I want to start by expressing my deep love for my father.
It's a love that runs deep, and I genuinely cherish it. However, it's essential to acknowledge that my relationship with my dad, like many father-child dynamics, can be complex.
My feelings towards him are a mixture of emotions, including anger, confusion, disconnection, resentment, and frustration.
I've felt anger because, for a long time, we struggled to have open and productive conversations, leaving many issues unresolved. Confusion arose as I envied the seemingly "healthy and happy" father-child relationships I witnessed among friends. I felt disconnected because generational and cultural differences created a significant divide between my dad and me.
Resentment built up because I always felt like I fell short of his standards, and frustration came from my perception that he was more critical of me than my peers. At times, I even felt like a target for his insecurities.
I unfairly judged him for being too traditional and conservative, pressuring me to conform to what I saw as restrictive expectations. I carried guilt, thinking I was somehow responsible for his struggles. I often found myself torn between understanding that he wanted what was best for me and feeling suffocated by his control. On the one hand, I felt obligated to be grateful for what he sacrificed for me, but on the other hand, I didn't want to dismiss my own feelings in the face of societal stereotypes.
It wasn't until I delved into the concept of the "father wound" that I realized our issues ran deeper than I initially thought. The father wound refers to the pain, trauma, and emotional scars carried by a father and inherited by his children, with sons and daughters both experiencing the effects. Even if a father is physically present, emotional unavailability during a child's formative years can still cause significant pain.
Many fathers, including mine, lacked the resources and support needed to process their own traumas, which influenced how they raised their children. Their self-image, values, traumatic experiences, harmful beliefs, and coping mechanisms all left a mark on us. Since fathers play a crucial role during our formative years, we tend to internalize these beliefs and behaviors, sometimes to our detriment.
The father wound can stem from various sources, such as societal expectations, war, immigration or refugee experiences, poverty, racism, emotional, physical, and verbal abuse, untreated mental illnesses, and more. Its manifestations can include difficulty in being one's authentic self without threatening others, challenges in setting boundaries, struggles in connecting with and healing one's inner child, a high tolerance for mistreatment, people-pleasing tendencies, emotional caretaking, competitiveness with others, self-sabotage, and conditions like depression and addiction.
Understanding the father wound doesn't excuse any harmful behavior stemming from a father's unresolved trauma. It's entirely acceptable to harbor resentment or anger over how our parents raised us while empathizing with their own difficult upbringing. We can see our fathers as flawed human beings who can experience pain and hardship, all while holding them accountable for their actions.
To address and heal from the father wound, it's important to seek professional mental health services, understand that as a child, you're not responsible for "saving" your parent, challenge and break down societal expectations of fatherhood, allow yourself to grieve for what you didn't receive as a child, question power dynamics in parent-child relationships, and develop a new, more balanced relationship with yourself and your father as an adult.
Recognizing the impact of generational trauma in my own family, especially my father's experiences, has helped me reduce the shame I felt about my own traumas and mental health struggles. Instead of viewing them as personal flaws, I now understand them as part of a larger generational pattern, and this realization has empowered me to break the cycle of pain and emotional baggage.
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