Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson
"Your relationship with yourself determines every other relationship in your life."
When we create a healthy relationship with ourselves, everything in our lives begins to transform.
Join us each week as we discuss topics such as overcoming shame, letting go of limiting beliefs, dealing with imposter syndrome, finding healthy motivators for achievement, transforming trauma, and learning how to practice self-love and self-acceptance.
The Permission to Love Podcast is dedicated to helping people have healthier relationships with themselves and find the permission to fully love and accept themselves.
About Jerry,
“When I realized I was the source of my own suffering, I realized I could also be the source of my own healing.”
Jerry is a Master Certified Transformational Mindset Coach, author, speaker, and host of The Permission to Love Podcast.
He works with high-achievers to help them create a happier, healthier, and more sustainable life grounded in self-acceptance and self-compassion.
Jerry has helped thousands of people have a healthier relationship with themselves and uncover the limiting beliefs keeping them from the life they so deeply desire and deserve.
He uses a combination of transformational mindset coaching, positive psychology, trauma-informed approaches, IFS, and NLP to remove limiting beliefs and connect with their authentic selves.
Jerry has an undergraduate degree in Political Science, an MBA in global business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and is currently completing his Master's degree in Psychology at Harvard University.
Before becoming a Transformational Coach, Jerry spent most of his career in Philanthropy, raising over $1 billion USD for not-for-profits. He is a survivor of childhood trauma and now helps individuals learn how to create the lives they want from a place of healthy motivators and remaining mentally, emotionally, physically, relationally, and spiritually healthy.
New episodes of The Permission to Love Podcast come out every Monday.
To learn more about Jerry, find additional resources, or submit a topic or question, check out: www.jerryhenderson.org
You can also connect with Jerry on Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Permission to Love with Jerry Henderson
Healing the Father Wound | The Scars You Don’t Talk About
In this powerful episode, we explore the father wound — what it is, how it forms, and how it continues to shape our relationships, sense of self-worth, and emotional health.
Drawing from personal experience and evidence-based practices, I walk you through key insights and healing strategies, including reparenting, grief work, and authentic forgiveness.
Whether your father was absent, abusive, or emotionally unavailable, this episode offers validation, healing, and a roadmap forward.
What You’ll Learn:
- What the “father wound” is and how it shows up in adulthood
- The emotional and behavioral patterns linked to unhealed father wounds
- Why high achievers often carry hidden wounds from their fathers
- How to begin healing through reparenting, IFS, and grief work
- The difference between forced forgiveness and authentic release
- Why you’re not responsible for repairing an abusive or absent parent relationship
Mentioned in This Episode:
- The new Overcoming Shame group coaching program: LEARN MORE
- 1:1 Coaching Free strategy call: jerryhenderson.org
- “Self-Love: The Root from Which Personal Mastery Grows” (transition episode) LISTEN HERE
If this episode resonates with you:
Share it with someone who might be carrying this silent wound too. And don’t forget — you are worthy of your own love.
Chapters
00:00 – Welcome and Introduction
01:52 – What Is the Father Wound?
03:43 – How the Father Wound Develops
05:00 – Jerry’s Personal Story
09:10 – Introduction to Overcoming Shame Group Coaching Program
12:20 – The Church, Forgiveness, and Misguided Healing
15:59 – It's Not Your Fault
25:38 – Mental Health Patterns Linked to the Father Wound
27:43 – Differences in Men and Women’s Responses
30:04 – How the Father Wound Shows Up in Adult Life
30:59 – Evidence-Based Healing Tools
32:03 – The Power of Reparenting
33:05 – Grief Work and Forgiveness on Your Terms
I am grateful you are here,
Jerry
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Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org
🔗 Access the course "Learning How to Love Yourself" here:
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Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jerryahenderson
Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm your host, jerry Henderson, and, as always, I am so, so grateful that you're here Now. If you're new to this podcast, I just want to give you a few seconds about myself and about this podcast. As I said, I'm Jerry Henderson. I'm the creator of the Personal Mastery Framework. I'm a master certified coach, author, speaker and host of the Permission to Love podcast, and I do the work that I do out of my own personal story and my own personal journey, and so this podcast is about how can you have a healthier relationship with yourself, how can you, as a high achiever, learn to create a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside, how can you find true fulfillment, true satisfaction, meaning and purpose, and to do all of that from a place that is deeply rooted in self-acceptance and self-compassion. So that is what this podcast is about, and I'm grateful that you're here Now with all of that in mind. I do want to remind you, or to let you know for the first time, if you're new here, that the Permission to Love podcast is going to be changing its name Now. The content, the focus, is going to continue to be based in everything that I just shared and everything that we have been doing over the last almost two years that we have been doing over the last almost two years. But starting May 5th, the Permission to Love podcast will become Personal Mastery with Jerry Henderson. And if you're curious about the name change the why behind it, you can go listen to the episode titled Self-Love the Root from which Personal Mastery Grows. Now, if you've not yet had a chance to subscribe to or to follow this podcast, I want to encourage you to do that, because when we change the podcast title from Permission to Love to Personal Mastery with Jerry Henderson, you're not going to be able to find Permission to Love if you search for it. So it's going to be really important that, if you want to continue to get the content from this podcast, to take a moment and hit that subscribe or follow button. So, with all of that, let's go ahead and dive into today's episode.
Jerry Henderson:Today, we're going to be talking about the father wound. We're going to talk about what it is, and then we'll also talk about how you can begin to heal it. You can heal it, you absolutely can. I know it because of my story and I'll share some of my story here in just a minute and I've also seen many of my clients come to a place of healing and transformation in this space. So I'm excited to share this episode with you today because I believe that it can really help you on your journey if you're a person who's struggling with the father wound.
Jerry Henderson:So what is the father wound? Well, the father wound is the emotional and relational injury that forms when a child's connection with their father, with their dad, is chronically unsafe, neglectful or absent. And while it is not a formal diagnosis meaning that you would not find it in the DSM-5, which is the handbook about mental health issues you're not going to find it there. However, decades of attachment and trauma, research confirms its impact the impact of the father wound on self-esteem, emotional regulation and adult relationships. It's very clear that when we have a painful relationship with our fathers, whether it's because they're abusive or because they're neglectful, or because they were absent, or whatever the story is, it has a significant impact in our lives. Well now let's take a moment and let's dive in just a little bit more on how the father wound develops.
Jerry Henderson:Number one physical absence, whether through divorce, death, incarceration, military deployment or work patterns that can remove a father from daily life. That absence of the physical presence of a father can leave a wound. Research is very clear about this. The other way that it can form is through emotional absence. A father may be in the home, yet they're distant, they're preoccupied or they're constantly critical, leaving the child without connection, without praise, without encouragement. There is a lack of emotional connection and intimacy. The other way that it can happen is through abuse or harshness, whether it's physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, things like verbal humiliation, corporal punishment or unpredictable rage. Now, another way the father wound can form is through what is known as role modeling gaps. This is when fathers struggle with things like addiction or their own untreated trauma or mental illness, and children often can internalize the shame and the confusion about this and they can translate it to their own identity and their own worth.
Jerry Henderson:Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I have my own father wound. I grew up in a very abusive home, had an alcoholic father. We grew up in US poverty on the welfare system and moved around all over the place because dad was trying to keep a job, find a job. So I wound up attending 17 different schools and life was pretty chaotic for me as a young person, and one of the ways that I tried to cope with all that chaos was through drugs and alcohol. By the age of 14, I was in rehab, and then, after I got out of rehab, I went right back into the same patterns. I had a lot of anger. I was always getting kicked out of school. From the sixth grade on, I was expelled or suspended from school every single year until the age of 17.
Jerry Henderson:And at the age of 17. And at the age of 17, something very significant happened in my life. I became a Christian. I joined a church and found a lot of healing and hope in that space. I also found a lot of challenges as well, and one of the key challenges was that I began to make God in the image of my Father. I began to see God not as filled with grace, not as filled with love, but a God that I needed to figure out how to please that. This God was always frustrated with me, that I could never quite please that God enough, and so my father wound showed up in my relationship with God, because I felt like I was always in trouble with God, always disappointing God. No matter how much I prayed, no matter how much I read in my Bible, it was never enough and I carried a deep sense of shame that had its origins, had its root, from the father wound that I had.
Jerry Henderson:And, the truth be told, that wasn't the only relationship that that father wound had an impact on. It had an impact on every relationship in my life For male figures, authority figures or people that I respected. I was trying to find my father in them. I was hoping that they would father me and heal that wound, that feeling of not being enough, not feeling accepted, always feeling rejected. I was hoping that other men could help heal that inside of me. It never happened. Now, while I did find some good mentors who were able to help me some, it wasn't their job to heal that in my life, and I'll talk later about what ultimately brought healing for me in that space and continues to provide healing for me in that space of the father wound that I carried and still carry to some degree, but it wasn't their job.
Jerry Henderson:Now, the other relationships that it showed up in was my romantic relationships, because I didn't know how to connect. I wasn't taught how to build intimacy, how to build safe connection, and it was very difficult for me to feel like I could be authentic. Part of that was because I wasn't taught how to be authentic. Part of it was also because I didn't want to be like my dad, but I didn't know who I wanted to be. Right, I didn't have a sense of clear identity that gets developed right, that sense of who you are and transitioning from boyhood to manhood. I didn't have all of that growing up and so I had to figure it out, and it was clunky and so big parts of me I hid because of the fact that I felt shame about who I was. I felt shame about my story. I felt shame that I didn't have a father who loved me and wanted to connect with me and who would go on to abandon me and I'll talk about that here in just a second. But all of that kept me from connecting and having intimacy, and I also carried a sense of fear that I would turn into my dad, and so I was always trying to manage that internally. And so this fear of not wanting people to see me because I felt like they would reject me, and then this fear of feeling like I had to not become somebody, versus who I needed to become or who I actually wanted to become. Hope, all that makes sense, and I'm sure that, as you're listening to this, if you've carried a father wound, you can relate to what I'm sharing. I want to take a moment and talk to you about a new group coaching program that I've just launched. It's called Overcoming Shame.
Jerry Henderson:Now, if you're a person who struggles with shame, I want to let you know you're not alone. So what is shame? Shame is that feeling that there's something wrong with you, that you're uniquely broken. And the challenge with shame is it makes us feel like we're the only ones dealing with it and we wind up having shame for having shame. And that was exactly my story. I carried shame that came from my childhood trauma for over 40 years, but I didn't know what I was dealing with. I didn't even know there was a thing called shame. I just knew that I carried the feeling that there was something wrong with me that caused me then to have all of this anxiety, depression, all this unhealthy coping mechanisms. I hid myself from others because I didn't want them to see who I truly was. So I felt alone and isolated and then wound up trying to cope with all of that through some pretty unhealthy coping mechanisms. And so if that's you, if you're struggling with shame and you're struggling alone in this, I want to let you know you don't have to struggle alone anymore, and that's why I've created a group coaching program called Overcoming Shame.
Jerry Henderson:As a part of the program, we're going to dive into the science behind what is shame? How does it get formed, how can you disidentify from it, how can you learn to let go of it, and what does a life look like on the other side of shame and throughout it? We're going to look at the neuroscience, the psychology, the practical ways that you can overcome shame. And can I tell you right now, you can overcome shame. You can move from a place of feeling like there's something wrong with you, wanting to reject yourself, feeling like you're never going to be quote unquote fixed. You can move from all of that to a place of true wholeness, of true self-acceptance and to a place of true self-compassion and self-love. So if you're interested in learning more about the program, I want to invite you to go to the show notes in this episode. There'll be a link there where you can set up a free 15-minute discovery call where we'll connect and see if this is the right fit for you. I'm intentionally keeping the program somewhat small because I want to make sure that we build community and connection, because research shows that's one of the key ways in order to overcome shame that we come out of isolation, we come out of hiding and we get among people who are carrying the same challenges, and in doing that, it helps us know that we're not alone, which, once again, is a key part of overcoming shame. So, once again, if you're interested, set up a free 15-minute discovery call with me, and you can do that by either going to my website at jerryhendersonorg or by simply seeing the show notes in this episode. I look forward to connecting with you, learning more about you and helping you get on a path where, once and for all, you let go of that feeling that there's something wrong with you.
Jerry Henderson:Now, the other challenge that I faced in trying to heal or deal with this father wound was in the church. When I became a Christian, one of the things that I was immediately told that I needed to do was to forgive my dad. Now, while I deeply believe in forgiveness, I believe in forgiveness in the right time, in the right way, something that's not forced, something that's authentic. And when we understand forgiveness that it's not even about the other person, it's about us, and us receiving healing and us letting go of that stored energy that we have towards the other person. It totally changes the way that we look at forgiveness, and we'll talk about that in another episode, and I've actually done some episodes on forgiveness and so if you want to go listen to those, it might be helpful.
Jerry Henderson:But in this situation with my dad, when I was told that I had to forgive him because if I wanted to be forgiven by God, I had to forgive my dad, if I wanted to be forgiven by God, I had to forgive my dad. Well, the challenge with that was it became forced forgiveness and it became just to show a mask that I wore and it didn't allow me to actually deal with the father wound. It was glazed over under the pretense of well, I've just forgiven the person. How can you do that? I mean, let's just be honest about this. How can you just flip a switch and say's just be honest about this? How can you just flip a switch and say I'm going to forgive this person right. After all those years of trauma, after all those years of abuse, I'm just supposed to flip a switch and say that I forgive this person and move on without any work internally to figure out how to heal that wound.
Jerry Henderson:As I reflect back on it now, it was a pretty darn terrible piece of advice. Now, the heart of that advice, I would say, was good, but the timing and the approach not so good. What I actually needed as a 17-year-old boy was space to figure out how to work through that, to understand that the trauma that I experienced was not my fault. The pain of the wound that I was carrying, the sense of shame that I felt, like there was something wrong with me, that I was broken, I was flawed. I needed for that to get healed and then, as that process unfolded, then come to a place by choice not out of fear, but out of choice to decide to forgive and release that energy, which I'm thankful to say that I've done later in a very much more authentic way.
Jerry Henderson:But in that time, wrong message, wrong time and in the wrong way, and so I want to encourage you if you've experienced that. First, I want to say that I'm sorry, I'm sorry one. If you carry a father wound, that if you grew up in a home where you experienced abuse or you had the absence of a father, I'm sorry that you had to have that experience and I'm sorry for the wounds that you've had to carry as a result of that. And if you've experienced anything that has said that you had to have that experience and I'm sorry for the wounds that you've had to carry as a result of that. And if you've experienced anything that has said that you've had to accelerate that forgiveness, or you've been pressured into it, or people have taken the side of the abuser and put you in a spot where you feel like you have to be the repairer of the relationship, can I just tell you, all of that's messed up. It's not healthy, and if you're experiencing that, I want to give you the permission to go at it at your own pace, in a way that is truly aligned with who you are. That brings true healing to you. Because, can I say this, that if you experience an abusive father, an absent father, it is not your fault. You were the one who was victimized.
Jerry Henderson:Now, being a victim doesn't say that we're going to stay there forever. Right. We want to take charge of our lives so that we can create a life that's beautiful. We want to take back that power. We want to take back our agency and learn how to build the beautiful life and relationships that we deserve. But I do want to tell you, if nobody else has ever told you this I'm sorry for what you experienced. I'm sorry for the wound that you carry. I'm sorry for the consequences that have shown up in your life because of that, the pain that you've carried because of it. And I want to let you know it's not your fault and it's not your job to have to reconcile your relationship with your dad. Now you can choose to if you want to, and beautiful things can come from that. But if you're feeling a sense of guilt or shame, that it's all on you to do it. Listen, it's not all on you to do this and there's a reason why we feel that way and it comes from the father wound that we so deeply and desperately want to heal that relationship. We want to be shown that we're worthy to be parented, to be loved, to be accepted, that we're worthy of connection. So we want to keep giving them the shot or the opportunity to make it right, because we're hoping in them making it right it's going to heal that part in us that got wounded. Now here's the challenge the father wound many times isn't healed by the father. It's not healed by the one who gave us the wound. It can be, and that's beautiful when it happens, but it doesn't always happen that way. And even when it does happen, the father is not the one who fully heals the wound. They heal a part of it. There's a piece that we have to do and we'll talk about that later in this episode that can bring the most transformational healing to us.
Jerry Henderson:It's part of my story my relationship with my dad. He basically bailed out of my life, or actually not. Basically he bailed out of my life when I was about 19 or 20 years old, went off, reinvented himself, got remarried, had more children who I still don't know at this point, haven't met, and we went for over 20 years without talking, no communication at all. And when I was in my mid-40s I decided that I wanted to reach out and see if I could make some way for this relationship to work, to get healed, and I was still carrying the sense that I needed to figure out how to make the relationship work. I mean, here I am this kid who grew up in all of that trauma and then didn't have a chance to really have that wound healed and then my father abandoned me, disappeared. Yet I still felt like it was somehow my responsibility to try to fix the relationship. I was hopeful that maybe if I reached out, things could get on a good path, maybe things would repair themselves and we could have some type of relationship that was meaningful.
Jerry Henderson:So in my mid-40s I tracked my dad down, got his phone number, texted him. We then jumped on a call, very short call, but we did get to reconnect and it didn't heal anything. It shifted things. I'll say that it allowed us to be able to connect in some way. We can send texts now occasionally back and forth about happy birthday etc. So improvement there, for sure.
Jerry Henderson:But what I also found in it was that my desire to want to connect with my dad and have that be something that was maybe intimate, maybe something that was healing, that could be something that I always wanted from a father. It was a beautiful desire of mine, but that desire was not met. And the interesting thing is is we discussed a couple of times about trying to get together, meet face to face, and then every time the time was going to happen, some excuse got made, something happened and we were never able to meet face to face and so I eventually decided just to give up on that part of it and decided that I didn't want to keep rewounding that father wound and I let go of it and I fully accepted at this point that maybe the best I'm ever going to be able to get out of my relationship with my father is a few texts occasionally, and at this point I'm okay with that because I also understand his story. I understand his journey and I won't share anything about that. But I understand his story, his journey, and so that helps me have some levels of compassion. It helps me understand or to make meaning out of what happened.
Jerry Henderson:As Viktor Frankl talks about man's search for meaning. If we can understand some of the meaning behind what happened and make some meaning from it and use the mud for the lotus to grow. As Thich Nhat Hanh would always say, how can the lotus grow without the mud? And so, in a very real sense, the person I am today is because of all of those experiences. The work that I'm doing today is because of all of those experiences. And so am I saying that those things are good, that they happened? No, am I saying that I'd want to change any of it? No, because I would not be the person I am today without those experiences. Do I feel like I had to go through them to be this person? I don't know, but I know who I am today, and if those experiences needed to be a part of that journey, I fully accept them as a part of the path that I had to walk. And so today, that's where my relationship with my dad stands.
Jerry Henderson:And today, do I still have some sense of a father wound? Absolutely, is it better than it was before? Absolutely, and so here's the challenge right, I do believe that we can do some deep work and deep healing in this space, but I also think that there will always be a little bit of us that aches for that when we haven't had a healthy relationship with our Father, we can be healed, we can be healthy, but there'll still maybe be a little remnant, a little echo of hopefulness for what could have been, knowing that it's not going to be. Now, let me just say this and be clear, that if your father is still alive and you have an opportunity and you still want to connect and have a relationship with your father, I 100% believe that it can go a different direction than mine has gone. It can go to one that is beautiful, restorative, healed and, dare I say, even better than what other people have as their relationship with their father. And so please, if that's something that you desire, don't give up on that. Allow yourself to have that Now.
Jerry Henderson:I also want to encourage you don't put yourself in a space where you're going to continue to get abused or continue to get wounded If the person isn't healthy enough to want to have a relationship with you and you keep trying to reach out and you feel like you just got to keep making it work. I would encourage you to reflect on that. Look at the evidence. Allow yourself to know that you are worthy of not having to go through that rewounding all of the time, and really take a look at are you trying to rescue the relationship? Are you trying to rescue your parent? Are you hoping that somehow they'll wake up and figure out how to truly love you? If you are, and you find yourself continuing to try to reach out, get disappointed, hurt again, et cetera. Can I encourage you to get some guidance on that, to meet with somebody, whether a coach or a therapist, to unpack that with you, because one of the things I've noticed with many people who carry a father wound is they keep going back and getting re-wounded over and over, and so there are ways that you can go about it that protect you while still allowing you to have some sense of hope that restoration could happen. And can I also say that if you don't want any restoration with that relationship, you don't want any connection, you just want them gone and that's like the best thing for you, your family or whatever the scenario is. That's 100% okay as well. It's okay to let the relationship go.
Jerry Henderson:I did that for some 20 years, and when people would ask me about my dad, I'd tell them a little bit, but internally I'd kind of made the decision that he was dead to me. And I don't mean that in the way of you know you're dead to me, but it was just kind of like I don't have a father. That's the way that my brain had to process. It was to basically consider him as if he wasn't alive. That was the way that I needed to process it at that time and it was a safety mechanism, it was a coping mechanism and I just wasn't ready to try to figure out how to make that work. And then later it felt like it was the right time, so I reached out.
Jerry Henderson:But if you're in that space, I want to let you know it's okay, you don't have to make your relationship with your father right. Okay, I hope that helps. All right, now can we start talking about some of the impact that this has on us? How does it start to show up when we have a father wound in our life? And I want to share these things because I think it'll help you to see the patterns, because often we get trapped in these patterns and we think we're the only ones who are dealing with them. But the reality is, when you have a father wound, certain things start to show up and for a lot of us we don't even know it's because of that father wound. Let's dig into these. I hope, as you see yourself in these, that it allows you to feel a sense of being seen and not isolated in your journey.
Jerry Henderson:Number one is it often will show up in mental health issues. Many people who deal with a father wound have a higher lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, eating disorders. There was a 20-year study in the UK that directly linked the absence of a father in early childhood to persistent depression in sons and daughters through the age of 24. Now another thing that happens is attachment style issues. Right, we hear a lot about attachment style and the research shows that individuals with a father wound have a higher rate of an insecure attachment style and the fear of abandonment.
Jerry Henderson:Now, another area that impacts is our core self-worth, and what that can do is it can fuel perfectionism or people-pleasing, or it can birth the high achiever to try to prove that there's not something wrong with us. You know, a lot of high achievers will have a core wound with a father or with a mother and their desire to try to prove that person wrong or to overcome the feeling of inadequacy or low self-esteem, low self-worth, will birth this desire to achieve. And that desire to achieve, if it's not checked and it's not healed and it doesn't get healthy, it's going to lead to all kinds of other problems, like burnout, like workaholism, like relational issues, addiction issues, etc. And so much of this can come from that core wound that we have with our fathers. Now, another impact that shows up is our ability to deal with stress or to cope with it. Research shows that when we have a father wound, it is going to reduce our ability to emotionally regulate and it's going to lower our resilience when we face challenges or setbacks in life. Another thing that shows up and unfortunately and sadly is the greater probability of repeating these patterns of emotional distance or abuse or absence from our own children unless we address and heal this wound. It's that intergenerational echo of trauma that just continues on and on.
Jerry Henderson:Now the research also shows us that there are a few key differences between men and women and how they deal with this father wound. Women generally I'm not saying this for all tend to internalize the pain, and some of the outcomes of that include greater levels of self-criticism, greater levels of anxiety, eating disorders, body image issues, an anxious or fearful avoidance style, difficulty trusting healthy masculinity, earlier engagement in sexual activity, higher levels of teen pregnancy, hyper-competitiveness feelings of the imposter syndrome are more acute and greater levels of emotional volatility under stress. Now for men, on the other hand, they're more likely to externalize all of this. They're more likely to display higher levels of aggression. They become more risk-taking. They're more likely to get involved in substance use as a way to cope with the wound. They have a higher suicide risk, have greater difficulty connecting with and naming their feelings.
Jerry Henderson:More likely to get involved in bullying behavior. More likely to have intimate partner violence. More likely to get involved in bullying behavior. More likely to have intimate partner violence. More likely to carry a chronic sense of inadequacy. They have performance-based worth or shame-based achieving. They might display hyper-masculinity or soft masculinity to avoid conflict. They could definitely have difficulty trusting authority or expressing vulnerability to partners and children, and they can wind up repeating the same emotional patterns with their own children. And so those are just some of the things that a person with a father wound might be carrying. And so if you feel things, for example, like being compelled to overachieve or people-pleased to earn approval, or you have an intense anger at male authority or fear of disappointing male authority, or if you're repeating patterns of emotionally unavailable partners, or you have difficulty believing the praise that you receive or feeling good enough even when you have success, or if you have success, or if you have spiritual struggles that mirror your relationship with your dad, like I did, I mean there's so many of these things that show up when we carry a father wound.
Jerry Henderson:So now let's talk about how you can begin to heal the father wound. I'm going to talk about it from evidence-based practices. Number one is attachment-focused therapy or coaching. This is when you get into things like emotionally-focused coaching therapy or things like internal family systems, which I absolutely love and I'm trained in. I've just had such an incredible experience seeing clients transform through the work of IFS. So why does it work? Well, because it creates a safe place for you to have a corrective experience of somebody who's trained to help you work through those exiled parts of you how to integrate the pain, how to understand that those things were not your fault, for you to show up as your own healer in that space.
Jerry Henderson:Now the second thing that you can do to bring healing is reparenting exercises, and this is about you reparenting yourself, and it's very effective and very transformative, right? Because therapy and coaching does provide us with reparenting experiences that we connect with individuals and they give us a corrective experience. But what we can also do from that is learn how to give ourselves corrective experiences, reparenting ourself. This is so powerful. A lot of this work can take place through things like IFS, and this is about giving yourself what you needed when you were a little guy, when you were a little girl, those things that you needed to help you be whole, to help you feel safe. You now are becoming that parent to that part of yourself. It's a lot of inner child work and it's a lot of you showing up for you with compassion, with love, with acceptance, with encouragement, you being to you the father that you never had.
Jerry Henderson:What did you want from your father that you didn't get? Can you make a list of that? Can you look at that? And then can you find ways to give that to yourself with the utmost gentleness, with the utmost kindness? Can you see that version of yourself, at whatever age you were, whether it was that you didn't have a dad and you wish you did and you looked at everybody who had one and it was so painful to realize that you didn't have that. And maybe you wondered what was wrong with you, that your dad left or wasn't a part of your life. Or maybe you did have the father in the home, but they were abusive, they were critical, they were emotionally unavailable. What did you need from them? What did you want? Make a list of that and then, throughout your day, find little ways to give that to yourself. And when you do give it to yourself, can I encourage you to celebrate it, acknowledge the fact that you are reparenting yourself and you are healing you.
Jerry Henderson:Another thing I'll talk about is forgiveness work. Now I'm going to tread lightly here because of my own story of feeling like I needed to get forced to forgive. When I say forgiveness, this is about you doing your work on your time. Now the research does show that forgiveness can be very healing, because when we understand that the forgiveness is about us right, the whole quote that when we forgive the prisoner we set free is ourselves. Forgiveness is about allowing us to let go of all that energy and the rumination and all of that stuff that's trapped inside of us, to let that go so that we can move on with our lives in a way that feels more healthy and whole. So I encourage you, just explore it. What would it look like for you? And if it feels like it's something that you want to walk towards, maybe you get somebody who can help you through that process. Or maybe you write out a letter or go through some type of practice to help you release that energy, of practice to help you release that energy.
Jerry Henderson:Now, another thing that can help is grief work, allowing yourself to grieve the father that you didn't have. This is important. It's really important work, because even if you had a father that was in the house, but they weren't the type of father that you needed, or you had the absence of a father in a home, give yourself permission to grieve what you lost, what you didn't have, and what this is doing is it's allowing you to honor the reality of it. Give yourself permission to experience the pain, the loss, because the father wound doesn't get healed when it's ignored. Part of it getting healed is grieving it, allowing yourself to know that you had every right to a safe, loving father and that you didn't have it caused a lot of suffering and a lot of pain in your life, and acknowledging that through writing a letter about it or allowing yourself to experience those emotions instead of denying them. It's going to be a really important part of the healing journey.
Jerry Henderson:Now, of course, the things that I've covered about how to heal the father wound. It's not comprehensive. It's just some things that I found helpful for me and I think they'll be helpful for you. So use what feels right and the other things that don't feel right, just set them aside for now, and if they come back later as some tool that you could use later, then that's great. But what I want to encourage you in more than anything be kind to yourself as you're going through that process.
Jerry Henderson:Be gentle with yourself as you're going through that process, and if you need help on that journey of learning how to heal the father wound, I want to invite you to set up a free strategy call with me. You can do that by going to jerryhendersonorg or by simply seeing the show notes in this episode. We'll spend a full hour together. You can share your story, your journey, and as we connect and spend that time together, we can see if it makes sense for us to continue to do some work together to help you on your journey of healing. Well, thank you so much for joining this episode of the Permission to Love podcast, and if you found the content of this podcast episode helpful, I would encourage you to share it with somebody else, because if it's making a difference in your life, it'll make a difference in their life as well. And finally, I want to remind you that you are worthy of your own love.
