CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - He Was There But He Wasn't: The Emotionally Absent Father

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Describe your dad in three words. For a lot of adults, the father wound isn't about a dad who left it's about one who was physically present but emotionally absent. Whitney explores why our culture tells you this is actually not a wound at all and why this particular grief is so hard to name.Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I asked you all to describe your dad in three words. I want to read you what you said. Detached, disrespectful, ignorant, traumatized, mean, unavailable. Disconnected, alcoholic, know-it-all. Wounded, covert narcissist. One of you said, I only need one word, absent. Narcissistic, cruel, petty, loving, angry, judgmental, caring, helpless, and distant. misogynistic, absent, dutiful, teasing, avoidant, manipulative. Empath, hilarious, kind. Those are real answers. Hundreds of them came in and I'm reading you a small slice of them because I want you to hear what I heard when I scrolled through the responses for the first time.

And in between all of these responses, almost every other answer included some version of the word absent, detached, distant, disconnected, unavailable, avoidant, uninterested, sometimes paired with the word anger or cruelty, or sometimes paired with words like loving and caring and dutiful. Because for a lot of you, this relationship is not simple. he didn't disappear. He just was never really there. And the gap between what he was supposed to be and what he was with you is the thing that you've been carrying without a name for it. Welcome back to the Calling On Podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. This is the show for people doing the work nobody handed them a manual for breaking patterns and navigating complicated families.

Today we are starting a month-long conversation about the father wound just in time for Father's Day in June. If you don't know anything about the Family Cycle Writers Club at Calling Home, we focus on a different topic every month. Our members get access to a new worksheet, article, script, video every single Monday for that month about the topic, as well as a topic group with me every Wednesday. And you get access to our entire content library with hundreds of different. different topics, horses, and our other support groups for things like estrangement from a parent,

adult children of emotionally immature parents, daughters with difficult mothers, family estrangement, etc. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at callinghome.co, and that's also linked in the show notes. We'd love to have you this month. And a quick pause before I go any further, because this month is not like a referendum on every father everywhere. If you have a great dad, a present dad, a dad who showed up, that's amazing. And I hope that you call your dad on Father's Day and that you connect with him. I think that there are good fathers out there. And I think that our expectations of fathers have changed tremendously from what they were when most of the people who listened to this podcast were growing up. This month at Calling Home and this podcast episode today is for the adults whose three-word description of their father made it. onto that list. The ones whose dads were maybe technically in the house, but never actually reachable, and the dads who walked away, the adults who have a dad who's a lovely guy to everyone but them, and the ones who have been told that they're being dramatic, he did their best,

and they should just be grateful he was around at all. And there's also the complicated middle where there's love and there's harm. And again, because we are really big on self-awareness and accountability here at calling home, if you're a dad listening to this, or you are the family member of someone who has a dad like this, there's a chance you might recognize some of yourself or someone else in what we talk about this month. Even if your intentions were good, it's worth listening from me. that angle as well. And a quick reminder, we are back to two episodes a week this week. Tuesdays are

for the deep dive episodes like the one today. Thursdays for Q&A. So we'll have our first Q&A this Thursday. If you have a question you want answered on a Thursday, send it to Whitney at callinghome.com. You can send a voice note or send it in text. Details are in the show notes. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Let's talk about what we actually know about dads, like the data that we have on dads today because it is pretty dramatic. There was a study done by Rinn Rekzek. I hope I'm saying that last name correctly at Ohio State that showed that 6% of adult children in the study reported a period of estrangement from their mothers compared to 26% who said they were estranged from their fathers.

Now, this study always gets misquoted that one in fact that, one in fact that, four adult children in the United States have been estranged from their father. It's not that one and four adult children are estranged from their father. It's that one and four adult children in the United States have been estranged from their father at some point in their life. Okay. And for most adult children, the estrangement is only temporary. 81% of estrangements with their mothers and as do 69% of those with fathers. I hate when I see that being misquoted. Everyone's going around saying 25% of adults are estranged from a parent. That is not an accurate statistic. Okay. Now, the rate of estrangement from dads, even though it is often temporary, is more than four times the rate of

estrangement from moms. And daughters are about 22% more likely than sons to be estranged from their fathers, which lines up with what I see in my office and what I see in my audience online and in our groups I calling home. There are a lot of daughters who, who report spending a lifetime trying to shrink themselves and to be enough to be seen by their fathers to ultimately just give up at some point. Adult children who are LGBTQIA plus are also more likely to be estranged from their fathers in comparison to their peers that are not part of that demographic. And there was also a piece that Isabel Woodford wrote about the in the Atlantic recently

where she talks about the father-daughter divide. And she says that relationships between fathers and daughters haven't necessarily ruptured as much as they've failed to adapt. And I think this is what I'm seeing happen across the board with sons, daughters, any adult child happening, you know, with their fathers, is that these relationships didn't necessarily blow up. There wasn't like this single fight or a big moment. It's a lot of times the adult growing up, becoming a full person with an inner life,

and the father never updating their understanding of who their child was. So the relationships become thinner and more distant. And then eventually the adult stopped sharing. And the dad starts to wonder, like, why don't I hear from her anymore? Now, I also want to mention that the audience that sent in these three word answers to that Instagram propped are not like a random reflective sample of America. This is the calling home audience. So the people that follow me are in large part people who are already wrestling with their family of origin and struggling. They came here because something is hard in those relationships.

So when I read you this list of like detached, disrespectful, ignorant, a hundred times in a row, that doesn't mean that every dad in this country is like that. The data is going to skew towards people who are struggling and I want to be honest about that. And we also have to ask ourselves, why are there so many adults that are reporting this type of relationship with their father today in 26? What has happened in those dynamics and what happened in the past? Over the last 15 years, we have built, you know, collectively on the internet and in therapy and in books, an entire vocabulary for the mother wound. And we talked about neglectful rejecting and cruel mothers last month inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club. And around Mother's Day, we were doing a lot of work on this.

So definitely go to calling home and look at that content if you're struggling also with your relationship with your mother or more with that relationship. And we talk a lot about like emmeshment, emotional incest, the narcissistic mother, the critical mother, the mother who needed you to be her best friend, the mother who needed you to be her parent. There's a lot of books on the shelf about this and there's a lot of podcast episodes and substack essays. And I think when when people say like, oh, my mom was a lot, there's more language for that. If you compare that to our culture on dads, it's a little bit different. You know, there's dad jokes. Like, you're a great dad, a girl. dad, like the genre is very celebratory around dads. I saw a video the other day that was like

a boomer's mom, a boomer mom's favorite person is a millennial dad because they grew up with these husbands that were like, I've never changed a diaper. And, you know, they're like proud and bragging about that. And these millennial dads are like spending way more time with their kids. And they're like, oh, I watch my kids when my wife goes to the grocery store. And they're like giving them a trophy for that and all these accolades because the. are has seriously been in hell, you know, for for dads over the lifetime in the United States, I think, you know, the expectation I think for dads and this hurts dads too. And we'll talk about that more is, you know, that you're really just supposed to be like this well-meaning like side character

whose job is to provide and like maybe show up at the soccer game. And when you compare that to how we talk about moms, our description of what motherhood is supposed to be is loaded. And there's a lot of judgment around moms who are not parenting correctly. Even, you know, single moms get a lot of disparaging comments and we look down on them and we never are like, well, she's a single mom because where's the dad? You know, the disdain is always pointed at the woman in a lot of these conversations, right? And so we've assigned an unbelievable amount of responsibility to the emotional life of the family for the mother. And we really, in the past, dads were assigned none of that.

So I think when a dad is emotionally absent, the cultural read is just like, well, that's how dad's are. And when a mom is emotionally absent, she's a monster. But very few people are going to sit around and be like, oh, I'm the only person with an emotionally absent dad. There's, it's, it's, it really was just kind of like the standard. The expectation was that he would not be emotionally present. And so it's not a shocking thing to discuss and people don't talk about it as much. I think that what, what that means for an entire generation, of adults is that you are carrying this grief about your father not being emotionally present. And you have nowhere to put that grief. Because culturally, your dad didn't fail. He was really just being a dad. He

maybe provided. He didn't beat anybody up. He showed up to your graduation. And the fact that you never had a single real conversation with him in your entire life, by the standard set, is not a problem. In fact, maybe you were not to even want that from your dad or to be told that he can't provide that, right? So if you grew up with this script and your parents grew up on that script probably even more rigidly, then your dad was a good dad. He could be checked out emotionally for 30 years and the culture would still label him a good dad if he met some of those markers of what is considered to be a good. father. And that's what you're taught to do, right? Unfortunately, we know now that kids need emotional

presence, okay? They need to be asked how they're doing. They need someone that notices when something is wrong. And when your dad can't do that and when you're told that he's not able to do that, but you're still feeling the pain of that lack, you're left with a wound that you've been told doesn't exist. You're not allowed to feel and isn't something that you should. even experience as a wound. And that's why I'm reading back those responses to you, because almost every one of them is describing the same thing, a person who was physically nearby, but emotionally not available. And that is the type of father that a lot of you in this audience had. It may not have been that he was physically abusive. Maybe he was as well, those often

and go hand in hand. I mean, most physically abusive fathers are also emotionally neglectful and emotionally abusive. There's very rarely a physically abusive father that's like emotionally connected to you in that way. That would probably not be very possible. But you're all able to name something that you didn't get from your fathers. And someone wrote this in and said, my dad would die for me, but he can't sit across from me. lunch and actually ask me how I am. I thought that was fascinating. That is the father wound for so many of you, right? It's not always the absence of love. He may genuinely love you and say that he loves you, but he doesn't make that love known to you in the form that you feel like you need it. Okay. And I want to

make sure that we're careful here because I think this is not a wound that all of you carry, but it's a pattern. Okay. It's a pattern that we see culturally. And if you feel like there's something missing in your relationship with your dad, but you can't put your finger on it or you feel like there's something missing that he wasn't supposed to give that you shouldn't be missing, this might be it. Okay?

Because this type of wound will leave you feeling like your emotional needs are a problem, okay, that asking for emotional contact from your father gets you nothing or gets you in trouble. So you learn not to ask and you manage your own feelings privately. You're always composed. You keep your inner life away from them. And then in your adult life, you find yourself in relationships where you can't quite figure out like why you can't share that you had a bad day or that you need something from your partner. And when we look at this, how this plays out across gender, you know, when we're looking at fathers and daughters, we often see this play out that the daughter might choose emotionally

unavailable partners and try to win them over because that dynamic is familiar, right? And for sons, you might have no model for how to be emotionally present. And you may even associate emotional presence. and connectivity with something that only women do and that you are not supposed to do. So you find yourself then repeating that in your own family because you have no way to sort of identify that in your own family and you have to learn it on your own and you may associate it even with weakness. And so if you're listening to this now, that might be something that you're learning to

take accountability for and learning how to do in your adult life. Having this type of absent dad, again, is falls under Pauline Boss's umbrella term of ambiguous loss, right? Because it's grief with no funeral. Your dad is alive. He's right there. He's at Thanksgiving. He's in the family group chat. And the grief you're feeling is not about him being gone.

It's about him never quite really being there. And we don't have rituals for that grief in our cult. The other thing that this does to you is it tends to leave you constantly trying to figure out what you're allowed to be upset about, especially if your dad provided financially, kept a roof over your head, showed up to things. And you probably got told, like, you don't have a right to be upset about that because everybody else has it worse. You could have a dad that abandoned you or that physically abused you. And so the wound is there, but you're not labeling it and you're certainly not doing anything about it because you feel like you're wrong for having that wound. Before we get started on this you and your father topic at calling home this month, I really want this episode to give you permission to acknowledge that even if someone said dads aren't supposed to do that for their children, even if it was woven in children, even if it was woven in charge. your culture that your father was supposed to be cold and rejecting and unemotional and not there

for you in these ways, that that doesn't mean that it doesn't create a problem for you. And that doesn't mean that you can't be missing something that someone told you was never supposed to be there. Because we know that being rejected by a parent hurts and it creates wounds for you later in life. We know that feeling like your parents do not care about your inner world impacts children. And the gender of the parent doesn't change that impact. And your father can provide things and be there for you and be loving in that way. And you can also still feel very disconnected from them. Now, this is where I want to add this caveat in. This does not mean that you can't have a good

relationship with your father in adulthood, even if they are not very emotionally connected with you. Because a lot of you have fathers who were raised in a time and in a world where they did not learn about this. They associated, again, with not being a man. They have not deconstructed their own like internalized beliefs about this and they're never going to. And so that's something that we are going to cover this month is that if you feel a sense of love

and connection to your father because of how they showed up physically for you and what they have done for you in your life and that is how they show their love, but you also feel this wound around absence and not being cared for and maybe being abandoned or emotionally neglected, how do we reconcile those things in adulthood? How can we look at I have this wound? It hurts. It doesn't feel good. But I also know that my parent cannot attend to this wound.

And what can I do in my life that allows me to hold space for all of that? Now, for some of you, working through that, it's going to result in you saying, wow, I don't know if I can have a relationship with my father. Because I am so hurt by what he continues to do in adulthood and or by what he did in my childhood. And for others, it's like, you know, he shows up for me in all of these ways. And I want to learn how to accept what he can offer and heal from this stuff and move forward with a different type of relationship. And so that's what we're going to be doing this month at Calling Home. In the first week, we're going to be putting language to this problem, which is what I

talked about in this episode today, right? So mapping your father wound, trying to walk through what you. you needed, what you got, and what you didn't get, and seeing, like, are there ways for me to work around this in adulthood, or has this really caused too much damage? And can I just put language to this pain that I've been carrying around that everyone tells me, like, shouldn't really be painful or shouldn't be a wound? And then we're going to talk a little bit about the expectations for dads, how daughters can often move into the role of being, like the family fixer, the family translator, the people pleasing kid who turned into a people

pleasing adult. And I also want to talk about the unique relationship between fathers and sons. And sons also having to step in for their fathers and be surrogate spouses to their mothers or how sons who want to be different from their fathers can hold space for what their father did, what they loved about him, and also how they want to be different as a dad now that they have learned new things about fatherhood and what men are actually capable of. And I also want to really highlight how this robs men, this belief system, that men should not emotionally connect with their children, robs the fathers of a lot as well, of a lot of amazing things that they could experience in the relationships with their children if they allowed themselves to do that and to be connected

in that way. We're also going to talk about Father's Day and how to get through that day, if it's really difficult for you, planning for it, making sure that you're supported. And then in week four, we're going to kind of wrap this up and talk more about the relationship between you and your father in the present, whether that relationship is done and you are estranged. You are navigating periods of distance. You're trying to get closer. Or you want to form a closer, more adaptable relationship with your father in the present. As we wrap up, I want to bring you back to where we started this episode with some of those words that you use to describe your father, detached, distant, disconnected, unavailable, avoidant, uninterested. And I want you to ask yourself, if I had to pick three words to describe my father, what would they be? If I had to pick three words to describe my relationship with my father, what would those words be? And sit with that for a second and think about what would you like those descriptions to change into?

How would you like to be able to feel in the relationship with your father? And is that possible? And that's a question that we will definitely be answering this month that each of you who does the work will be answering for yourselves. If you're sitting with a father wound that has never had a name that you've never been able to acknowledge, you're allowed to call it what it is. And I think that there are so many ways to experience that wound. You're also allowed to love your dad and grieve your dad at the same time. And maybe you've stopped talking to him and you still miss him. You're allowed to have a perfectly great dad on paper and to have been wounded by that and need to work on it in order

to move forward. Thank you so much for being here and for listening to this episode. Thank you for submitting those words that helped me build this episode and helps me understand what it is that you all need this month. I will see you on Thursday for the Q&A episode and don't forget to like, subscribe, follow the podcast, and leave us a review. Thank you. Calling Home Podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Colling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Collingholm's

terms of service linked in the show notes below.