“Emotional loneliness is so distressing that a child who experiences it will do whatever is necessary to make some kind of connection with the parent. These children may learn to put other people's needs first as the price of admission to a relationship. Instead of expecting others to provide support or show interest in them, they may take on the role of helping others, convincing everyone that they have few emotional needs of their own. Unfortunately, this tends to create even more loneliness, since covering up your deepest needs prevents genuine connection with others.” ― Lindsay C. Gibson
Some daughters grew up with an emotionally distant father. What every child most desperately need, when they are little, is emotionally involved parents. Not to have one of those parents, to have, especially a father, emotionally distant to a daughter, has impact for further generation. It is another cycle we need to break; a circle of need and loneliness and feelings of rejection and disconnection. There was physical support; there may have been a generational difference where men did the work and women did the house and home work. The generational difference might have included children are to be seen but not heard.
Perhaps a daughter grew up where everything in her father’s world came before she did. Because of this, she will seek men, in her later life, who are their father’s character and will continue her feelings of being rejected, ignored, unnecessary, lonely and ‘not enough’. Perhaps sports, work, friends, socialization came before her on the list of importance. Yes, a parent needs a social life, for recuperation and restoration. Perhaps there were other sons in the family and they worked with them and played sports with them, or attended their sports events, leaving the daughter(s) to seek emotional support elsewhere.
Things that may have been important in a girl’s life, where fathers were expected to be a part of, never included her father (daddy-daughter dates, dances, evenings). Perhaps he simply did not fulfil a role of her father as if there was no sense of ‘belonging to’. It might have been unintentional, but it was a reality and there was no way to please him and so she moved her alliances elsewhere. In my case, I and my younger brother were the product of a late in life marriage and there had been 10 before us. We, two, were called our mother’s kids, not sister or brother until very late in life. I always felt the fringe family member, adopted, and my younger brother was a birthed son. Do not think I was not loved. I was. It was all inferential and how I took on meaning of things most young children do not consider. Self worth is truly damaged by such though.
Some daughters are the recipient of an emotionally absent parent that was almost permissive because of his lack of involvement in their lives. This leaves a daughter with no role model and, typically, was the recipient of stern, sharp commands about what is right, wrong, not to be done, after the fact. There were few boundaries set ahead of time as the daughter grew up and, therefore, she tended to make her own boundaries (typically loose or self-restrictive) and set her on a road to self-criticism (typically, after the fact). With a lack of ‘responsible adult’ or ‘authority figure’, the daughter can grow up resenting authority when, in fact, she resents the emotionally absent father. Paternal Nurturing, has to be constant early on in childhood. If it was not, the daughter grows up, in fact, crippled’, and spends a lifetime trying to figure out the why of many of her actions, responses, and thoughts.
An emotionally absent father can have the daughter grow up needy, with sense of unresolved guilt ( “…it must be my fault…”), a sense of fears throughout their life (most will be fears of a child that stay long into adulthood, without counseling or deep introspective healing). There may be, in the daughter, a false sense of needing to control situations. It can leave a daughter bitter. The gender equality movement may have been driven further by daughters who was raised by an absent, or emotionally absent father/father-figure.
An emotionally absent father can be the cause of resilient and strong, brave and responsible daughters, ye, but underneath all that might be a layer of a female feeling emotional dependency, of needing extra compassion, understanding, empathy and comforting. There may even be some traumatic bonding happen and the daughter can seek out men like ‘daddy’.
Do not get me wrong, because a father might be emotionally absent, does not mean he was abusive in any other way. As we get to understand our own life and residuals that cling on from childhood, we should be able to understand why a father might be/might have been emotionally absent. I understand mine and have given clues as to why I might have reacted through most of my life from the residuals. My grandfather became my replacement father figure and he greatly loved me, paid attention to me, and we had such adventures. I loved him dearly and lost him when I was fourteen, right when I could have used some more paternal guidance, care and comforting. I managed to get through some relationships with controlling partners, some needy relationships, and, finally, allowed real love to enter my life after doing some hard hard work on myself. I had to work through being resentful of male authority figures. I ha to stop seeking father-fulfilment from men who were not equipped to give it. I had to stop seeking approval. I had to stop being a pleaser. I, eventually, felt “enough” and worthy of having a great relationship in my life. God stepped in again and took him, but I have been able to move into a late-in-life relationship that nourishes and strengthens me. When I sense some resentment (older man issues and aging issues), I thank my father for doing what he could with a precocious little girl meant to nurture and fill his wife’s grieving heart, much to his sacrifice at being able to retire and not have to parent more kids. I get it. I truly get it. Seeking answers in generational research and searching for stories of our father’s earlier life can answer much.
May you, like me, learn to father ourselves.
©Carol Desjarlais 4.12.22
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