The Hidden Father Wound: My Dad Loved Me, But There Were Things I Needed

My father loved me. He wasn't abusive. He wasn't a bad man. He worked hard, provided for our family, and did the best he could with what he had. Yet as I began reading Where Were You When I Needed You, Dad?, I realized something that changed how I viewed my own journey:

My father loved me, and there were still things I needed that I didn't receive.

In this deeply personal episode of Worthy & Abundant, I share my reflections on the father wound—not to blame our parents, but to better understand how childhood experiences can shape our beliefs about ourselves.

We explore:

• What the father wound is 
• How emotionally unavailable or absent fathers can impact self-worth
• Why children often believe, "Maybe it's me"
• The connection between childhood experiences, validation, and worthiness
• How healing begins with compassion instead of blame
• Why you have always been worthy

If you've ever struggled with people-pleasing, perfectionism, seeking approval, feeling "not enough," or believing you have to earn love, I hope this conversation reminds you that your past may explain some of the beliefs you've carried—but it doesn't get to define your future.

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Remember...

You are worthy.
You are abundant.
Your life is yours to create.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome back to Worthy and Abundant. Today I want to talk about something I honestly was not planning on talking about. So, a friend of mine, a former therapist, recently gave me bags and bags of books. She was cleaning out her bookshelves, and she gave me so many bags of books, and I donated many of the books, but there were a few that I decided to keep. One of them is called Where Were You When I Needed You Dad. It's about healing what many people call the father wound. And to be honest, I almost skipped over it, and I thought this probably doesn't really apply to me, but maybe it does. My dad was not abusive. He was not a bad person. He loved me. He worked a lot. He had his own trauma. He grew up in the depression. He had a lot of trauma around money. But as I kept reading, I found myself stopping and highlighting and reflecting. And I realized something that stayed with me. I think that my father loved me, and there were still things I needed that I didn't receive from my dad. So those two things can still be true. We can have a loving parent that didn't provide everything we needed. And this is not about blaming our parents. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The older I get, I have more and more compassion for my parents and more understanding that they did the best they could with what they had and what they knew and their capacity. And I can see now how he was carrying things I probably never could have understood as a child. But children don't experience our parents' intentions. They experience whether they felt seen, heard, and safe, and whether they felt encouraged and supported. And there was very little affection in my home as well, like physical affection. But anyway, so when I found this book and started reading it, I thought this is powerful information, and it's likely partly why I teach worthiness. And when our needs are not met, we often create beliefs about ourselves that follow us into adulthood. So what is the father wound? The father wound is not an official diagnosis. It's simply a way of describing the impact that an emotionally absent, distant, critical, inconsistent, or unavailable father can have on a child's beliefs about themselves. Sometimes fathers are physically absent, divorce, whatever, addiction, who knows? Sometimes they're living in the same house but emotionally unavailable, or they work all the time. Sometimes they're wonderful providers, but never learned how to express affection or encouragement because no one ever showed them how to do that. So that doesn't make them bad, it makes them human. Let's be honest. So as I was reading the book, I started asking myself some questions, and it's very powerful. So what beliefs did I, little than that, develop because of the experiences I had as a child? And I realized spending all this time teaching women about worthiness, that maybe it's because I spent years learning how to feel worthy. And so I have some questions. As I read, I found myself wondering: do I sometimes look for validation outside of myself? Do I feel like I have to earn love? Do I overachieve because accomplishment makes me feel valuable? Have I confused being productive with being worthy? Do I sometimes feel like I need to prove myself? And maybe you've asked yourself some of these same questions. My father was not perfect, and neither was my mother, and neither am I. He worked very hard. He loved me. He simply didn't always have the emotional capacity to give me what I needed, and he wasn't around a lot because he worked long hours. He was a pharmacist. But the beautiful thing is, I don't have to stay stuck in those beliefs that my child Linda, the little Linda, created decades ago. And neither do you.