The Psychology of your 20s - 181. The psychology of father wounds

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Father wounds arise from a disorganised or complicated relationship with our father figure - either due to them being physically or emotionally absent, harsh and critical, unfeeling or abusive and can result in a number of dysfunctional behaviours and emotional patterns as we grow older. In this episode we are breaking down the psychology of father wounds and discussing:  The origins of father wounds and the role of generational trauma Mother wounds versus father wounds  Attachment theory and father archetypes  Father hunger and father replacements  Is forgiveness the only answer?  The power of inner child healing  All of that and more, listen now!  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast  Business enquiries: [e-mail]    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, dive into the psychology of our 20s. How are you going? How have we all been? It's been a while since I asked

that and I'm not expecting an answer since this is kind of just me in this room right now recording. But sometimes it feels nice to just imagine you all on the other side, listening in your car or at work or at the gym, whilst you're cleaning the house. I hope you're all doing amazing and there is something great you are looking forward to or something you're especially grateful in life at the moment. This week's topic is a little bit heavy and might be rather intense for some people, perhaps very vulnerable and revealing. So I thought it would be nice to just start out with something positive to focus on

before we jump straight in because today we are going to be talking about father wounds. and the ways in which our relationship with our father within the family dynamic can lead to a lot of difficult beliefs, difficult emotions, difficult behaviors later in life. Father wounds are really complex and really difficult and they emerge from a myriad of different experiences, mainly our fathers being absent in our childhood, being emotionally or physically unavailable, consistently prioritising work over family, not taking on a positive and active role in our lives, perhaps being abusive. Anything that disrupted the dynamic or relationship between you, the child, and your father,

the caregiver, can result in this form of unresolved trauma or disconnect. Divorce, cheating, alcoholism, a few other reasons. example, remarriage, having a new younger family. These are all things that disturb or injure the connection and the attachment that we have with this important figure in our lives. And it can be really formative and impactful. People sometimes call it daddy issues. I don't love that term, especially in a clinical sense, because it's become very poppy, I guess. And I also think that it has been reduced to kind of shame women in particular for their sexuality. You know, she likes to have a lot of sex because she has daddy issues.

It's a lot more complex than that. And I think this kind of language is quite reductive. As with anything that has to do with psychology and our mental health and our emotional state and our behaviors, the explanation is not always as simple or simplistic as we might hear on social media or as might be displayed online. And a lot of the time, our father wounds really only begin to be revealed as we grow older, especially in our early or late 20s, sometimes even later for some people, when we have left the orbit of our family, we have flown the nest. We are beginning to see what may have been normal for other people that was not the case for

ourselves. I think we are given both the gift and the curse of hindsight and the ability to compare our childhood history with our friends' experiences. And when we do that, often, if you are someone who has a father wound, a gap emerges. You begin to see that you might not just be an angry person or a sad person or a reactive person or someone who lacks confidence and trust in themselves. It's actually a lot deeper than that. And the truth is contained in our childhood memories. It's not all about your personality. You were not destined to be this individual.

There was something that emerged between you and your caregiver that has created a whole pattern, a whole flow-on effect of things that as an adult you're only now just working through. I think as we grow into our adult selves, we often become a lot more reflective and critical of our childhood experiences. We think back on the things that we had to accept or at least tolerate as children when we were dependent on our caregivers, when we were powerless and vulnerable. And now as independent people, we can be a bit more honest about it because we don't need

to be kind of in a survival mode. That honesty often reveals things that we have suppressed or avoided thinking about for a long time out of a need for self-preservation. We didn't know what we know now. We were just kids who accepted the standard that was set for us. And we didn't yet have the cognitive or the mental skills to kind of rationalize our experiences and have an adult understanding of what occurred or we felt was pain. And this can be a really scary thing to unpack because we don't like to see our parents, our fathers as being fallible or even human. For so long, they have to be a really scary thing to unpack. this almost godlike status in our minds. They can do anything, say anything, they are everything.

So it feels strange to think that this person who we entrusted with all of our needs may have done something to harm us either knowingly or unknowingly. Unconsciously as well, we may not even realize that this is what has happened and that there are certain dysfunctional habits or patterns in our romantic relationships and our professional careers in our friendship. that all come back to our childhood. There is a lot of resentment, perhaps, that comes up later in life when your parents do get older and you suddenly realize that you have to take care of them and there are certain things that you haven't quite worked through.

Or maybe you are about to become a parent you are considering having children and you're like, I don't want to repeat what I experienced. There's a sense of inadequacy because there was never a good example set for you. There is so much to be said about the impact that these wounds have. And there is a lot of misinformation. They have become this idea, this concept of father wounds has become somewhat of a buzzword. And with that, we often become detached from what is really occurring in our unconscious, subconscious, subconscious minds on a very psychological and emotional level. We aren't exactly clear on what it means to have a father wound from an attachment perspective.

And we aren't exactly clear on where to go from there. How do we work through this on our own, maybe with our family, with a romantic partner? Is forgiveness the best policy? I don't think so. I think it requires more than that. There is an acknowledgement of our father wounds that at some point we're all going to have to do. We're all going to have to reflect on. And I want to talk about it today.

Starting, of course, with a theoretical premises for why these occur. So a lot of the research that father wounds are based around comes back to attachment theory. One of the most well-known, I think, concepts and doctrines in psychology. I'm sure we've all heard of it before. But for a brief refresher, attachment theory was first introduced by two psychologists, John Bolby and Mary Ainsworth, and it followed their observations of children, specifically like quite young children, infants almost. and they expose these infants to these situations in which their parents were absent or they were approached by a stranger or they were left in a strange situation

and they observed their interactions and from that they came to this conclusion that the child's relationship with their caregiver would predict how they behaved in this strange situation and from their behaviors we could categorize these children into attachment styles as children we have some very core physical, emotional, mental, even social needs. And we are entirely reliant on our parents to fulfill these for us. This of course includes the need for security, the need for emotional safety and availability for comfort, for food, for love. Not every parent meets their children's needs in the same way or in the way that their

child requires. It is just a sad fact of life. Some people do not know how to be parents. They do not know how to provide for their children. And this is often very generational. Our parents, our fathers, behave the way that they did and that they do because of how their parents acted,

who were the way that they were because of their upbringing. And that can get passed down to us through parenting styles and the cycle continues with the impact on our behaviours when we perhaps want to or do have our own children. children, the only model that we have for a parent-child relationship is dysfunctional. How our needs were met or not met in childhood affects how we relate to ourselves and others in relationships, in parenting, in friendships when it comes to our self-esteem, our independence, our ability to deal with conflict, and so much more.

Now, according to attachment theory, people who grew up with supportive and present caregivers are more likely to develop a secure attachment style. That's about 65% of us are causing, according to recent estimates. By contrast, those with less engaged caregivers, possibly people who have a father wound, we are more likely to develop an insecure attachment style, such as an avoidant or an anxious attachment style. A father wound can contribute to these forms of insecure attachment.

And it is what it sounds like. It is an emotional mark, A scar, a psychological scar, left from an experience that maybe caused us pain, some emotional discomfort and distress, even if we didn't realize it until much later on, some kind of damage was done. And so when you go out into the world and want to form attachments with people who are not your caregivers, the only basis you have for what that should look like is the attachment you have with your parents.

They are our role model for relationships. And when we're talking about father wounds, they are our role model for relationships with men. You know, Freud and Jung talk about this a lot, talked about this a lot, sorry, past tense. But we really do use our parental relationships as a blueprint for our adult relationships with the same or the opposite gender. I know this sounds quite strange, but really as children, we learn through observation and we learn through experience. And we learn to mimic what we experienced as children with, you know, a member of the opposite sex or the same sex. normally our mother or our father, and we take that through our lives. Our fathers are our first example of what we think men are like, how they behave, how they treat us, their innate character

and qualities. If you have an angry father, you will think that all men are angry. If you had an absent father, you naturally conclude that all men have this innate tendency to leave and abandon you, to not give you affection or attention unless they're trying to win your approval or apologize. If you had a father who left the family, who cheated, who started a new family, you assume that this is inbuilt to male destiny because you don't have any other examples to base it off. At least no other examples that are that clear and obvious to you that are that kind of personal. And this is kind of the father's role. This is the father archetype, the one that is set by your parent and therefore the male archetype, right? You don't know.

to expect differently. You don't know anything else, even if you had other males present in your life. The father, your father is the one you look up to the most. And so that wound that is left from a damaging interaction or relationship begins to expand beyond just your thoughts into how you treat men, into how you engage in relationships with men, into how you treat yourself, but also just people in general. It differs from the mother wound primarily just in the role that a mother typically plays versus the father. The major distinction does really come down to societal expectations. These expectations might not be correct or ideal,

but gender roles do still dictate what fathers are asked to provide compared to mothers, whereby mothers provide a lot of emotional safety for their children, a lot of the care, the comfort, the kind words, whereas fathers are typically seen as physical providers or protectors, advice givers, financial providers as well. they're often seen as more tough or disciplinary. It doesn't mean that that is always the case. I want to say that, it doesn't mean that it should be the case. But often, when a father is absent or emotionally, physically unavailable, you know, maybe struggling with their own things,

distant because of a divorce, whatnot, we can still go to our mother for emotional comfort because that is who we would normally seek out. It doesn't mean that we don't still want the approval of our father. We still want the support this figure offers in our lives. If you felt unloved, unknown, unwanted by your father from an early age, this really influences how you see yourself because a lot of these things happen during a really formative emotional chapter for us when we are developing things like our self-esteem and our self-concept. And father absenteeism makes you think that something is wrong with you, makes you think that you have done something that has made him not love you. And so as you grow up, you're constantly seeing men as these people who

hurt you, but also seeking out the approval of men as a way to almost gain mastery over past pain, or to show yourself that history will not be repeated. You don't have any other guide. You don't have any other source of information that is telling you to act differently. Actually, I think we should stop and talk about that for a second, because I feel like we need to lay down the exact behavioral or relational origins of these kinds of wounds. And the full span of behaviors that we might see is symptomatic of this kind of disorganized relationship. I think it is this tug of war between wanting your father's approval and presence and

pushing away the desire to be reliant on him or to expect more than what he can offer, not wanting to be disappointed in him, therefore not wanting to be disappointed in other men. Our father wounds, as we said before, are the result of a distance, a breach and expectations, you know, your father being unable to provide what he should. And what we want him to provide, you know, it commonly relates to fathers who were physically or emotionally absent, overprotective, controlling, dealing with substance issues, verbally, physically, emotionally abusive. Perhaps they even passed away when you're a child, as sad as it is.

And I want to caveat this by saying there are some things that it can, you know, some of these things can occur and not necessarily result in the typical outcomes we associate with father wounds. I have friends whose fathers unfortunately passed away or who went to prison or who have remarried and they have not had the same struggles as other people have had. On the other hand, I have seen people who have had two loving parents who have gone on to really struggle with maintaining certain relationships and feeling secure about themselves. Trauma is accumulation of a lot of factors and predispositions and environments and personality. I think a lot of people view it as if X happens, Y occurs, you know, if your father abandoned you,

you are traumatized. It doesn't always work out that way. What we do observe about father wounds when they occur, though, is this. So I'm going to list a couple examples here of typical patterns that we would see in response. Firstly, people who have been negatively impacted by this relationship with their father might tend to repeat the pattern of their emotionally absent parent by pushing people away, by having incredibly rigid boundaries, self-isolating because they are afraid of unreliable people, such as someone who replicates or appears like their father,

sneaking into their life through the cracks and hurting them. That might mean that you struggle connecting with people. You have fewer really close relationships. But as one article put it, this one therapist said it really well, the pain of feeling lonely, sometimes, to you is nothing compared to the pain you anticipate from someone letting you down the way your father did. Now this is what we call an abandonment fear. And it's really common in these situations.

Being let down hurts. Being rejected by a parent of all people hurts. And so by avoiding getting close to anyone, we avoid repeating that outcome that we associate with a lot of terrible psychological, mental, emotional pain. On the other side of the coin, because we develop an understanding of how we should be treated based on our caregiver's behavior, we may be also used to emotionally unavailable or poor treatment from our fathers. And so when these things maybe appear in our adult romantic relationships, we already have a tolerance for them. we have been taught that they are acceptable. So you're not pushing people away,

but you'll, I don't want to say letting people in because it makes it sound like you're at fault here, but people are entering your life who might not treat you right or with respect, who are manipulative, emotionally absent, mentally abusive, who remind you of your father. In another lane, me may also sustain a pattern of emotionally hollow or shallow relationships, situationships.

And why is that? Well, some psychotherapist would suggest that you may have an unconscious wish to repair the early father wound by having a relationship with a person that creates similar feelings and familiar feelings that you experienced from your childhood. So basically what you are seeking out is a father type replacement, sometimes someone who is older, sometimes someone who replicates his same emotional, physical, mental patterns. because by doing that, what you're experiencing is something that is predictable. You already know the outcome because you're familiar with this kind of man. But the more you date these people, the more you feel like you can change them. And by changing the relationship you have with this person romantically, it feels like you have more power over the relationship you have with your father.

Because by controlling this current situation, it makes you feel like you could have had control over the past situation. Now, being in a relationship with someone consistent and reliable can actually feel potentially very emotionally threatening because we're not used to that. And so we tend to return to what we have become accustomed to even if it's worse for us, even if the person is controlling or absent or demanding. This may also evolve from a place of poor self-esteem and self-confidence that manifests as a result of a father who made you feel undeserving and made you feel undeserving and made you feel

unlovable. Receiving love and acceptance from a caregiver, from a father, from our parents in general is so important for developing our sense of self-worth and self-concept because the words they speak to us become our truth and they teach us how to treat ourselves. So someone said this to me the other day and it really like hit the nail on the head. Each of us has an inner critic in our brain, in our mind, saying negative things to us. Does that inner critic sound like your mother or your father? I think that's really revealing of what kind of wound you might have. Or it might sound like someone else entirely, but when we're talking about father wounds, often the words that you hear yourself say to yourself sound a lot like the words that your father

spoke to you as a child. It might tell us that we aren't worthy of love. That's why our father was absent. We are easily replaceable. That's why our father left. We are bad. That's why our father yelled at us. We are stupid. That's why our father criticized us. You might counteract this by trying really hard to be good, leaning on perfectionism, and being the good kid, but still finding that nothing, no achievement, no positive affirmation, makes you feel good enough or worthy because these negative beliefs are so deeply ingrained in you. Sometimes having another parent who speaks out against these things or fights back against this negativity with positivity can be really protective, but, you know, there are just times

when that inner critic is louder than our external cheerleader. And so we still want our father's approval. That is what we crave because we never got it. In men, especially, who have a distant, absent, emotionally unavailable father, there is actually a specific name for this. It's known as Father Hunger, whereby, regardless of how they were treated and hurt, they still psychologically on some level, hunger after their father's approval and presence.

or they seek out male role models, male figures, in teachers, mentors, bosses as a replacement or a proxy for the love and support and encouragement their father deprived them of. My father never loved me, but here is this person who will. Here is this male figure who can be his replacement, who can give me all the things that I was always looking to him for. I really think that we need to do more research on this, primarily with young boys and men, hopefully longitudinally as well because I think logically this does make a lot of sense, right?

Like boys admire and aspire to be their fathers, women take on the traits of their mothers. But I really want to look into where this attachment to an external icon comes from, how they choose the replacement. Another kind of pattern that is indicative of a father wound is that people find themselves lashing out as their fathers did. Or they are so overwhelmed with rage and resentment. that they can't control their emotional outbursts. It may also be because they have not been shown an example of how to self-regulate, how to self-soothe. There is this saying that if you grew up with an angry man in your house,

there will always be an angry man in your house. Because you take on that rage. You become the angry man. You don't know any other way. And if your father got to be angry, by reclaiming that anger for yourself and being visibly angry at the world, at others, you feel like you are no longer the target, you were the distributor of all the fury

that was once directed towards you. And so it gives you back the power you never felt you had. Or it also is just this unresolved trauma trying to find an outlet through a dysfunctional coping mechanism. The sadness, the pain, the frustration has nowhere to go. And it builds up, it makes you feel terrible. And the way out of that is to be angry. And we can often trace that back to a father wound. And finally, kind of on a similar note, we have impulsive behaviors. You want to gain control over your life in a way that you may have been unable to do with a controlling or even an abusive father. And so you act out because it gives you the illusion of freedom.

You do everything your dad said not to do. Because that is one way to reinforce within yourself that he no longer has control over this adult version of you. You are no longer a child. That child version of you is gone. You are in charge now. And so almost as a delayed rebellion, you may do things that are quite self-destructive or engage in self-sabotage because at least you now have a say.

Even if your actions aren't aligning with what you want, you get to be in control. I think this is where the stereotype of people with absent fathers having a lot of sex comes from. I just want to say I looked into this. I searched. I researched. I deep dived. I did not find a single peer-reviewed academic article that could confirm that stereotype for me.

So I think we can kind of disregard it. Father wounds may result in more risk-taking behavior, but that is not always related to sex, right? We could make the same and equal link to shoplifting if we wanted or dangerous driving. In terms of life outcomes, though, there has been some research, academic research, that has observed how children who grew up without a present father are more likely to drop out school, more likely to spend time in jail. This was research conducted in the United States, though. I do think it's important to also consider things like intergenerational trauma, systemic racism, poor social supports. I think that contributes both to father absenteeism

and also childhood outcomes and adulthood outcomes. So I think when anytime we see like an article like that that's saying like, if this person has this, they will become this. We got to sit back and really examine that a little bit because it's not always as clear cut as that. We're also seeing research, this paper actually out of Australia that suggests that absent fathers during childhood can negatively impact our social emotional development, particularly by increasing aggressive or attention seeking behaviors. That is something that we have already gathered from above, right? You have all this fury that was directed towards you that you never learned how to self-regulate because your father never self-regulated. And you have all this sense of like this person,

man that has all this power over you that you always wanted approval from and now that you're an adult and you never got that now that you're an adult and you're still looking for it you do all these things as a way to maybe gain attention but also to bring back a sense of freedom and control over your life it's both interesting but i would say more so devastating to see how important this relationship is and what occurs when it is disturbed once again i will say it It's not always the case, but on a very unconscious level, I think we have a deep need to feel love and attach to the people who are meant to care for us. And if they don't prove that they can meet this need, if they gain our trust and then break it,

if they harm us, the impacts of that are deep and significant and show up in so many ways. Mother, father, parent, caregiver, the human needs to bond and rely on others is perhaps one of our most primal. And God forbid, when someone doesn't take that responsibility seriously, sometimes we just don't have it in us to forgive them. So what I want to talk about next is, what do we do? If you have recognized a father wound within yourself, do you just live with it? Do you just live with the failed relationships? Do you just live with the anger? Do you just try and ignore it day in and day out? Or is there something that we can do? Well, I think of course I wouldn't be saying that if there wasn't, I do not like the idea of false hope, but one of healing and love.

So we're going to talk about that a little bit more, the steps forward, the steps out of this after this short break. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%, I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.

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If you have identified a father wound within yourself, that is, impacting your ability to love, to form connections with the kind of person you want in your life for the long haul, to form a secure attachment, to date, to manage your emotions, to see yourself accurately and with compassion, the next question is naturally, well, what do I do? There are so few guidebooks for this kind of stuff. And a lot of the resources focus specifically on trying to repair the relationship. I think that's admirable. I do think that's part of the story, but that's not always

an option for all of us. I think the reason we see this perspective of forgiveness more than others is because if you do any research into father wounds, you will find that a lot of the literature on father wounds has very religious undertones that are perhaps preaching something that is outdated, not good for everyone, but matches the internal teachings of a specific faith or a church. I see a lot about how not having a biological father should mean you accept your spiritual father or how forgiveness is the only path forward because that is what God preached. Spiritual healing can be powerful, but let's be honest, it's not for everyone. It hasn't really

played a role in my life. There is also a power dynamic there of submission and at times sweeping things under the rug that I don't love that is not therapeutic. And that can be really confusing and frustrating, very hard to square. When you're looking for help, you're going online, out into the world, being like, okay, I've done the work. I've identified what has happened. Now I want like a reasonable explanation for what to do next and the only option you have is forgiveness. I just don't think that that is particularly fair. It's not an option for everyone, not just practically because you may not have a relationship with your father anymore. They may have passed on, they may have experienced a significant cognitive decline since the last time you saw them,

you may just, like I said, not have any contact with them. So practically forgiveness, active forgiveness is not an option, but emotionally and mentally it might not be an option either. We just don't want to forgive and have to go through the process that would allow us to find closure. I do think that there is such a thing as forgiving someone for yourself and not for them. that is a really powerful thing and can be incredibly healing for some people to be like, I understand why this happened and I understand that it wasn't my fault and I forgive you for what you may have done. But also I think you, in order to forgive sometimes, it does have to be this active remembering

and that can really open the door to be hurt again. You are not always going to be promised an answer that will satisfy you, especially since people don't like to be confronted with their flaws and their wrongdoing. And these wounds are often very intergenerational. You may also risk being back into an unstable, unhealthy relationship which may trigger past coping mechanisms and trauma. There are many reasons why people don't necessarily want to forgive. Family trauma is not a situation where you always have to forgive either, but it doesn't mean that you are cursed to kind of struggle for the rest of your life. I think that you can acknowledge why your father was like this, what made

him this absent figure, what made him this angry man in the house, what made him emotionally unavailable or harsh or mean, and still reach the conclusion that what is best for you is to remain distanced. That is how you will move forward. I really do believe that we cannot always rely on other people to heal us, especially the person who has created the pain and the emotional psychological damage to begin with. They can provide us with information. They can provide us with information. They can apologize, they can provide us with explanations, but I do think we have to take all of that and reach our own conclusion. This may involve really unpacking your attachment style, or when you are tempted to fall into patterns of avoidance, isolation, anger, self-sabotage,

pain. Are you seeing those things in your relationships, especially, especially your relationships with men. And as a coping mechanism, which is what these things are, is it actually serving you? Is it making your life better to push people away? Is it making your life better to keep going for people who are emotionally unavailable so that you can keep them in a distance? It might make you feel emotionally safer

because it minimizes the capacity to be hurt again. But in the long run, I just don't feel like we have to live in this state of always being hypervigilant to the potential for hurt. Part of that involves allowing people in taking a chance on your ability to trust someone else, even though you know that they could potentially hurt you. Now, this is, I was going to talk about this a little bit more, but we actually have an whole episode on this called Understanding Our Fear of Intimacy. and there's just a lot more advice in there that I feel like I would just be repeating.

So if you want more information on that, go and listen to that episode. It talks about how to push past fear and relationships, how to unpack fear, how to unpack the wounds, i.e. father wounds that contribute to anxiety and stress and repetition in our relationship patterns. The thing about these kinds of wounds like father wounds is that they do often become generational, right? They do often get passed down. and not just generation, but they do become repeated and very ingrained. And it impacts the people around us, but most of all, it impacts our own happiness and our own fulfillment and our sense of peace.

That is who matters the most in the situation. You, you matter the most. And I think there is a lot of power in how we choose to speak to ourselves to get rid of that angry or disappointing voice in our head, to release our own sense of blame and shame that seems to linger, even after we've moved out, even after we have no contact with our father. And that is where the practice of reparenting also becomes so critical. You may have heard about inner child healing or in a teen healing recently. We've talked about it before on the podcast.

I think it is a real amazing way of thinking about childhood problems as having adult solutions, right? is there is something that you can do about them, even if you're no longer in that situation. So basically the premise of this kind of healing is that our childhood self does not disappear. The memories that we make at that time remain. They are a foundation for all of our future experiences, for our interpretations, for how we see the world. And there are things that are stored in those past versions of ourselves that impact us in the current day. obviously we cannot go back and undo the past as sad as it is there is nothing we can say

nothing we can do that is going to undo those experiences so we think a lot of us feel quite trapped by past trauma right i'm only the things that have happened to me and there is nothing i can do to act on those things because they are untouchable but the idea around inner child healing is that that version of you that was hurt, that was harmed, that was damaged, that was put through psychological, emotional, physical pain, they are still alive, they are still present. And as you become an adult, you have the opportunity to reparent them in a way that is going to be beneficial and healing. You are now responsible for creating a psychological, internal environment where you feel safe enough to explore the past and then heal from that by giving your inner child

what they never had while simultaneously showing yourself that you can meet your own needs. You are deserving of love or joy or safety or whatever it is that you required that you did not get. You are safe now. The past is the past. That is a terrible thing, but is also a beautiful thing. Because you are now this future current version of you who knows more, who can do more, who can act on your knowledge and heal that version of you that couldn't help themselves. I really love this idea.

Part of inner child healing involves, firstly, like, setting boundaries for yourself, the boundaries that your childhood self couldn't set, creating environments and opportunities for joy and for happiness, giving into your inner child's needs by providing them with the things that they didn't get, whether that is, like, material and physical, like, clothes that they wanted or food that they didn't have, or comforts that they weren't allowed to indulge in.

And then also just speaking kindly to that version of you. Like I said, there is this inner critic in all of us. And a lot of the time, it sounds either like our mother or our father or someone from our history. We take on that negative voice and it becomes our own. So instead of thinking of it as your father's voice, think of it as your inner child's voice. Of this five-year-old self sitting in front of you saying, I feel stupid. I feel unlovable. I feel undeserving. If a five-year-old was saying that to you, what would you say back to them? You wouldn't be like, oh my God, shut up. I don't want to think that

anymore. You wouldn't be like, oh yeah, you're totally right. That is who we are. Of course not. That's a five-year-old child. That is a seven-year-old child. That is an infant. And so treat them as if that version of you was sitting in front of you right now saying all those things. How would you speak back to them? How would you ask them to change their thoughts, to be more aligned with how much you love them and the goodness and the vulnerability and the purity that you can see in them. There are so many other examples of this that I think are so valuable. But basically what it comes down to is just radical self-compassion,

choosing to love yourself forcefully almost, even when everything about your past, everything about who you believe you are is telling you that you are undeserving, it is almost an act of rebellion to say, no I'm not going to listen to that. I'm going to set a whole new attitude towards myself. I'm going to set up a whole new perspective, a whole new way of living that is one of joy, that is one of acceptance, that is one of love and openness.

And whatever happened in the past is in the past, I now have a duty to embrace it and move forward. So I think that's where I'm going to end this episode. I want to send complete utter love to any one of you who is dealing with a father wound right now. I really hope that this has helped you understand it more, understand how it does make us who we are, why there are certain things in your life right now that feel out of control because they may not even be in your control.

They are subconsciously coming from childhood treatment that you are not aware of yet. I will also say there is so much that a therapist can help with when it comes to this, particularly a psychotherapist. A lot of the stuff that happens in our unconscious just has been kind of described and derived from a lot of Carl Jung's work, and he obviously informed psychotherapy, so there are people out there who are so equipped to help you through this.

But I am really sending you love, and I'm sending you healing, and I hope that you learn something. I hope that you understand yourself better now. And if you did enjoy this episode and you feel like there are someone else who needs to hear it, please feel free to send it to them. And make sure you leave a five-star review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now. And if you have thoughts, have feelings, want to share,

you can send me a message at that psychology podcast. I love hearing from you guys. If you have an episode suggestion, if you want us to dive into Mother Wounds next, maybe that would be a great one to do. Please let me know. And as always, be kind to yourself, be gentle with yourself.

And we will be back next week with another episode. 2%. That's the number of people who take the status. when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience

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