tend towards these oversimplified explanations. I think they put us into these sort of categorical. Clusters of self-identification that just forgets how complex and nuanced the human being is. And I tend to just want to revel and be in the what can sometimes feel a bit chaotic of the human psyche in this nuanced complexity that being human really means. Relationships are formed within social. economical, economic, cultural, and personal circumstances. And and people change and some behaviors are not visible like until years into a relationship. I've been married now for I think it's 20 years, maybe 18. And I cannot believe the different iterations of myself and my husband. And To be honest with you, there are there's been times in that two decades where the iteration of our current selves was not a good match for one another. And divorce is on the table, right? we're always assessing, we're always looking at our behavior. We're always taking responsibility for, where we are and what we're doing and how that's affecting the other person and whether this relationship is sustainable. It It's important that there's responsibility for harmful behavior and that that that really belongs to the person engaging in it. And I'm I'm not saying that like we have to get to a point in our relationships where it's obviously harmful behavior, but sometimes we are being inwardly starting to hold these perspectives of ourselves and our partners that can feel harmful to the dynamics. So understanding our patterns is not the same as accepting responsibility for someone else's conduct. If you are in a relationship where somebody is just really cruel, that's on them. That's not you in a pattern. Okay. You know, there are differences here, and I I just feel like I need to say that, as does, you know, everyone feels they need to say that. Sometimes it's obvious and sometimes not. So what understanding can do is give us a wider range of choices. We may begin to notice the difference between attraction and anxiety, between intimacy and emotional intensity, between being loved and being needed, and between the safety of a familiar arrangement and the deeper security of a relationship in which we can actually be ourselves. So At twenty-five years old, I became a mother. I gave birth. well, maybe I got pregnant when I was 25, had her at 26. I wasn't married to my daughter's father, and by the time she was one year old, our relationship had ended. So what followed was a 16-year custody battle. So obviously, this is not the man that I've been married to for 18 years, right? That's second guy. So Custody battle of sixteen years. I'm guessing more than a hundred thousand dollars in, you know, court expenses around shared parenting time. There's a whole story that goes into that that I'm not gonna get into. I do share that when I'm coaching women who are going through custody arrangement stuff because I think my personal lived experience is quite helpful. But An enormous amount of time and energy was spent navigating the consequences of a relationship that had ended between me and him. And could never entirely end because we had a child together, right? So let's not mistake anything here. When we end a marriage and there's children for the life of that child, we are connected in some way. When I think about those years now, I think about how young I was when they began. And I think about the decisions that we make before we have the perspectives that we eventually develop over the time in the course of a lifetime. And I think about how becoming a parent can really bring our own childhood experiences into much sharper focus. Because suddenly we are not only managing our own need for safety, we are responsible for someone else's. And when a relationship ends and a child is involved, the two questions become considerably more complicated. What does stability mean? And how do I protect my child? How much conflict can I tolerate? How do I make decisions when another adult has a permanent place in my child's life? Regardless of what has happened between us. I don't want to suggest that every difficult co-parenting relationship is an expression of an unresolved father wound. It isn't. But I do think that our histories can influence how we respond to the situations we find ourselves in. For someone who grew up with instability, the prospect of losing control over the circumstances of her child's life. Can be particularly difficult. And there is something worth examining in that. Not to assign blame, but to understand why certain experiences touch something much older than the present moment. Sometimes we are responding to what is happening now. Sometimes the present is also activating a history. And often it is both. So I want to bring in family constellations and the place of the father within that framework now and how that pertains to what we've been talking about for the last 25 minutes. So this is an interesting introduction for me with this work. It's experiential and it draws on family system ideas and other influences. And if you want more information of that, Listen to the first podcast where I give more history about that. So, Family Constellations work is helpful in the way that it explores people's belonging and loyalty, exclusion and connection within a family system. And I find some of its questions particularly useful, although I want to distinguish them from established scientific findings. Claims about inherited energetic fields. Or what we could say is the direct transmission of specific ancestral experiences are not scientifically established. However, I think that this is a really interesting framework, and I and what interests me is the perspective that it can invite. So in this approach, we look not only at the individual, but at the wider family system. Who belongs? Who has been excluded? Whose suffering is acknowledged? What roles have children taken on? And what happens when a child feels compelled to align with one parent against the other? One principle in family constellation work is that both parents have a place in the child's family story. And I find this particularly meaningful when thinking about separated parents. A relationship between two adults can end. Their relationship as parents continues, although the form of that relationship may really actually change quite dramatically. A child doesn't stop having a father because her mother no longer loves him. And she doesn't stop having a mother because her father is angry with her. Both parents remain part of her history forever. And this doesn't mean both parents are equally safe, equally available, equally capable of parenting, nor does it mean that children should be encouraged to maintain contact where doing so would expose them to harm. It truly simply means that a child's origins are not erased by the end of an adult relationship. And that sometimes there can be a great deal of relief in recognizing that. And here's why. Because a child should not have to carry the responsibility of resolving the conflict between the people from whom she comes. A child should not have to prove her loyalty to one by rejecting the other. She should not have to become the emotional companion of a wounded parent. She is the child. And the adults have the responsibility to remain adults. So let's now leave that for a moment and carry into the father as a psychological symbol. This is another dimension to this conversation that I find interesting. In Youngian psychology, the father can also be considered symbolically, not as an individual person, but as part of our psychological relationship with authority, structure, boundaries, and the wider world. And these associations are not symbiotic, these associations are symbolic. They're not universal descriptions of men or women. Mothers can provide structure and authority. Fathers provide tenderness and emotional security. Families definitely take many forms. But as a way of exploring our internal world, the symbolism can be useful. So how is it useful? So we might ask, how comfortable am I with authority? Do I trust my own judgment? Can I make decisions without seeking permission? Do I believe I have the right to occupy space in the world? Excuse me. Do I experience boundaries as protection or as a threat to connection? For some women, these questions reveal a very interesting tension. They may be highly competent in their professional lives and while feeling uncertain in intimate relationships. They may make significant decisions for other people while struggling to make decisions for themselves. And they may be very good at responsibility, but less practiced in freedom. And I wonder whether part of healing the father wound for some of us involves perhaps developing a different relationship with our own authority. Not waiting for someone else to approve of our choices and not waiting to be chosen. not requiring another person to validate our experience before we are permitted to trust it. Several years ago I made a decision that I have thought about in great detail. I left England, a place where I had been extraordinarily happy. I'd actually never felt so happy in my life as in the times that I would frequent England. And I made the decision to move there permanently with my children, and I never felt happier than when I lived there. And for context, I'm dual citizen. My father is British. My eldest daughter remained there when we decided to move back. And why would I move back? You might be thinking, if this was the happiest place that I ever felt. well, my husband was not willing to continue working in England. We had younger children whose schooling was connected to a longstanding family legacy elsewhere. So these were practical considerations. And they were family considerations, financial considerations, and I chose to leave. And I don't regret the decision in a way. I pine every day for England, but I don't regret my decision. And I want to be clear about that. I can now see that I chose familiarity and stability over a place where I felt. Deeply connected to the life I had made for myself. In America, we owned a home. My husband had a secured job. My children had a great school. In England, we did not own a home. Housing was always up in question. Where we wanted to live in the country was in question. We weren't certain of where the right school for our children was. And my husband did not like the employment prospects, meaning finances would have been more challenging. So all of this is just me trying to make the point that when you've grown up with instability, safety can become an extraordinarily persuasive argument. I had also experienced years of custody conflict with my eldest daughter's father. And I knew what it meant to have a child's life divided between parents. And I had made a commitment to myself that. I would not go through that again with my younger children. That I would make the decisions necessary to have my children, these these two other kids, raised under one roof. That history mattered. So when I look at the decision to leave England, I don't really see a woman who made a foolish choice. I see a woman making a complicated decision through the lens of everything that she'd lived. And this is one of the things that I find most interesting about psychological work. We can understand a decision without needing to condemn it. We can recognize the ways our history influenced us without concluding that we should have done something different. And we begin to ask whether those same influences are still shaping our decisions today. What served us as in one stage of life may not serve us in quite the same at another stage in life. Safety is important. Women crave safety. But so are freedom and vitality, connection, and the possibility of living a life that feels genuinely our own. And that's what I like to call aliveness. And women have to feel alive. Sometimes the work is not to reject safety, it's to truly expand our understand our understanding of what safety can include. So again, through the lens of family constellation work, we can ask to consider invisible loyalties. And these are ways we may feel connected to the experiences and values, losses or expectations of earlier generations. Some of these influences can be understood through established processes such as family learning, attachment, socialization, and the transmission of beliefs and behaviors. Others are explored symbolically within constellation work, and I think it's useful to hold both possibilities without confusing them. Imagine a family maybe in which women have repeatedly experienced abandonment or financial insecurity. A daughter may grow up hearing that men cannot be trusted, or that women must never depend on anyone. Or conversely, that keeping a marriage together is essential, regardless of its emotional cost. And these messages may never be explicitly stated. They may be communicated through stories and silences, family decisions, and the emotional atmosphere of the household. And years later, that same woman finds herself making choices that reflect those beliefs. Not because she's consciously agreed to them, but because they have become part of her understanding of how life works. In constellation work, we may ask whether a woman is carrying an inherited loyalty that no longer belongs in her adult life. In psychological language, we might ask whether an early family belief is continuing to organize her expectations and behaviors. The language is different, but both questions can invite meaningful reflection. And the question that I find particularly interesting is: Can I remain connected to the people I come from? Without repeating their lives. Can I acknowledge what happened to them without making it my destiny? Can I love my family and still choose differently? So in this arena that we've talked about today, what does healing actually look like? I don't think healing the father wound necessarily means arriving at some place where we feel entirely peaceful about our fathers. Some relationships can be repaired and some can be more honest. Some remain limited and some require distance. Forgiveness may be meaningful for certain people, but it isn't a prerequisite for psychological growth. What matters is developing a relationship with our history that gives us more freedom in the present. Perhaps we begin to notice when we're seeking approval from someone who is unlikely to offer it, and we stop. Perhaps we stop interpreting another person's emotional distance as evidence that we're unworthy, and we find a different story. Perhaps we recognize that the anxiety we feel in a relationship isn't necessarily proof of love. Perhaps we begin to make decisions based on our values rather than on our fear of disappointing someone. And perhaps we stop asking our partners to resolve emotional experiences that began long before we met them. And this isn't about becoming perfectly regulated or never being triggered. Believe me, I am perfectly unregulated and triggered every day. It's about noticing. It's about being able to say something about this feels familiar, it's not mine. And then asking, is this actually what is happening right now? is the story I'm telling myself, the one that's actually happening right now. And that small little space between the experience and our interpretation of it can change a great deal. So I'm gonna wrap up, but I'd like to leave you with a few questions, and you don't need to answer them immediately, or ever, if you don't want to. In fact, I think that these questions are really good ones to sit with and to just consider about your father. So just think about the father or the person who occupied that place in your early life. What did you learn about love from that relationship? What did you learn about men from that relationship? What did you learn about authority? Conflict. and emotional availability. And what did you learn about yourself? Do you become the responsible one, the accommodating one? The one who didn't need much. The one who tried to keep everyone happy? Now think about the relationships that you formed as an adult. Are there familiar dynamics? Are there places where you still find yourself trying to earn something that should not have to be earned? And finally ask yourself, what would I choose if I no longer needed this relationship, this decision, or this version of my life to resolve something from my child? You may not know the answer, and I want that to be completely totally okay. Sometimes the important thing is simply beginning to ask a different question. I tend to think that one of the most significant things we can do as adults is begin to understand the difference between the lives we inherited and the lives we are consciously choosing. Our fathers are part of our stories. They literally gave us life. So are our mothers, so are the circumstances of our childhoods, the relationships we've formed, and the decisions we've made in the name of love, security and belonging. But understanding those influences gives us the possibility of relating to them differently. We cannot go back and give ourselves a different childhood. We cannot change the people our parents were, and we cannot rewrite every decision we've made. But we can become more conscious of the ways those experiences continue to live within us. And we can decide what we want to carry forward. Next week, next podcast, I intend to explore what happens when relationship ends, but the connection cannot, because we have a child with someone and find ourselves navigating a relationship that may be difficult, painful, or persistently conflictual. Because one of the most important places we can begin to change inherited patterns is in the relationships we create around our own children. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I'm Laurel Soleil, and this is the unexamined life working title, the unwritten life, or something else entirely, I'm not quite sure. A conversation about the stories that we've inherited, the patterns we repeat, and the lives we're still free to write. Not just about the people who came before you, but about the person you're still becoming. If you are interested in any other information or conversation with me, you can find me at laurelsoley.com. It's first and last name.com. Take good care until next time.