In this Soul teaching on the father wound you will learn:
- How the father wound is created in our childhood
- Why the father wound is a sign of our times
- How mothers (unintentionally) undermine the father’s relationship with his child(ren)
- What the father wound looks like on a Soul Path level
- And more…
There is great interest these days in balancing our inner masculine and feminine parts, to for example attract the right partner or unlock higher levels of spiritual consciousness as well as higher levels of income. The missing piece however in most teachings is undoing our patriarchal conditioning and healing our patriarchal wounding.
Healing the Masculine & Feminine series is an eight-article series by Sabriyé Dubrie of Soul Teachings on healing our patriarchal conditioning and truly balancing our inner feminine & inner masculine parts within ourselves. As a society, we are only starting to understand how deeply our patriarchal wounding still influences us today; and how it wreaks havoc in our romantic relationships, our relationship with our parents, our relationship with the opposite sex, our relationship as women amongst ourselves, and in what it means to be a woman or a man in our own lives.
The teachings shared are gleaned from my own healing journey on a Soul path level and my experience in working with over a thousand clients using the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method. For those interested in learning this method as a therapist, I run a yearly Soul Embodiment® Therapy Certification Program to train therapists worldwide in this revolutionary healing modality.
In this Soul teaching on the father wound you will learn:
- How the father wound is created in our childhood
- Why the father wound is a sign of our times
- How mothers (unintentionally) undermine the father’s relationship with his child(ren)
- What the father wound looks like on a Soul Path level
- And more…
What is the Father wound?
We all wish that we had a father like the man in the image above, someone who protected us, provided for us, and cherished us, but in many cases our dad who we so desperately wanted to see as our hero fell short. Not only did he turn out to be a mere mortal, but for many people he became a source of trauma whether they realized it or not.
The father wound is the childhood wound you didn’t even know you had and this is because father absenteeism is such an integral part of our Western society. It is one of the biggest social experiments of our times and we are only just starting to understand what a pivotal role fathers play in their child(ren)’s upbringing.
Yes, obviously there needs to come a time when we forgive our parents for the mistakes they made but sometimes we are so eager to rush to forgiveness because it’s the spiritual or high vibe thing to do that we don’t allow ourselves to really process the pain or understand the ramifications of our childhood experiences on our adult lives. This is such a childhood wound that impacts our lives in profound ways, that we often aren’t even aware of. Even more importantly, it’s a wound that we subconsciously pass on to our children and grandchildren. It’s the epidemic no one is talking about, but that continues to spread like wildfire which is why it cannot be missing from this series on healing the masculine & feminine.
The father wound is an unresolved trauma between father and child that occurs when a person’s father is absent or abusive. It’s important to recognize that both a physical or emotional absence can cause a father wound. Source: attachmentproject.com
In other words, the father wound is another term for father absenteeism. When a person’s father is physically absent, emotionally distant (unavailable), or has an abusive, negative, or overly critical character, it can have long-term consequences for the child and the adult they grow up to be.
To be clear none of these masculine and feminine wounds are mutually exclusive, especially not the mother and the father wounds as they often go hand in hand. For example, with an abusive father, there will be both the father wound of the abuse, but also, the mother wound because your mother perhaps couldn’t or didn’t protect you. Or it could be that your mother was very controlling, while your father was emotionally checked out and left the childraising to her. The mother and father wounds are the yin and the yang to each other, especially when one parent is out of control and the other parent accepts this and does not stand up to them for themselves and/or on the child)ren)’s behalf.
A symptom of a father wound, for both sons and daughters, is feeling as though ‘you are not worthy’ or ‘good enough’ and need to seek approval from others, especially other men. If you have a father wound, you may find that you’re subconsciously trying to prove to your dad that you are deserving of his love. In client sessions with adults with a father wound I often see a pattern of becoming overachievers to prove their worth to their fathers.
Other ways the father wound can manifest in sons and daughters are:
Women with a father wound often find themselves in future relationships with men who are emotionally unavailable, especially if their fathers were absent or not home often enough to establish a bond with them. They are also more likely to be abused or abandoned by their partners because of their wounded relationship with their father. The father wound in women can manifest as a distrust toward men as well as an anxious attachment style where the hurt inner child of the woman tries to subconsciously heal the father wound through her romantic relationships which is a behavioral pattern we often refer to as having ‘daddy issues’.
Men often suffer a father wound if they were raised by a belittling, demeaning parent who wanted to exercise dominance over his child. Alternatively, men, who were raised without a father whether that is because the father died or because of divorce or abandonment tend to develop a father wound as well. What makes the father wound extra complex for boys and men, is that it is the father that teaches them what it means to be a man in this world. If the mother does not have male relatives, due to the feminization of society and the absence of male teachers boys can grow up without any healthy male role models which makes them turn to other boys and young men (gangs) to figure out manhood for themselves.
Boys and girls with a father wound tend to have authority issues. ‘A fatherless child often rebels against authority, for it represents the sacred position his father once held. Authority is something to be avoided, mocked, or scorned…. Distrustful of authority, fatherless boys leave behind a wake of failed jobs and failed relationships. Each of these may start well, but they are inevitably sabotaged by his distrust and rebellion. With the passing of each, he blames his boss, pastor, manager, girlfriend, or spouse. But without knowing it, he is the common denominator in the long line of failed relationships.’ Source: Fatherless Generation, John Sowers.
A sign of our times…
In our modern, post-feminist age more and more children are growing up without their fathers in the home or even in their lives. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17.8 million children, nearly 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. That’s enough children to fill New York City twice or Los Angeles four times over. Source: Fatherhood.org These are just the American statistics, but of course, this is an increasing trend that is running rampant throughout the (Western) world.
Live-in boyfriends can actually exacerbate the father wound through abuse, neglect, etc. This is not to say that all blended families are doomed, however, the statistics don’t lie. ‘Children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend—especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.’ Source: thepublicdiscourse.com
Growing up with an absent father has serious negative effects that mothers are often not aware of until it’s too late. At no point in history have men been separated from their children the way they are now collectively in our modern times and we are only now understanding the impact of their absence as a society.
In previous eras, men may have been away from home for years, but they would at some point return and their wives would keep their husband’s authority intact. In our society, fathers are often undermined by their (ex-)spouses even if they do not intend to do so or are unaware of doing it, which further strains the relationship between the father and his child(ren).
How mothers unintentionally undermine fathers
There are multiple ways women can interfere or obstruct the relationship between a father and his child(ren).
- Women can cut a man out of their lives because of how he has treated her but a man’s capacity to be a good husband doesn’t automatically mean he can’t be a good father.
- Another way women interfere in the relationship between the father and his children is by protecting their children against the father’s parenting style that they may not agree with but actually, children being raised by single fathers are better-adjusted humans than children being raised by single mothers. Source: Dr. Warren Farrell
- A woman with a father wound has difficulty trusting men, which has caused her to develop a pattern of needing to be in control in order to feel safe. This subconsciously drives her to dominate and control her partner which will either lead to huge clashes in the relationship or the partner becoming infantilized by her when he accepts or even welcomes her dominance and control due to his own mother and/or father wounding. It can also lead to periods of acceptance and inevitable periods of clashes when the male partner feels too emasculated by his female partner.
Women need to understand that men bring something unique to their children’s upbringing that children both need and crave, which we as women often can’t and don’t provide. Women should therefore extract themselves from interfering with the relationship between father and child. Especially, in our children’s teenage years, fathers are absolutely invaluable but only if you haven’t fully undermined their authority by then.
It doesn’t really matter if the father is made ineffective in the home or thrown out of it (women are the primary initiators of divorce), as soon as you make a father impotent in his parenting your children pay the price.
So many well-intended mothers who only desire to protect their children in their mind, completely undermine their partner’s parenting efforts by demanding they parent the way a woman does and it’s not doing children any good. A father can live in the home and still be absent from his children’s upbringing because his wife is the one who is in charge of parenting and has trained her partner to get out of the way and let her do her thing. These are the ‘Yes, dear’ men, who have completely collapsed into themselves unable to assert their authority. Or he suffers from Peter Pan syndrome and she sees him as an extra child, but in both cases, she is left to fend for her own and all responsibilities fall on her shoulders.
What the mother doesn’t realize in these situations is that she is passing down her own father wounding to her children because it doesn’t really matter if she couldn’t trust her father because he was there in a negative way or absent to whatever degree – the end result is the same and it’s a generational pattern she needs to break so that her children will have a healthy and supportive relationship with their father which is impossible unless she gets out of the way and lets the father of her children build his own relationship with them.
As long as the mother is trying to control or even worse dictate what this relationship between the father and his children should look like, she is interfering in it.
I realize that for many women reading this, it can be very confronting and perhaps might even feel like an attack on them but that is not my intention in writing this. This Soul Teaching is not meant to shame either mother or father, but to help bring to light the subconscious patterns that create and sustain these unhealthy patterns within our families and family lineages so that we can spot them in our own lives and consciously choose to change them.
This is what it truly means to be a ‘generational curse breaker’, it’s not just about rejecting the things we don’t like in our parents and grandparents, it’s about finding where we have internalized certain family patterns and are subconsciously repeating them without even questioning them and passing them down to our own children in the process.
The impact of absent fathers on children
Fathers can’t be missed from the lives of their children, but due to the feminization of society, many young boys and girls grow up in single-mother households without any or very little exposure to healthy male role models in their lives. At the same time, thanks to feminist ideology many women are taking the dominant role in their intimate partnerships which becomes a vicious circle that leads to a diminished masculine role in their children’s lives that gets passed down to their children and grandchildren.
A father out of the family home already makes his ability to father his children less effective and often drastically decreases the time he is able to spend with them. While divorce isn’t always avoidable, working on healing one’s own unresolved pain and trauma can really help. I have helped clients turn dead and even emotionally abusive relationships around by helping them heal their own unresolved trauma.
Of course, a loving stepfather can be worth his weight in gold and be a positive masculine role model for his stepchildren. However, he cannot heal the father wound as the connection with our biological father is what creates the father wound, a wounded relationship with a stepfather may add to it but a good relationship with the stepfather can never fully heal it – simply because he is not our ‘creator’.
Here’s a list of the effects of father absence on children from PsychologyToday.com:
- Diminished self-concept and compromised physical and emotional security: Children consistently report feeling abandoned when their fathers are not involved in their lives, struggling with their emotions, and episodic bouts of self-loathing.
- Behavioral problems: Fatherless children have more difficulties with social adjustment, and are more likely to report problems with friendships, and manifest behavior problems; many develop a swaggering, intimidating persona in an attempt to disguise their underlying fears, resentments, anxieties, and unhappiness.
- Truancy and poor academic performance: 71 percent of high school dropouts are fatherless; fatherless children have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics, and thinking skills; children from father-absent homes are more likely to play truant from school, more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to leave school at age 16, and less likely to attain academic and professional qualifications in adulthood.
- Delinquency and youth crime, including violent crime: 85 percent of youth in prison have an absent father; fatherless children are more likely to offend and go to jail as adults.
- Promiscuity and teen pregnancy: Fatherless children are more likely to experience problems with sexual health, including a greater likelihood of having intercourse before the age of 16, foregoing contraception during first intercourse, becoming teenage parents, and contracting sexually transmitted infections; many girls manifest an object hunger for males, and in experiencing the emotional loss of their fathers egocentrically as a rejection of them, may become susceptible to exploitation by adult men.
- Drug and alcohol abuse: Fatherless children are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and abuse drugs in childhood and adulthood.
- Homelessness: 90 percent of runaway children have an absent father.
- Exploitation and abuse: Fatherless children are at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, being five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment, with a one hundred times higher risk of fatal abuse; a recent study reported that preschoolers not living with both of their biological parents are 40 times more likely to be sexually abused.
- Physical health problems: Fatherless children report significantly more psychosomatic health symptoms and illnesses such as acute and chronic pain, asthma, headaches, and stomachaches.
- Mental health disorders: Father-absent children are consistently overrepresented in a wide range of mental health problems, particularly anxiety, depression, and suicide.
- Life chances: As adults, fatherless children are more likely to experience unemployment, have low incomes, remain on social assistance, and experience homelessness.
- Future relationships: Father-absent children tend to enter partnerships earlier, are more likely to divorce or dissolve their cohabiting unions, and are more likely to have children outside marriage or outside any partnership.
- Mortality: Fatherless children are more likely to die as children, and live an average of four years less over the life span.
How our relationship with our father impacts our love life
We often don’t realize how our relationship with our father affects our relationship choices and the way we feel about ourselves. But, because the relationship with our father reflects our inner masculine template, a troublesome (traumatic) or non-existent relationship with one’s father automatically impacts our romantic relationships and this is true for both men and women. Men may struggle with commitment issues, the ability to take responsibility, as well as being able to protect and provide for their families. On top of that, the feeling of not being worthy or good enough often wreaks havoc in our romantic lives no matter our gender.
Women with a father wound will often find themselves attracted to men who are emotionally unavailable, abusive, or men who will allow her to stay in control at all times. Because of their own father wound, they attract men with a father wound as well which gives them the benefit of being able to be in control (in order to feel safe) and not having to be too vulnerable (which allows them to stay in control) as their partner is often emotionally unavailable.
The price they pay however in such relationships is having to take the masculine role which can include decision-making, responsibility, and even being the breadwinner. Rather than have an actual partnership, where both partners distribute work and responsibility equally she is left carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.
In many cases, women with a father wound end up in situations where they have to be the man/father whether they are in a partnership or single (mothers). The collapsed inner masculine that they attract in the men in their lives, is a reflection of their own collapsed inner masculine created in their childhood through the father wound but that they were already predisposed to through their Soul path history.
Father absenteeism is a generational ‘curse’
Fathers’ absence is a pattern that shows intergenerational continuity, most notably within disadvantaged populations. Source: jstor.org
The father wound a recognized ancestral program that is passed down to future generations. This means that parents with a father wound pass down this pattern to their children. Men who grew up with absent fathers are more likely to become absent fathers. Research has also found that women who grew up with absent fathers are more likely to have children with absent fathers. This is because women with a father wound (collapsed inner masculine) seek relationships with men who are emotionally unavailable (i.e. have a father wound as well) when they are adults. Emotional unavailability erodes a romantic relationship which has led to another epidemic the Walkaway Wife Syndrome.
While the stereotype is that women are the ones who want to get married, the truth is that they are the ones who want to get divorced when things aren’t going right. In fact, studies show that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. When accounting for just college-educated women, that figure jumps up to 90%. Source: ejj-law.com It becomes a loop that feeds itself because these are the single mothers of tomorrow raising their children either with limited access or the complete absence of their father.
I can see this in my own life, my father’s father died when he was seven years old and my mother’s father died when she was twenty-seven. I ended up with a father wound through the sexual abuse by my father and later him being out of my life from ages nine to thirteen and a half when I lived in the United States and my father lived in Europe. All the significant men in my life had father wounding as well including my two ex-husbands the fathers of my children. Even my Twin Soul, for everyone on the Twin Flame journey, has a father wound, as his father died when he was three months old. He like I and my parents and ex-husbands was raised by a single mother.My husbands and I passed this wound down to our own children. All my children have had difficult relationships if not traumatic relationships with their fathers. I see a similar pattern in my parents’ siblings’ lives on both sides as well as in the lives of my cousins.
When we remember that patriarchy cuts men off from their feelings and connecting in a meaningful way with their loved ones, we get a better grasp of what men are subconsciously trying to heal through the very painful experience of being cut off from their children whether that’s being forced upon them by their ex-partners or because of their own life circumstances and choices such as a new family, drug or alcohol abuse and other addictions or for example incarceration.
The father wound on a Soul path level
On a Soul path level, the father wound is a wound with the Divine or with God. While you might not be religious in this lifetime, we all carry deep religious wounding from previous lifetimes as well as our split from Source wound which can be compounded by our religious wounding from past lives as monks, nuns, priests, etc., or victims of someone who was said to represent God as well as traumatic experiences in temples or the house of God where you thought you would be safe.
To children, their parents are God initially, and through our patriarchal conditioning, the idea of God being masculine and a Father has been firmly planted within the collective unconscious. Although Source or God is neither masculine nor feminine but both (i.e. androgynous), the father wound is with the masculine aspect of the Divine. While the mother wound is the wound we have with life itself, who has birthed us into each new incarnation throughout our Soul journey. In this way, our father wound can mimic our split from Source wound as it triggers the same sense of ‘not being worthy’ or ‘good enough’ that is created on a Soul Path level when we split from Source. Nothing prepares us for the reality of splitting off from Source, which can create feelings of abandonment, rejection, being discarded, betrayed, or cast out, and more for which we deep down blame ourselves even when we harbor negative feelings toward our Creator.
This means that we use our current life father wound to heal our split from Source wound. A word of caution here, do NOT spiritually bypass the pain of your current life father wound because it’s not the root cause. Your inner child needs to be honored and acknowledged in their pain, feelings of betrayal, etc. When we carry mother or father wounding, it leaves its mark on our inner child and who we become because of this particular wounding. Those wounds need to see the light of day, be cleansed, and given the opportunity to heal. It also doesn’t justify or ‘make right’ any bad, abusive, or criminal behavior from a parent, caregiver, etc. just because it served a higher purpose on a Soul level. Please do not confuse the two, spiritual law does not excuse people from facing the legal or other consequences of their behavior.
How to start healing the father wound
In a society that is based on instant gratification, we would all like everything under the sun to be healed as quickly as possible but deep processes such as these on both a current incarnation as well as Soul path level simply take time because they are our deepest wounds. Just as our current incarnation childhood experiences are seen to mold who we become according to contemporary psychology, our early Soul path experiences do the same as these are our early childhood experiences on a Soul path level. These are the experiences that created our trauma filter, which became the lens through which we interpreted all our experiences.
It is important to realize though that as light beings (souls) we used trauma to densify our energy field to be able to take physical form. No one got through the split from Source trauma-free because we weren’t meant to. We needed trauma on a Soul path level in order to be able to take human form. As we are now on the ascending arc of our incarnation process aka our Ascension process, we need to release this more recent as well as ancient trauma to raise our vibrational frequency so that we can embody our Soul essence, rather than our personality/ego which is not who we truly are but merely an accumulation of our wounding.
It doesn’t matter where you start your healing because the father wound and the split from Source wound are conflated, you can’t heal one without the other. You have to heal both. So, inevitably healing one will bring you to healing the other because the father wound mirrors our split from Source wound, they are effectively the same wound just being played out on different levels, the current incarnation and the Soul path level.
On a Soul path level, it’s important to revisit the split from Source wound and allow yourself to feel the repressed emotions that you still carry from that experience eons and eons ago and to be able to see the falsehood about what you made it mean about yourself, the Divine and life itself. On a current incarnation level, it’s about allowing out the stuck emotions from your inner child and again be able to see the falsehood about what you made it mean about what happened to you.
For example, as a toddler, I decided that the incest by my father meant that I didn’t deserve to be loved. As an adult, I can see that this wasn’t true but until we do make these deeply repressed and painful subconscious beliefs conscious they create our reality without us being able to see the connection between the past and our current life experiences. This is why, simply deciding to put things in the past does not work because it doesn’t undo our false beliefs that we don’t even remember creating.
It’s not about reliving one’s traumas but about releasing the stuck emotions, reclaiming lost and disowned parts of ourselves, and releasing false beliefs or self-identifications that were created through the traumatic experience. This work does not retraumatize us, nor does it keep us stuck in (the vibration of) trauma. It liberates us once and for all of the pain we still carry around that experience and helps us undo how it has changed or molded us. This process needs to happen on both levels, your current incarnation level as well as on a Soul path level.
You cannot heal what you are hiding from yourself and the more painful the experience, the more you have attempted to stuff it away deep inside of yourself where you tell yourself that it can no longer hurt you. But the problem is that these wounds begin to fester and swell and inevitably there comes a time when they become so big and in your face, that you can no longer ignore them.
Rather than wait for this moment to come, you can actually preemptively start cleaning out the proverbial skeletons in your closets. This is not only important work to do for yourself, your own well-being, and Soul evolution, but it’s also important work to do for your children and grandchildren.
I pray this Soul Teaching serves you and has helped you get a deeper understanding of the father wound, how it manifests itself in our lives, the type of wounds it creates, and how this is a pattern that we subconsciously pass down to our offspring. Healing this wound will take time, it’s not just a matter of one session but it is a pivotal wound to heal because just as our earthly Father is meant to protect, provide, and cherish us – so is our Heavenly Father (the masculine aspect of Source). When we carry father wounding, we often struggle with feeling protected, provided for, and cherished by the Universe or the Divine because we subconsciously feel unworthy of it or not good enough. When we can change these internal stories, we open the floodgates of Heaven and finally have all that is ours by Divine Right.
With my deepest love,
