Men's issues
The Father Wound
Fathers play an important role in the development of children. A father’s ability to lead, play, teach and provide emotional nourishment has a profound impact on their sons and daughters. A father who does not provide this level of engagement also deeply affects children.
Fathers who only provide financially to their family but have limited emotional connection to their children will often create a woundedness that can last for a lifetime.
In sons in particular, boys who grow up without a significant emotional attachment to their fathers can be left with a deep lack of self-trust and real confusion about what it means to express their masculine side.
Emotional absence is as real and damaging as physical absence. The father who sits silently through dinner, who responds to your excitement with a grunt, who treats family life like a job to be managed rather than a relationship to be lived—that creates a wound. – Asher Miles
The Disengaged Father
The father wound is a psychic wounding that impacts children’s ability to make sense of themselves in relationship to their fathers and create a healthy, flexible integrated selfhood. It is a result of a father not being available emotionally. Often these types of fathers are stoic, show little emotion, work often and don’t engage their children beyond superficial directions. They will tell their sons to clean their rooms but they are not spending time with their sons catching a ball or wrestling. This really limits the child’s ability to understand themselves in relationship to their fathers.
For sons this is even more critical because it forces the child to imitate these types of behaviors do not allow the son’s full psychological experience. For example, stoicism is a lack of emotional expression that disallows a person to express what they are feeling. For many men, being stoic is in the face of pain. When pain arises, emotional or physical, the response is as if nothing happened. Men are often enculturated in our society to show no signs of weakness. For a boy growing up with a dad who is not allowed to show any pain the boy quickly learns that any expression of pain is not allowed. This forces the boy to limit access to any signals in his body that would give him a different sense of pain. Boys learn to not pay attention to their pain as well as not feel their pain.
As adult men boys who exhibit this kind of emotional control struggle in their relational life. They are not able to speak to relational issues that cause them to feel uncomfortable. In a professional relationship with a superior this man may feel dismissed, demeaned or even worse. Without the ability to speak to this and try to create a workable relationship a man with a father wound will often say nothing while hating his work life. This leads to resentment and pent-up emotional energy. The danger here is eventually this energy must release and it does in the form of rage and/or violence.
Earned vs. Borrowed Masculinity
When masculinity is constructed from fragments rather than developed through relationship, it creates what psychologists recognize as a “false self”—a persona that earns social acceptance while leaving the person feeling fundamentally unknown, even to himself. – Asher Miles
In order for a boy to develop a sense of being a man they need to imitate their dads. When the dad is not involved in any relational experience this transmission of what it means to be a man gets blocked. Boys are not learning what masculinity is through relationship but through their own construction based on guesses from what their dads and other men do. This leads to a constructed selfhood that is ultimately false. A false self creates a number of mental health issues. When you live in a false self you never feel like you know who you are or feel a connection to your life force. Instead you often feel as if you are just going through the motions without any real meaning or purpose.
The difference here for young boys is the difference between earned and borrowed masculinity.
Borrowed masculinity is a false masculinity that boys acquire out of their own experience. It is often a distorted masculinity because they are not clear about what it means to be a man and the values and expectations that come a long with that. When a man inherits his masculine understanding in this way he is often rigid in how he does things, lacks a clear sense of himself and looks externally for validation. This leads to defensiveness and an inability to work through relational issues.
Earned masculinity on the other hand comes through the father imparting on the son a sense of values, culture and clarity of what it means to be a man. When a son learns this from their father they are able to have a clear sense of who they are. This leads to a man being flexible because he feels a clarity between his internal integrity meeting his external expression. This is a man who knows who he is and is living out his values. Often men with earned masculinity have access to all of their emotions.
Boys who grow up with disengaged fathers lack the clarity of what it means to be a masculine being. Instead they are guessing at who their dad is or pushing their dad away. With nobody to imitate, as a way to understand who they are, boys are left to create a masculinity that is not grounded in authenticity.
This lack of attention from the father results in the son’s inability to identify with his father as a means of establishing his own masculine identity. – Guy Corneau
The Wounding Of Shame
For men who grow up without their fathers’ nourishment and direction they develop a sense that something is wrong with them. This is the shame that is foundational to the father wound. Sons need to feel their father’s approval and delight in who they are. When sons don’t get this they feel a longing in themselves and a sense that somehow they must be the reason their father is not bonding to them. Children, in the first 10 years of development, don’t have the cognitive awareness to see how limited their parents may be in relating to them. Children are, as the famous French psychologist said, “cognitive aliens.” Children cannot make sense of the nuances of life. Things are good or bad, up or down, there is no in between. A child will thus focus the pain of feeling separated onto themselves and assume that their father’s lack of relating to them is because they are unworthy.
This shame carries into adulthood and is, for many men, a foundation of their way of interacting with the world. Men with this shame wound will be in a constant fight to prove their worthiness through external expressions like work, physical strength, sexual prowess and many more. Men who carry the father wound rely on the crumbs of external approval because they are not getting the internal proof that they are good enough.
When fathers are emotionally unavailable, boys learn to mute their needs to avoid disappointment. The boy stops sharing excitement when Dad doesn’t look up from his phone. He stops asking questions when every question is met with “Not now.” Slowly, he internalizes the message: my inner world doesn’t matter. – Asher Miles
Healing The Father Wound
To heal this wound men must learn to engage their wounded child and re-father this part of them. This means learning how to access our hurt parts and developing a relationship with them. In this relationship we can begin to help the parts understand that they do matter and that the adult self can now be the father that these younger parts never had.
This may sound a bit strange to some wondering about inner child work. One way to think about it is to understand that psychically we never move out of our developmental stage completely. We physically grow up but psychologically we often have younger parts that still need to mature. This is what inner child work tries to address. It is a healing and maturing of the developmentally stunted parts of ourselves.
An example would be the child that was neglected by his parents. When a parent cannot attune to a child’s emotional needs a child’s authentic self is rejected and the child must create a false self in order to survive. The false self that is created leads a man to struggle in his relationship to himself and everyone else.
When I work with the father wound I support my client in building a relationship with the wounded part. Often clients can visualize that part and a memory of what was hard at an early age. Clients then enter into this memory and offer the part what the younger part never got as a child. It could be affection, compassion, understanding and other necessary emotionally attuned characteristics. We then work on the limiting beliefs that inevitably occur from the wounding. These beliefs are actively removed from the part and new beliefs and helpful qualities are brought in. A new belief might be “I can get the love that I need.” A new quality might be the ability to express vulnerability by asking for this love.
To heal the father wound, you have to be willing to feel what the anger is guarding so carefully. You have to risk the very vulnerability you’ve spent decades protecting against. You have to trust that being seen in your woundedness won’t automatically lead to abandonment—it might actually lead to the deeper connection you’ve been seeking all along. – Asher Miles
How This Shows Up In My Life
In many ways I’m luckier than most. My father was more engaged than fathers of the 70s and 80s. However, he had his own emotional limitations. My dad didn’t know how to be vulnerable and express his emotions consistently with my mom, me, or my siblings. He struggled to talk about things which led to explosive emotional outbursts.
I have discovered my own emotional limitations occur when things get heated in relationship. I often shut down and pull away. This is a learned response from my dad. What I needed as a child was some clarity around a better way of relating with people. My hope is that I can provide my sons more of what I didn’t get as a young boy.
In my own journey I have used inner child work as a way to understand these younger parts and build healthier and more supportive relationships with them. The part that shuts down is only trying to protect me from the pain of feeling hurt and misunderstood. Underneath this part is a more vulnerable part that carries the wound of shame. This part believes I’m not good enough.
Although I’m not healed I feel a much deeper sense of my own Self and who I am. I don’t seek external validation like I used to but feel a sense of safety within myself. This has led to greater flexibility and a depth of relationship that I’m truly grateful for with my loved ones.
If you struggle with the father wound or know someone who does please reach out.
Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!
References:
Corneau, Guy (1991). Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search For Masculine Identity. Shambhala Publications, Berkeley, CA.
Miles, Asher (2025). The Absent Father Affect on Sons: How To Heal The Father Wound and Rebuild The Man Within. Self-published.
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