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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, whatever 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 and 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 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 a 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 prioritizing 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,
few other examples, 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
stay 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 old
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 avoid 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 it could or we felt was pain.
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.
Because so long they have 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 friendships 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
that you are considering having children and you are like I don't want to repeat what
I experienced as 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
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 are all going to have to do, we are 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 am sure we have
all heard of it before, but for a brief refresher, attachment theory was first introduced
by two psychologists, John, Bulby and Mary, Ainsworth and it followed their observations
of children, specifically like quite young children, infants almost.
And they expose these infants to the 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 through
the impact on our behaviors.
Or when we perhaps want to or do have our own 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-worned, we
are more likely to develop an insecure attachment style, such as an avoidant or an anxious attachment
style.
A father-worned 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 may be 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-worns,
they are our role model for relationships with men.
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 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, they are 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.
This is the father's role.
This is the father archetype, the one that is set by your parent and therefore the male
archetype.
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.
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 to 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.
As you grow up, you are 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 as 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 in expectations.
The Father being unable to provide what he should and what we want him to provide.
It's 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 were a child, as sad as it is.
I want to caveat this by saying there are some things that some of these things kind of
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 feelings 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 why it occurs, 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 there 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 care givers' behavior, we may be also used to emotionally unavailable
or poor treatment from our fathers and so when these things may be 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 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 reminds you of your father.
And another lay me may also sustain a pattern of emotionally hollow or shallow relationships,
situations.
And why is that?
Well some psychotherapists 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 in loveable.
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.
When men, especially whoever 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 long to tunely as well because I think logically this does make a lot of sense,
right?
I'm not going to be a father, 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-serve.
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 and others, you feel like you are no longer
the target you are the distributor of all the fury that was once directed towards you.
It gives you back the power you never felt you had.
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.
It builds up, it makes you feel terrible, and the way out of that is to be angry.
We can often trace that back to a father wound.
Finally, 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
the controlling or even an abusive father.
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 sabotage because at least you now have a say, even if your actions aren't
aligning with what you want, you get to being in control.
I think this is where this 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 was
not.
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 wins may result in more risk-taking behavior, but that is not always related to sex,
we could make the same an 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
of 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 any time we see an article like that that's saying, 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.
You're also seeing research, this paper actually out of Australia that suggests that abs
and 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 this person, this 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'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.
Another father, parent care giver, 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-worn 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.
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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 and
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 like 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 onto 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.
They 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, 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 I also think you in order to forgive sometimes it does have to be this like active remembering
and that can really open the door to be heard again.
You are not always going to be promised and answer that will satisfy you especially since
people don't like to be confronted with their flaws and their wrong doings.
These wounds are often very intergenerational.
You may also risk being back into an unstable, unhealthy relationship with which may trigger
past coping mechanisms and trauma.
There are many reasons why people don't necessarily want to forgive family trauma.
It's 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 reached 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 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
hyper vigilant 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.
This is, although I was going to talk about this a little bit more but we actually have
a whole episode on this called Understanding Our Fear of Intimacy and there is 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 in this into that episode, it talks about how to push past fear and
relationships, how to unpack fear, how to unpack the wounds, I eat 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 this 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 inner 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 are 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 am 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 it's
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 the material and physical
like clothes that they wanted or food that they didn't have or comforts that they want
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,
one of acceptance that is one of love and openness.
And whenever 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 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 there.
So consciously 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 has been kind of described and derived from
a lot of Carl Jung's work and he obviously informs 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 learnt
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
of you on Apple podcast, Spotify, whatever 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 Woon's 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.
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