How To Know If You Have A 'Father Wound' — And If It Still Affects You Today
It creates a lifelong impact.
aslysun / Shutterstock There is one problem that surpasses all others in its impact on men, women, and society. It is the father wound.
We focus on the importance of mothers in determining the well-being of children. However, the father wound — resulting from the physical or emotional absence of the father — has been largely ignored.
The father wound may be the most pervasive, most important, and least recognized problem facing men and their families today.
Here’s how one man described his wound:
"My dad had a ‘nervous breakdown’ when I was around 5 years old. I’m 73 and still remember the ‘shame.’ My mother used to take me with her to collect him after he had been given ECT — still hurts today. Not only the father wound, but because my mother took me as a surrogate partner, my life has been littered with very nice women who could never live up to her standards, even though she’s been dead for 32 years. I’m okay but still working on those wounds and doing my best to help others heal too."
The father wound doesn’t just impact men’s lives. Here’s how one woman described her experience:
"I feel very threatened and feel like my partner is going to leave me all the time. I have a lot of chaos in my life and nothing seems for certain. I was the ‘black sheep’ of the family on top of the dysfunctionality of a father who was present physically, but not emotionally. I feel that getting older I have become more scared and in more pain. It has been very difficult for my partner. I don’t want to hurt him anymore. He is too good for that."
On May 7, 2016, six months before the Presidential election, I wrote the article "The Real Reason Donald Trump Will Be Our Next President". In the article I concluded, "Mr. Trump seems to have suffered abuse, neglect, and abandonment as a child."
He was raised by a father who worked seven days a week, whose basic value was "win at all cost" and had little time for his role as a parent. Many people identified with Mr. Trump’s rage, without recognizing the underlying cause, and voted for him.
When wounded children grow up to hold important political offices, the impact can be felt throughout the world.
As a psychotherapist who has treated more than 30,000 men and women over my long career, I have seen the devastating impact absent fathers can have on the lives of their children and how the wounding causes problems at all stages of life.
Boys and girls who experience the father wound often become adults who unknowingly wound their own children. Once I recognized and understood the prevalence and importance of the father wound, I could help people recover from problems that had previously been resistant to both medical and psychological interventions.
According to the National Center for Fathering, "More than 20 million children live in a home without the physical presence of a father. Millions more have dads who are physically present, but emotionally absent. If it were classified as a disease, fatherlessness would be an epidemic worthy of attention as a national emergency."
The father wound impacts four critical areas of our lives:
- Our physical health.
- Our emotional health.
- Our relationship health.
- Our social and political health.
The effects of growing up without a loving, engaged, father ripple through the generations and contribute to many of the most serious problems we face in our society today including:
- Drug and alcohol abuse
- Depression and suicide
- Teen pregnancy
- Sexual addiction
- Poverty
- Divorce
- Crime
- Broken marriages
In order to help people, we need to understand why most people don’t recognize that they have a father wound or that it is the cause of many of the problems they experience in their lives. It’s difficult to believe that childhood trauma can be at the root of problems that occur thirty, forty, or fifty years later.
The life-long impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has been demonstrated by landmark studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)/Kaiser Permanente.
These studies have been conducted over the last twenty years and show that most people in the U.S. have at least one ACE and that people with four ACEs— including living with an alcoholic parent, racism, bullying, witnessing violence outside the home, physical abuse, and losing a parent to divorce — have a huge risk of adult-onset of chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and alcoholism.
Scientists are still debating how emotionally damaging experiences in childhood can have physical effects years later, but by now it’s pretty well established that they do. One of the more promising lines of inquiry shows that adverse childhood experiences damage the immune system.
The impact of absent or abusive fathers is one of the ACEs that has been largely ignored. For most of us, we block out early trauma. It was painful at the time, but we survive and get on with our lives, hoping to put the memories behind us. However, what we don’t remember can cause problems later in life.
Fortunately, we now have a host of treatments to heal childhood trauma and its impact on adults. I wrote about four helpful techniques in my book Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well.
These techniques include EFT (tapping), heart coherence, Earthing (grounding), and attachment love. They work equally well for women.
Healing begins with understanding and accepting the father wound and the impact of other ACEs in our lives. To see if you have been affected by Adverse Childhood Experiences you can get your ACE score here and you can also learn more about the ACE studies.
Jed Diamond is a licensed psychotherapist with a Ph.D. in International Health and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.
Edito're Note: This article was originally published in 2017.