Today I will be talking about how an absent father will affect a woman’s self-worth. In the process of working on my own traumas, I examined certain factors around my conception and birth, which were thought to impose certain characteristics and limitations on my personality. At the time, I remember thinking, yeah, right, as if, but I was actually soon made to eat my words because they turned out to be incredibly accurate.
One of the factors was an absent father, which implied that either the reality or the perception through my life would be that men aren’t there for me. Given that my father was absent for 99% of my life, my stepfather could barely say two words to me. My first husband was abusive in every way, and my second was better, but not really there when it mattered the most. Many men since have pretty much used me for what they could get without giving much in return. So I’d say that this idea of feeling abandoned by men really turned out to be true.
When a father is present and emotionally connected to his daughter, he is in fact facilitating a healthy attachment, which is conducive to her self-esteem, helping her to establish some individuality. This healthy attachment means being consistently supportive, offering emotional understanding and affection, which will promote her self-care. The love, acceptance, stability and strength that he offers will give her confidence to maximise her potential, playing an integral role in her identity and creating a secure existence.
So for those of us who have grown up with an emotionally unavailable father, or without one altogether, our sense of self-worth will always be affected, because we will grow up often feeling confused about what love is. It will be that childhood wound that dictates how we attract men. This means that we will attract men who are similar to our father, emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, cold.
Hence we arrive at the belief or the reality that men aren’t there for us. And until we heal that childhood wounding, we continue to think that there must be something wrong with us, that we are not worthy of love. But of course we are.
We just never had that paternal presence that showed us what we’re worth. So we repeat toxic cycles, attracting men who lack emotional intelligence, because that is what feels safe to us. That’s what we’re used to.
We’re not necessarily even looking for a partner. We’re still the child looking for that father figure who would show us affection, who would protect us and keep us safe, who would choose us and who would see us for who we are and love us just the way we are. But we unconsciously choose men who don’t choose us. So we have to beg for every little piece of what we believe is love. But of course it’s not love. It’s that trauma part of our brain telling us that us begging, us performing to gain a few breadcrumbs here and there, that’s what we deserve, because that’s maybe all we got as a child.
It’s not right, but it’s familiar to us. And it’s what our nervous system recognises as being. Safe.
When we grew up receiving nothing from men, we accept every little crumb that we can get later in life. And because it may be more than we ever had, we perceive it as love. We change our behaviour, morphing ourselves into what the man of the moment wants us to be or what we believe they want to make us more acceptable to them, to make us feel worthy, to avoid yet another rejection.
I’ve spoken previously about parentification and if we have had to parent ourselves as a child we might fall into those people pleasing and fixing behaviours as a coping mechanism to make us feel worthy. We may become the protector that we never had, mothering the men that we fall into relationships with. This too can be exhausting, because we don’t learn how to simply be present in a co-committed, loving experience.
For so many of us, when we have lived through trauma, we don’t understand balance. We become hypervigilant or we numb ourselves. We expect too much or we set our standards way too low.
We make ourselves completely available at our own expense or we shut down so much that we become emotionally cold. Even though at some level we know that someone isn’t good for us, we will protect them with every fibre of our being, making excuses that they’re misunderstood or they too have trauma. And if we want them to understand our trauma, we should accept theirs, right? But that doesn’t give them a licence to re-traumatise us.
But we can’t just admit the truth. The truth that primarily we were wounded from not having a loving or present father, but also that we are now hurting because that person that we tell ourselves that we love, while giving us everything that feels familiar, is actually just a replacement for the disappointment that was. When a woman finally speaks her truth, this is when healing can start, because she is now attracting from a place of power rather than pain. She’ll no longer be the mother in relationships. She’ll choose men who really see her and don’t just use her.
So let’s talk a little bit about what is known as the absent father concept. The term absent father doesn’t only refer to a father who is physically absent, but also to one who is unavailable emotionally or neglectful. Women who have had such fathers are often deeply emotionally scarred and often feel unseen or misunderstood by men in adulthood.
I can certainly relate to this, having grown up not knowing my father at all, barely even knowing his name, until I met him briefly as an adult, when his physical absence was simply replaced by completely inappropriate behaviour, which was just one more disappointment. In his place, during my childhood, came a stepfather who, while physically present, was emotionally very unavailable. This resulted in me entering relationships with men who didn’t see who I really was on the inside, and who were often completely incapable of meeting my needs, thus resulting in me once again feeling abandoned.
This kind of rejection gives rise to feelings of inadequacy, personality fragmentation, and a loss of agency. These father-daughter dynamics, they impact on both collective and individual culture, as well as the archetypal foundations and depths of the human psyche. The absence of a father figure brings up feelings of longing, melancholy, oppression, wrath, unfulfilled love, and want.
As a result of these conflicting emotions, the daughter’s physical and emotional state grows up with an immediate need to discover who she is. Here, the focus is on how the betrayal of the father, and his failure to uphold the parental vow, and the daughter’s subsequent lack of love and emotional support, affected her mental health, physical well-being, and capacity to love herself and others. Many daughters of absent fathers struggle with poor self-esteem and lack of self-worth.
I refer to the father’s absence as a betrayal because it is within the family unit that the first love vow is made. Feelings of oppression stem from the degree that he is or is not present, and inadequacy, immaturity, and duty are exacerbated by his absence. In addition to being angry and depressed, the daughter may feel conflicted about her life.
When a father fails in his duty to cultivate emotional intelligence and value, the daughter finds an emptiness which she is unable to securely attach to, nor can she separate from it. When paternal love is missing, a daughter will frequently exhibit masochistic tendencies, which she primarily directs towards herself, unable to carry out self-love. Confusion and a loss of agency are the outcomes.
She becomes imprisoned with the absent father, unconscious to the world around her. The early life absence of a father can negatively impact a daughter’s development to where she will struggle to identify her own masculine and feminine qualities, withdraws not only from him but also other men, sometimes even demonstrating a hatred towards other male figures. When a daughter grows up without a father figure in her life, she is more likely to experience disappointment, pain, and a loss of inspiration.
Anxiety, despair, strained relationships, they all become the hallmarks of her attempts. Carl Jung once said that, until you make the unconscious conscious, until you establish a sense of presence, conscious awareness, then that unconscious will direct your life and you will call it fate. A father’s absence makes it impossible for him to show his daughter how to be an independent person.
She strives desperately for connection, seeking him out, but he remains a source of misery. She will continue in denial, wounded further by the fact that her wishes have been crushed. Recognising this absence is a lengthy process and as time passes, the fantasy father that we may have spent our childhood yearning for succumbs to the crushing weight of reality.
Taking the weight of responsibility for their estrangement is a common strategy through which daughters try to make sense of such incomprehensible situations. But we shouldn’t be taking the blame for something as women that happened to us when we were a child. When a father withdraws love, including just acting indifferent, inconsistent or even angry towards his daughter, she freezes up and rejects everything around her.
Her passions, love, feelings and emotions, just being herself as the world around her turns hostile. She will require assistance in escaping this disaster to avoid internalising it and reliving the pain in relationships with other men. The unacknowledged absence sits in the middle of the presence that we need and the loss that we feel.
A daughter’s internalisation of the collective psychological and social standards that shape her identity is affected when she grows up without a father figure. Since her father is not around, her wrath and frustration focus inward on herself. When girls and women finally face up to this truth, they will also be confronted with lies, disillusionment and betrayal that are deemed unacceptable by society and many cultures.
The void left by her father’s absence is a measure of his emotional detachment and women will be forced to face the reality of their own lac of affection, respect and significance in this world. The longing for love that lies beneath the daughter’s animosity towards her father’s absence has the potential to captivate her and draw her closer to her father. When the father doesn’t want to be identified or doesn’t want his daughter in his life, the pull towards him becomes stronger and even though he isn’t physically there, she still considers him important.
And despite repeated denial and withholding affection, the absent father is still demanding attention, maintaining a prominent position through this unconscious awareness despite not being a significant visible presence. Accepting this past necessitates facing desires, fears, grief, loss and unconsciousness in order to unlock new experiences and the daughter will have to confront the truth about the father issues which will often encroach upon the fantasy of the idealized father who is absent in so many ways. Any loss can be a constant and excruciating pain which can involve conflict, bewilderment, melancholy and a lack of self-confidence.
If we look back over past eras, daughters were seen as expendable and of low worth. Therefore a father’s absence or attitude towards his daughter was almost invalid because she was just his property. Even now in modern western society we tend to overlook how important it is for a father to be involved with his daughter from the beginning.
With many fathers depriving themselves and their daughters of the emotional connection and care that is assumed will come from the mother. According to cultural and psychoanalytic theories the father figure is supremely authoritative, revered, benevolent and protecting. Although the Oedipal father-son myth has been extensively discussed in traditional Freudian psychoanalytic thought, the daughter father myth has received less attention, somehow seen as less significant and even in Greek mythology the daughter played a small role.
Discontentment results from things that have been neglected or not given enough attention. Remembering the demands of our natural, instinctual and intuitive selves is a prerequisite to facing the future. So we must acknowledge what is inaccessible, unexplored, unconscious but is nonetheless a part of our mind.
This is difficult when as women we’ve learned restraint in our desires, our speech, ambitions from our absent father. As a woman’s mind becomes more preoccupied with forgetting her father’s absence, her father’s absence starts to take up more space causing further confusion. Depression brought on by broken communication bears witness to the unseen.
The daughter either doesn’t ask any questions at all or decides to ignore her father and everything he stands for. But still she has lost touch with who she is. The daughter of a father who is emotionally cold and unavailable often starts to associate love with loss in her childhood years.
So as an adult she becomes triggered by the fear of reliving the impact of her father’s death or absence on her character. One thing remains true and that’s that an unfathered daughter often grows up feeling anxious, unprotected and unable to accept herself and her father’s inexistence is mirrored in her own feelings of insignificance and non-existence. However it is possible for women to break free from idealization, betrayal, abandonment and loss in order to move towards repair, renewal and self-love.
Recognizing the impact is the first step to healing as it enables one to understand the roots of their self-doubt and poor self-esteem to prevent us from seeking the validation we so badly needed from our father from our partners in adulthood which often creates trust issues and codependency and to remove the expectation that a partner will fill the emotional void left by their absence. We must not only recognize our tendency to do this but also set realistic expectations, find ways to validate ourselves internally and build healthy attachment styles so that we can enter an adult relationship in a co-committed manner. Self-compassion is crucial in replacing self-criticism with understanding so that we can heal from childhood wounds and unmet needs and this is where inner child work can be so valuable.
Breaking that cycle of internalized emotional avoidance or over-dependence and consciously choosing to be vulnerable. Therapy, journaling, breathwork, mindfulness and self-reflection are all useful tools in processing feelings of abandonment or rejection allowing women to reframe their experiences and heal. By surrounding themselves with strong female role models and embracing personal interests and goals they will also develop resilience, self-worth and a sense of identity.
So this is how an absent father can affect a woman moving into adult relationships and I am going to be doing some other sessions similar to this, particularly I will at some point do one about how a mother affects a woman’s self worth, but also I will do one on how an absent mum can affect a man’s self worth, so they will be out at some point in the future.
Well said