Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - How to Heal the Father Wound

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Fathers play such an important role in the life of all children, but especially their daughters. Whether he knows it or not, how a father treats his daughter determines if she’s fortified and ready to take on the world, or carrying unhealed wounds affecting all areas of her life as an adult. If your relationship with your father was lacking, less than ideal or has left you wounded, it’s time to start healing. In this Language of Love Bite, I discuss the father wound and how it can impact a woman, her relationships and life choices. It doesn’t have to have been an abusive relationship. A fathers’ neglect, criticism, indifference or abandonment can also create trauma that all too often goes unaddressed. I’ll also cover the signs of a father wound, and how you can recognize them. Lastly, I’ll help you begin walking down the path toward healing, leading to you becoming the best version of yourself! In this episode you’ll learn: Why parent (in particular father) relationships are the foundation for life relationships How healing begins with recognition but doesn’t always lead to rejection or confrontation How to learn to stand by your truth and not be afraid to re-parent yourself Resources and Links Dr. Laura Berman Language of Love Podcast Laura Berman Instagram – Dr Laura Berman Facebook – Dr Laura Berman Youtube.com – Dr Laura Berman  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman, and for the last 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick, and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. So I posted a carousel on social media not long ago about the father wound and the idea that if you had a father who was absent physically or emotionally, meaning they were around,

but just not really emotionally available to you or present or was always working or was cold and distant, or if you knew he loved you, but he never really said it or expressed it, it will show up in your relationships as sabotaging, avoiding, choosing emotionally unavailable men. Now, these kinds of father wounds that I'm talking about are not big T trauma emotionally and physically and or goodness forbid, sexually abusive relationships with your father. These are kind of more of the insidious, low-grade, but heavy heart impact, ongoing feelings of rejection, abandonment, being invisible, not really receiving love. I speak all around the country and the world about love, sex, and relationships. And one of the questions

that always comes up, especially if I'm talking to a group where there are a lot of parents in the group. And even when I go in and talk to parents before starting a sex education program at their school or something, they will ask, what do we do to keep our daughters? And it's always about the daughter. What do we do to keep our daughters safe or to keep them from getting into a toxic relationship or to make sure that we raise them to be empowered, but also sexually healthy? And I always say, look, obviously, there are a million things. It's really important to do a lot of things to raise your kids in a healthy way and to have a healthy attitude and a safe attitude towards sexuality.

But the best, best gift, and for some reason, because I know we're not all heterosexual by any means, but for some reason, it is in a girl's relationship with the masculine in her life, the male energy. and she could have two moms, but one of them is more in their masculine energy. That seems to have a really big impact on how she relates to men. And the way that I found after 30 years of working with mostly adult women who have these kinds of difficult patterns in their love lives and these kind of low-grade disconnected relationships with their father, the only way I can describe it is that the best gift you can give your daughter

is an awareness of her treasure chest, I call it. Those things in her treasure chest, which is a metaphorical one, are things that make her feel deliciously, delightfully lovable. They are things that are super unique to her, right? It's not just she's pretty and kind and smart and good at sports or whatever. It's like all those little times that you've repetitively pointed out, how beautiful her eyes look in the light, how her smile lights up a room, how her laugh lights up your heart, how her insights are so powerful, how she's so thoughtful in the way she communicates and makes such an impact with her words or her actions, right? You're planting these seeds. And by the way, boys need this too. But since we're talking about girls and their

fathers, they need those treasures because what happens is their treasure chest ideally gets filled up with these really beautiful things that are unique to them. And they are experiencing your love and your connection and your presence and your emotional availability. That is what they are going to look for in someone else. So when someone comes around, regardless of who they are, male, female, whatever, whoever they're interested in romantically and sexually, the person they're going to fall in love with is someone who recognizes the treasures in their treasure chest, right? Because they know they are treasured. They know what their treasures are, okay? And that's what they look for in someone else, someone who will, they may not even know

that's what's happening, but that's what ends up happening. Unfortunately, girls who are raised that way are the exception by far and not at all the rule. And even speaking for myself, I had a father who I absolutely knew loved me and loved me in the best way he possibly could, but was also a toxic narcissist and wasn't emotionally mature enough to really hold space for me, to be present with me in a nonjudgmental way, to see me as an individual human being with her own thoughts and feelings and wants rather than an extension of him. There were so many messages, large and small, that I needed to be a certain way, look a certain way, act a certain way to be worthy of love, that love was conditional. And also that I could easily be gobsmacked, right? Like I could be

happily going about my way as a little girl. And all of a sudden, because something had offended him accidentally or something had narcissistically injured him, he would fly into a rage. And so I was petrified of him while simultaneously dying for his love and his approval. Right. And in our family, largely because of him, approval and love were the same thing. And so what that led to was years, decades of toxic decisions in love of choosing men. Plus my dad was a big philanderer. I mean, may he rest in peace. We talked about all this before he died, but he was a big philanderer. He cheated a lot. And he told me about it way too much when I was way too young. And I was my parents' therapist from way too young. And there were gifts in that

because why do you think I'm a therapist today? I've been practicing since I was four years old, but also a burden, you know, as you can imagine. And so in my mind, and I never questioned this, I wouldn't have even been able to articulate this as a younger woman, and most of us don't. We never really think about or articulate our expectations, our true, not just our wishes for love, but our true expectations of love. But my expectations were not very high. All men leave. All men cheat.

I've got to look and be a certain way in order to be worthy of love. So I got involved with relationship after relationship with men who were emotionally unavailable, who cheated on me, who emotionally abused me, who made me feel small, who I bet myself into pretzels in order to fit what I felt would make me worthy of their approval and love. And it went on for decades until I finally woke up, mostly because my heart got broken by horrifically by my first marriage and everything fell apart. One of these famous AFGEs, as I call them, another freaking growth experience. And then that's what started me on my healing journey. The act of healing from that divorce is what opened up the Pandora's box of my wounds. And remember, at the bottom of Pandora's box is hope. I always think about that when I'm scared to go places. I'm scared of, you know, emotionally, I'm scared of opening that Pandora's box.

So going into the healing is really what saved me and set me up to heal enough to fall in love with my final husband now of 20 years, who's the love of my life and treats me beautifully and who I'm my full actualized self with. And I know I'm not alone. Maybe you didn't have a narcissistic father, but you had an emotionally absent one or you had an abandoning one or you had an addict or a father or you didn't have a father or your father went off and started a new family or your father was right there in the living room but barely spoke to anyone, right? There's all these different incarnations. And I guess my wish for you, because I know that so many reach out to me after I made this post and say, okay, I want to heal. What the heck do I do?

It starts by acknowledging what happened, first of all, and not letting yourself belittle it or minimize it. Well, what's the big deal? So many people had fathers who physically and emotionally abused them. I know my father loved me. He just wasn't very good at showing it, Right. We make all these excuses. And by the way, this is not to demonize your father, because I think that the majority of fathers, very, very few fathers intentionally and consciously try to sabotage their children's lives. they may be really damaged they may be really messed up and do really messed up things but even those are the minority of fathers the majority of fathers who mess us up just like the majority of mothers who mess us up have the best intentions it's not like they set about intending to hurt you or to reject you quite the opposite it's just that their emotional immaturity which let's face

it. There's a lot of in our parents of their generation because they weren't emotionally educated or attuned like this generation and beyond is. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey and it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. And I am so thrilled to announce that I am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig.

We've got Catherine Woodward Thomas. We've got me. We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us.

So they maybe were emotionally immature or their wounds were so deep that they were incapable of loving us in the way we deserve. So recognizing, step one is recognizing, but recognizing what happened does not mean that you need to now reject them or make them bad or horrible or have a huge confrontation. It may end up coming to that if you choose that, but it certainly isn't necessary when we're talking about this kind of trauma, this kind of slow, low grade, but insidious and consistent trauma, little T trauma, not necessarily big T trauma. It may not ever require a confrontation. I mean, I certainly never confronted my father, but about two weeks before he died, for me, not even for him, I said everything I wanted to say, including acknowledging the ways he hurt me. But in the context of how deeply I was holding reverence and forgiveness for him and the ways that I could see how the way he wounded me, while it caused a lot of pain and a lot of mistakes and sent me on a really dysfunctional trajectory, I wouldn't be here doing this amazing work I get to do. I wouldn't even have my oldest son, which came from he who shall not be named the first

philandering husband. I wouldn't have him, which I can't even imagine. So there's so many gifts that came out of that pain. And I shared that with my father as well as the pain he caused me and he, which I didn't expect. I didn't know what to expect, but he held it. And he actually, for the first time in my conscious memory ever apologized and said, you know what? I'm so, so, so sorry. You're absolutely right. And that was a profound

moment of healing for me. And I think it was for him too. But this was two weeks before the guy died. I don't know that I would have said it six years before he died. I don't know now. Maybe I would at this point in my life. But the point is that you don't have to. It's really about acknowledging inside yourself what happened, getting support and help because there is somatic impact in our families of origins. And what I mean by that is that when we grow up and let's say you're growing up in a house for 18 years, right, or 16 years or whatever it might be, during that time, you are constantly being affected by your environment and by the people who are in charge of your safety and your security and your well-being. And so this is deep and far

reaching, and a lot of it is even not conscious. So part of recognizing it is also going to the body. And you know that I'm a huge fan of somatic experiencing for all kinds of trauma, including the father wound trauma, because there are ways that you're not even conscious of, of tightening and tension and holding and wounding inside yourself emotionally that you are holding in your body. And because so many of these memories and so much of the impact probably happened with your father the first eight years of life, that's not to say things didn't happen after that, but things are getting really cemented for us in our self-identity and in our emotional awareness and in our emotional toolkit the first eight years of life. So a lot of those things that

happen to you or those rejections or those subtle and not so subtle rejections or abandonments on the part of the father probably aren't even fully in your conscious memory, but they are remembered by your body. So when you are willing to not only acknowledge what you do remember, but get some somatic experiencing therapy, it does wonders for releasing the hold that the father wound rejection has on you okay so acknowledge find yourself a somatic experiencing therapist and start working on things and start exploring inner child work because we can't change the past obviously but we can absolutely change the present and the future and a huge part of that and the only way to go back is to connect with the wounded child that you were, because there are a million parts

inside each of us, little small parts of ourselves, young parts of ourselves that felt abandoned or hurt or traumatized or lost and just stayed stuck there, right? And so they're still there. Sometimes they're driving the bus, right? And sometimes we are. Those times that you're triggered or reactive, those times that you sabotage relationships or are hypervigilant and suspicious, right? Because you're expecting the other ball to drop. All of that is basically trauma reactions. And it's not you necessarily. It's that younger part of you who learned that she isn't necessarily worthy of love or safe in love or able to trust love, right? And so you, as the adult you are may feel very differently than that, but there is a little girl inside you

who still feels that way. So a huge part of the healing of the father wound comes from inner child work. And I will make another video all about inner child work, but basically for now, the basics of it are that you start to connect, just start with one little inner child part of yourself you don't have to play with all of them right maybe the little girl in you who felt rejected or abandoned or unimportant or unapproved of or unattractive or unlovable whatever that was she is the one that is the reason she's stuck there is because no one has ever had a conversation with her taking care of her and held her emotionally and even literally in some cases the way she needed, but you can. That is what's so cool about inner child work. So even if you

just start with one aspect of yourself, like for me, it was this one in me who tends to give her truth away real quick. If someone in a high stakes relationship, AKA my husband, or sometimes friends or colleagues feel differently, right? The way that I would operate in my younger years before I started doing inner child work is that if you had a different opinion, I would start questioning mine. I would give it away. Even if I knew that I was right or could be right, I just would immediately not trust myself because I learned really early that if I believe something to be true and my dad believed something else was true, I better align with his belief if I wanted to stay safe. And the only way my little girl mind could do that because

I would rebel otherwise and get in even more danger was to decide that my perception wasn't real and his was. So even if I knew something to be true, I would give that truth away and be like, oh yeah, I must be wrong and he must be right. And that became a pattern for decades. I mean, probably into my thirties when I finally started healing. And one of the first pieces of inner child exploration and her child work I did was starting to attend to that little girl in me who so quickly gave her truth away and helping her, that part of me, because the grownup me knew that that was ridiculous. But in the moment of a high stakes or a nervous situation, I wouldn't necessarily be able to continue to hold my own. So I would, before I would go into a meeting or

before I would go into a difficult conversation where I knew there might be conflict or differing opinions, I would give her a pep talk in the mirror. I would stay energetically connected to her like, we got this. I trust you. I believe in you. You can trust your instincts. Don't have to give your truth away. I will support you. We're in this together. Like I literally would talk to myself in the mirror and even during the meetings or the scenarios or the conversations. And slowly over time, I could feel the loosening of the grip of that uncertainty and insecurity, right? So there are many inner children in you. If you are finding that you are repeatedly sabotaging love or getting into toxic relationships or getting into relationships

that look good on the first glance, but then once you get into it, they turn out to be an addict or a cheater or an abandoner, then you probably have significant inner child wounds from an emotionally difficult, unavailable, or abusive situation growing up. And so as you choose, just start with one aspect. As you start to explore that, it's a matter of just re-parenting yourself, basically. Re-parenting yourself the way that you should have been parented as a child. That is what inner child work does. And as you continue the journey, doing the somatic experiencing, the self-awareness, the inner child work, then you slowly start practicing in real life situations and you start to really connect with your worth. If you can build in

a spiritual practice, a metaphysical practice, a meditation practice that connects you to those higher powers, and there are so many meditations on my website and in my books where I talk about this, that is such a powerful path to worth. And I will say that those things, the emotional work, the inner child work, the somatic work, and the spiritual connecting for me has been key, key, key in doing the healing that it took to choose healthy love, to get my sniffer correct, you know, that compass that tells us when someone is for us or not, or something is for us or not. That is when my confidence came online.

That is when my clarity came online. That is when I started to really understand what my body was telling me about people. But we can't do that until we heal. So hopefully this gives you a starting point. If you want more videos on this topic or any topic, I am always here for you, helping you learn to love and be loved better. for your love wrote me

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