Understanding & Healing The Father Wound

Healing the Father Wound: Why Fathers Matter, Why Father’s Day Hurts, and How to Heal

The episode, released ahead of Father’s Day, addresses both those who celebrate and those for whom the day triggers grief from a deceased, estranged, abusive, or emotionally unreachable father, naming anniversary grief, disenfranchised grief, and ambiguous loss. It presents a research-grounded and faith-integrated deep dive on why fathers uniquely matter, citing biological and developmental findings (prenatal voice recognition, oxytocin and brain changes, rough-and-tumble play, vocabulary effects, epigenetic trauma) and a Swiss study linking fathers’ church practice to children’s future attendance. It defines the “father wound” as a clinically recognized pattern affecting body, relationships, and prayer, explains different impacts on daughters and sons, and shows how paternal experience shapes God image versus God concept, including distorted God images and Catechism 239. It outlines seven healing steps, including trauma-focused therapies, Catholic pastoral pathways, and careful forgiveness models, and offers a free 100-page e-book.

00:00 Fathers Day Mixed Emotions
01:36 Episode Roadmap
02:53 Three Types of Grief
04:35 Fatherlessness by the Numbers
05:22 Four Core Father Functions
06:41 Brain Science of Fatherhood
09:34 Dads Shape Faith Practice
11:03 Consequences of Absence
12:04 Defining the Father Wound
13:18 Somatic Armor and Prayer
16:06 Daughters vs Sons Impacts
19:26 Present but Absent Fathers
23:02 Coping Modes in Adulthood
25:46 Causes and Divorce Nuance
26:38 When Divorce Happens
27:24 God Concept vs Image
29:00 Brain Systems Under Stress
31:17 How God Images Form
34:48 Father Traits Shape God
36:48 Schemas and Distorted Images
40:04 Catechism on Fatherhood
41:33 Why Fathers Day Hurts
43:26 Healing Steps and Therapy
46:53 Forgiveness Without Bypassing
49:01 Saints and Final Takeaways

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Father's Day is coming up, and for some of you it's a wonderful day. And for others, it may bring up some old wounds as well. Maybe you'll pick out a card, you'll plan a brunch, you'll think about a man who loved you well, who showed up, who saw you, who made you feel safe in this world. And if that's you, then I am so thankful for that man. So tell him, hug him if you can, and pray for him if you can't. But there's also some of you, a lot of you, who next Sunday might be a very hard day of the year. And not many people are acknowledging it. Because for you, maybe your dad is no longer alive and the grief may come back every June. Maybe for some of you, your dad is alive, but you haven't spoken in years, or you wish that you hadn't spoken. And every conversation leaves you feeling more lost and hurt. Well, in this episode, we are going to take a deep dive into the role of fathers, the incredibly important role that God calls these men to, and how important they are in our lives, how they shape our image of the outside world and God, and most importantly, how to help fathers show up and be the man that God needs them to be, and perhaps more importantly, how to heal some of those wounds if they haven't. Now I'm releasing this early because I didn't want it to be a downer for Father's Day, but it's right around the corner. So what do you say? And make sure you stay till the end because I'll tell you how to get my free 100-page ebook, Healing the Father Wound, that I created just for you. Let's go. Now, this episode is not just for the wounded. It's for everyone. It's for everyone who's had a dad, wonderful or devastating or somewhere in between. But it is especially for those whom Father's Day, silent prayer, even the word father carries a weight that is hard to acknowledge. The promise for this episode is a research-grounded, clinically real, faith-integrated deep dive into fathers. You all know that when I start doing research, I just can't help myself. And I did a deep dive on fatherhood. So this is gonna be a long one. Welcome to the couch, put your feet up, grab something to drink. Let me tell you where we're going. First, we're gonna talk about why fathers uniquely in the brain science on this is absolutely amazing. Then we're gonna talk about the father wound, what it does to your body and to your relationships, not just in your earthly relationships, but also your relationship with God. We'll talk about how daughters and sons carry this wound differently. We'll talk about the God image bridge. This is how your earthly father shaped how you relate to God, why Father's Day specifically can trigger grief, the healing path, seven concrete research back steps, and then of course our Catholic theological landing. This is what the catechism itself says. So if you're ready, let's get started. Many people have a hard time talking about this out loud. There are some of you who are looking forward to Father's Day. It's gonna be a great day, but for those of you who are dreading it, chances are there's three main groups. The first are those whose fathers may have died, and anniversary grief is a predictable annual resurgence triggered by the calendar itself. And sometimes it's complicated grief, now formerly called prolonged grief disorder in the DSM, and sometimes it's just a hard day. The second group are those who may be estranged or have no contact or very little contact with their father, or those who are carrying a wound from a father who hurt them. And Kenneth Doka in 1987 named this disenfranchised grief, and our culture refuses to validate it still. There are no greeting cards for this kind of grief. There's no casserole, people don't come over, but the grief is still very real. And it can be hard to grieve who you needed your father to be, even if he's still alive. And then for the third population, there may be those of you whose fathers are alive, but emotionally unreachable. And Pauline Boss called this ambiguous loss. Maybe your fathers are physically present with a psychological absence, and closure may be hard to come by. These are the people whose dads are still here, but dad's not really here. So if you're listening right now and maybe you already have some tears welling up, that's your body recognizing the truth of what you've been carrying for a long time. And that's why we're here. It's a place of information and to start healing. There are so many people who are sitting in one of these categories this week, but there's almost no language in our culture for it. So today we're going to change that. If you feel like fist is everywhere right now, then your perception is correct and the numbers are sobering and staggering. One in four children in the US lives without a residential biological father. That's roughly 18 million kiddos. And that was back in 2022. Fathers are absent from approximately 80% of single parent homes. Not the mothers, but the fathers. And 40% of all US births in 2022 were to unmarried women. That is a 400% increase since 1970. This is not a fringe issue. This is a huge part of our culture, unfortunately, right now. And it is producing measurable generational consequences that we are going to walk through today. Developmental researchers have identified four specific things that healthy fathers tend to deliver to their kids. And none of these is exclusive to fathers, but all of them are more readily delivered by an attuned father. The first function is separation from the mother-child bond. Dad helps the kids individuate and be adventurous. Function two, authorization of risk and exploration. Try it, climb higher. I've got you if you fall. Function three, validation of identity through recognition. I see who you are and I am proud of you. And function four, establishment of rules and structure. Boundary setting that feels like love, not punishment, creates a healthy relationship between the child and rules and authority for the rest of their lives. Mom is the original home. Dad is what we call the first ambassador of the outside world. And when these four functions are unfulfilled in kids or any of them are, kids don't just shrug and move on. They can build compensatory strategies that work as survival in childhood and then are integrated into their identity and adulthood. So if you've ever wondered why you keep doing certain things that you do, maybe your father wound might be answering questions that you didn't know you're asking. Let's keep going. Before we look at the wound, I want to share with you a handful of findings from the research that I found absolutely fascinating. These are things that a lot of people don't know about what fathers contribute biologically beyond just their DNA contribution. First, let's talk about fetal voice recognition. Late in pregnancy, fetuses, babies respond distinctly to their father's voice. There was a study that showed this with fetal heart rate monitoring in the third trimester. The baby's brain catalogs the dad's auditory signature before birth and responds to it. Is that amazing? Second, skin-to-skin contact with dad raises oxytocin in the baby and the father. And fathers who hold their baby skin to skin for at least 15 minutes a day on the day of birth and three days after report significantly stronger attachment months later. Third, fathers' brains literally restructure during the late part of pregnancy of their wife and after birth. They have higher oxytocin, lower salivary testosterone, and this is not a feminization of men. This is evolutionary optimization. Low testosterone and high oxytocin means increased patients, sensitivity, and staying close to the nest. Four, let's talk about rough and tumble play. Father-led play with the right warmth and dominant sharing builds emotion regulation, working memory, and pro-social behavior. The father-child play can uniquely predict emotion regulation in preschool, independent from mom's play. It's like the child learns the boundary between fun and danger. Fifth, father's vocabulary uniquely predicts child language development at 36 months. A 2006 study showed that dads use more complex vocabulary with kids. They ask more why questions, more what questions. And this is where something called the bridge hypothesis comes in. The bridge hypothesis says that dad bridges the child to the broader social world, which is why we say he's the ambassador to the outside world. And sixth, this one is a bit more haunting. Parental stress is inherited epic through sperm cells. Research from Holocaust survivors showed documented paternal line transmission of trauma responses in humans. This is wild. So half of our DNA is from the dad, but epigenetic changes mean that certain experiences and hormones can tag part of that DNA and turn it on so that gene is expressed in a new way in future generations. We will come back to this. Dads are not backup quarterbacks, they are not babysitters. They are running completely different and very important plays and coaching in a child's life. Now let's talk about a study that I think every parish in America needs to know about, but almost nobody does. In 1994, the Swiss government did a national census-based study. It was published in 2000. The tenth line for the finding, in their words, was it is the religious practice of the father of the family that above all determines future attendance or absence from church in children. Let's look at the numbers. If both parents attend church regularly, then 33% of children become regular churchgoers. 4% are irregular churchgoers, and about a quarter don't practice. If only the mom attends, then only 3% of children become regular churchgoers. 38% do not go at all. That is right. But if only dad goes and not mom, then 38% of children become regular churchgoers. So dad's regularity alone holds the line. Why might this be? Because if dad is the ambassador of the outside world, then dad's saying that this value system is important and it's essential for safety in the outside world gets encoded into our nervous system. Mom represents internal safety of the home. Dad represents the outside world and objective ultimate authority. So if dad dismisses a belief system, then the child's limbic system categorizes that belief system as irrelevant to survival in the real world. So if you're wondering why our parishes might be struggling to retain the next generation, this is a really important place to start with the death. When fathers are absent at the scale that we're losing them, though, that bill will come due one day. And we know that 63% of youth self-exits come from fatherless homes. That is five times the average. Now that's correlational, not causal, but stay with me. Of homeless and runaway children come from fatherless homes. That's two-thirds the average. Fatherless boys are two and a half times more likely to be incarcerated by the time that they're 30. But here's an important caveat: father absence doesn't cause these outcomes by themselves. We think that there are some confounding variables here, like poverty, intergenerational trauma. But the most rigorous causal studies, McClanahan reviewed 47 of these, still did find direct effects of father absence on adult mental health beyond adjusting for income. So on the positive side though, there was a review of 24 longitudinal studies that found 22 of the 24 showed significant positive effects from engaged fathers. The wound doesn't look the same in every child. So let me show you what this actually looks like. We need to define this because we may have heard of the term the father wound, and it gets defined very loosely. It is not in the DSM, so it's not an official diagnosis, but it is a clinically recognized constellation of effects. This is a recurring pattern of adult psychological and somatic experience that is traced back consistently to specific developmental conditions in the father-child relationship. So here is the attachment science. By adulthood, your mental representations of mother and father have largely fused into a single internal working model of relationships. And that single template is the lens through which you interpret almost every important relationship in your life. Your spouse, your boss, your friends, and yes, even God. And when the father relationship has been disrupted by absence or harshness or unpredictability, the internal working model carries those distortions further. And when we say absent father, we're not just talking about a father who is not physically in the home. A father can be in the home, but not emotionally there or not emotionally stable. We'll talk more about that in a minute. Now, if you have ever wondered why when you kneel to pray, your shoulders start to tighten, maybe your jaw clenches and your chest feels really hollow, or you've ever sat down for silent adoration and you actually felt more anxious and high alert, like you need to escape and you don't know why. This is not a lack of virtue. It's likely something called somatic armor. Somatic means the body. The clinical somatic researchers describe three signs of what we call an armored heart in adults that have father wounds. The first is this a braced chest and jaw. This can be chronic muscular tension that physically suppresses deep breathing and seals in the softer emotions like grief and fear or a longing for touch. If you constantly had to look and scan to make sure that you didn't do something or upset dad, then your body likely helped you with that by regulating your breathing, making it shallow so that you can't really be in touch with those deeper emotions, can't have the needs that might be difficult, and then dad doesn't get mad. The second is what we call a somatosensory association. This is where you detach from the body sensations. Essentially, we separate the head from the rest of the body. So if the body is where all the painful feelings are, then we just stay in our heads. The third is called limbic resonance blockade. This is your capacity to rest and a felt sense of safety. And this is compromise for many people with a father wound. And this is why silent prayer, contemplation, stillness, or surrender can feel like a threat, not relief. Now it's not the only reason why, but it is a reason why. Think about it. If you were constantly scanning to make sure that dad was not going to be upset and everything was gonna be okay, then relaxing and closing your eyes and not having any defenses feels like a very scary thing to do. And even though you may not live with that type of father anymore, it's been coded into your biology from so much lived experience. So you grow up, but that feeling of tension in the room, it stays in your body. Here is the bottom line: your inability to meditate or pray or feel relaxed is not necessarily a moral failing. It could be your biology doing exactly what it was trained to do, to keep you alive based on what we might call an outdated software or operating instructions. Armor can't be reasoned with. When a father is absent, though, it doesn't have one independent outcome. It can produce two different types of injuries based on the gender of the child. So let's talk about how it affects daughters first. In a 2000 dual cohort study of girls in the US and New Zealand, researchers found that daughters whose fathers left before the age of five were seven to eight times more likely to experience adolescent pregnancy. Anne Weber did a meta-analysis of over 33 studies at 70,000 girls that confirmed that father absence actually accelerates puberty and minarchy. And sibling comparison designs rule out genetics. It's environmental. That is probably the single wildest finding that I saw that the absence of a father can literally accelerate puberty and decrease the age of minarchy. Why might this be? I mean, is that wild? Theology of the body at its finest, I'll tell you how. Life history theory explains this. When the female nervous system detects an unstable environment, which can be signaled by father absence, physically or emotional absence, and maternal stress in response to this, then the endocrine system accelerates reproductive maturity. So this is a biological necessity. If resources are scarce, then it's important to reproduce sooner so that we can pass on our genes because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. This is biology executing a survival protocol. It's also the body making visible what's invisible, spiritual and divine. In adult relationships, there can be a repetition compulsion. This is where daughters with absent or wounding fathers often unconsciously partner with men who replicate the original womb. Available, safe men can feel wrong on some level, even though they can't explain it. And distant men or wounding men may feel familiar in her body, even though her brain knows there's something not right here. Also, a daughter's body image is affected by an absent or wounding father. Paternal warmth predicts adult body satisfaction more than maternal warmth, which means that dads more than moms teach daughters that they are capable, that they are good. And when that recognition is absent, then daughters often grow into women who are aesthetically or physically self-conscious and existentially uncertain as well. Now let's talk about the sons. Without a father modeling a regulated masculinity, men can bifurc into one of two patterns. One is a very rigid hypermasculinity where there's performative aggression, overcompensating that was never modeled or conversely, they can take on a type of quiet avoidance where there's avoidance of commitment, avoidance of fatherhood, avoidance of authority themselves. And but they are often searching silently for substitute father figures. And the same-sex transmission is stronger, which means mothers to daughters or fathers to sons. So paternal mental health more strongly affects sons, and maternal mental health more strongly affects daughters. Now, here's the section that I think a lot of you are gonna need the most. Let's talk about the present but absent father. This is the dad who was there but never really there. And we tend to see this, sadly, a lot in Catholic circles because we do hold such a high value of marriage that many times people will stay married in high conflict marriages, but without getting the help that they need. So high conflict intact marriages produce worse childhood outcomes than divorce on psychological adjustment and self-esteem. I know this is often not what we hear, and marriage is great. I am all about marriage. I love helping marriages. And yes, divorce can be very harmful for children, but just staying together is not enough. The conflict, not the marital status, is what does the damage. So if you grew up in a home where your parents stayed together, but the air was always thick with contempt, then your wound is very real. And even though the culture may have told you just to be grateful. So there's a lot of research on the effect that harsh fathers have. There's cross-cultural research from China and Germany and the US and the Caribbean shows that these types of harsh fathers or authoritarian fathers, which is the low warmth but high demand, actually predicts anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, aggression, and low a behavioral genetic twin study confirms that this effect is causal, not genetic. It means that these are studies that take identical twins that have the same DNA that are separated at birth and they're raised by different families. And so we are able to weed out a lot of the genetic variables. So we know this is not just a genetic issue. This is actually the environment, the attitude, the mood, the regulation of the father that has these damaging effects. And a 2024 study confirmed that fathers who show narcissistic traits had children who had significantly poor relational and psychological outcomes. And this pattern is recognizable. Maybe you recognize it in yourself sometimes. There's hyper adaption to others' needs. This is that chronic people pleasing. There can be a chronic feeling of never being good enough, or a toxic perfectionism, a fear based perfectionism, not just doing good because it's the right thing to do. And there can be difficulty understanding and defining your own emotions. Because if growing up you had to keep everything squashed down to keep dad okay, then you didn't have the important development. Developmental skills of experiencing emotions and having emotionally mature parents that can help you understand what you were feeling and how to express them. So, researcher Pauline Boss spent her entire career, starting in the 1970s, researching absent fathers or present but absent fathers. And she coined the term ambiguous loss theory. These are the words I was talking about that we often don't have to express our longing or our grief for a dad who was there, but not the kind of father that we needed him to be. And of course, nobody on earth is perfect, but there's not perfect, and then there's lacking in some very profound and fundamental ways. You know the difference, you feel it in your body. Ambiguous loss helps us understand how when dad was there but not there can still create a wound and a grief. So the father who was there but not there gave you a sense that you were guarded, you were safe, the bills were paid, but you weren't truly known. You were managed but not loved. It's like growing up with a security guard, not a father. When someone experiences a father wound, it can express itself in different coping modes. Not everyone copes with a father wound in the same way. And I'm pulling from schemate therapy here. One mode could be the compliant surrenderer. This is where you learn to make yourself very small. You say yes when you really want to say no, and you bend and contort and pretzel to authority, not from love, but from fear. Now, spiritually, the compliant surrenderer may serve the church out of guilt, not love. You could volunteer for everything, but you're burning out quietly and secretly holding a lot of resentment. This confuses self-obliteration with humility. And as I mentioned, you can also carry some very deep but unexpressed resentment. If you've spent your faith life saying yes because you were afraid of what would happen if you said no, then that may not be coming from a place of virtue. It could be coming from a place of fear and survival. Another way of coping is called the spiritualizing detached protector. And this is actually very common among Catholic adults. When a vulnerable emotion threatens to surface, comes up, then this mode defaults instantly into theology. This is that separate the body from the head. These are scripture verses, doctrinal certainty, long perfected, accurate sentences that exist to avoid feeling. So if you've ever caught yourself answering a friend's pain with a Bible verse or a platitude instead of your presence, then this might be a mode that's operating in you. Another coping mode is called the Pharisaical critic. This is where we have an internalized voice of harshness. The harsh, critical voice of the earthly father gets internalized. So you may not be living with him physically, but he can still be living in your brain and in your heart. This is the person who beats themselves up preemptively. So this can even express itself in scrupulosity, confessing the same sin repeatedly, never sure of forgiveness, always scanning and feeling really bad about yourself. And if you're beating yourself up first, then at least on some level you feel ready for the criticism that you're preparing for from the outside world. And then there's one other coping mode that can sometimes come up, and it's called the Hellenistic schema of apathy. This is God as Aristotle's moved mover, God as the clockmaker who winds up the universe and just lets it go. This is the exact opposite of a God who was with us in our sadness, who weeps at Lazarus' tomb, who is with us in the difficult moments. So God is the authority and he's fully capable, but it's really hard for you to feel that he's with you whenever you struggle. So, what are some causes of father absence? Well, yes, divorce is one of them. And there was a meta-analysis of 92 studies that, yes, showed that children of divorce score lower on adjustment, conduct, self-concept, and social relations. But this is critical. The conflict model still holds. It's the conflict that damages more than the divorce itself. And for some families who live with an objectively abusive father, divorce is actually the stress-reducing event. And we know that, yes, overall it is absolutely better for kids to be raised in an intact home with a mom and a dad who have healthy ways of coping. We also know that 80% of children of divorce don't have the lasting effects that we once feared. So this is the nuance here. I'm not saying divorce is good. I'm saying try everything that you can. But if you are one of those people who is in an abusive marriage, who is with a partner who is unwilling to work on things, and you think that you're staying just for the kids, this new research, which is strong research, it's a combination of 92 studies, shows that might not be the case. There's other ways that fathers can be absent, of course, from incarceration or from death or from depression and mental illness, from military deployment, or from addiction. So this is context, and these principles that we've been walking through, the absent father, apply to all of them. So it's a much more nuanced picture than maybe we thought before. Did you know that your God image was likely shaped by your father? Researchers have made a critical distinction that most Catholics haven't heard about. This is the difference between a God concept and a God image. So the God concept is what you believe about God. This is at the head level. It's the theology, the catechism answers, all of the things held on the left brain, all you know and believe intellectually about God. But your God image is what you feel God is like. This is the felt sense when you walk into a chapel, that flinch when you imagine that you've been seen by him. This is the heart. This is the body sense. This helps us understand how you can know that God is good and loving, our God concept, but have a God image or a felt sense that's something very different. And the clinical reality here is that most adults have a very orthodox God concept, but a very wounded God image. They believe that God is love, but God feels distant. And they believe that God is merciful, but it's hard to feel like God's not trying to punish you. This connecting of head and heart that we often talk about, it has a name now. And we know that it was likely shaped by the relationship that you had with your father. I'll try to give you the clearest explanation to one of the most painful experiences that a lot of Catholics carry when this God concept and God image don't align. The God concept, it lives in this cortically dominant left hemisphere semantic memory. This is words. This is the part of your brain that's used for language and logic and explicit belief. And this is shaped by catechism, by theology, by scripture, by learning. But your God image lives in a subcortical, right hemisphere, limbic memory. The amygdala, the limbic system, this is the part of your brain that handles emotion, attachment, threat detection, felt safety. And it is subconceptual, which means there aren't really words for it. And it's shaped by your earliest attachment experiences, but especially by the father. Activation conditions are different. So the God concept is activated when we reflect on doctrine or have a theological conversation or prayer that involves thinking. But the God image is activated when we're in crisis, when we feel like we're a failure, when we're in isolation, or when we're in contemplative prayer. So here is the paradox. Under stress, the brain defaults to the implicit subcortical relational programming. It defaults to the felt sense and it bypasses all of the other things that you know about God. Let me give you a roller coaster analogy. Let's say you're going to Six Flags and you read the entire safety manual. You see that everything is made from reinforced titanium. You know that you are safe. But when you get to the top and you drop on that roller coaster, it doesn't matter. Your stomach sinks and your nervous system feels like you're going to die. This is the same brain, but two systems, but in states of crisis or failure or isolation or cresting the top of the roller coaster, our limbic system or our felt sense is always going to win and dominate. In other words, theology is important. It creates the context or the container, but it cannot reach our limbic system without help. It's not that there's a problem with your faith. It's actually a problem of neuroscience, and there are some solutions. There were three landmark theorists that help explain the bridge from Earthly Father to God the Father, Rizzuto, Witz, and Grandquist. Now you've probably heard of Dr. Paul Witz if you've done any reading about the father wound in Catholicism. But Henry Razuto in 1979 wrote about the birth of the living God, the God image that forms in what we call transactional space between a subjective fantasy and an objective reality. This means that it's built from actual parents. But here was the key the God image persists that felt sense in our body indefinitely. It's how the psyche maintains an interpsychic homeostasis across crises and loneliness and ultimately the transition of death. Okay, I know we're getting pretty deep here, but stay with me here because this is really important. They also found that there are certain developmental milestones in how we create a God image. So at ages two to three, we call this the anthropomorphic baseline. God's traits equal the parent's traits. So think about a two-year-old or three-year-old. God has a face, he lives in the sky, he can do everything. And that's often how we feel about our parents. I mean, they control everything, they give us food, they give us shelter, and they can even pick you up and move you to the other side of the room. So, in a very real way, parents have very similar features to God when looked at through the eyes of a two or three-year-old. Now, the next phase is in early and middle childhood. This is the paternal adoration phase. This is the phase where children often adore the earthly father as if he were a type of deity. Warmth, strength, unpredictability, criticism, whatever dad's signature is, gets directly transcribed onto God. And when our basic emotional and physical needs are not met, this is different than overt abuse. There can be abuse, but also neglect. So when there is care, when there is not abuse, when there is attunement, then we map this on to what we think God is. And so things like abuse or neglect can have a direct impact on our view of. And in 1999, Paul Witz wrote The Faith of the Fatherless, and he talked about this defective father hypothesis that defective or absent fathers make believing in a personal God psychologically harder. But there's also this thing called the correspondence versus compensation hypothesis. This is where securely attached or healthily, healthfully attached people tend to inherit a God image that mirrors their parents' faith. But insecurely attached people may turn to God as a substitute or attachment figure. So it could go both ways. I remember a story from John Paul II, and after his mother died, his father took him to the church and said, This is Mary, she is your mother now. So similar concept, although that was with the mother. The point being, adults who have a secure relationship with God are likely either healthfully attached to their earthly father and they're just projecting that onto him, or they may have had a negative experience and turned to God to compensate for the deficits of the earthly father. But this is for believers. We're not talking about atheists. So it is hopeful to know that for some people, the wound isn't the end of the story. It can actually be a door. Now, this is where things get super exciting for me. When we have paternal acceptance, a father who believes in us and delights in us and is attuned to us, then we tend to predict God as being kind and loving. Plus, there's also better existential and religious well-being long term. If we have a father who was controlling, then we often predict that God is wrathful and controlling. That makes sense. But here was a crucial finding lacks discipline. So the dad who likes let you eat pancakes for dinner or cookies for breakfast, or the absence of a father by itself does not correlate with a God image change, a negative God image. It's the emotional tone of our interactions with dad that matters more than just presence or rules. So a dad who has strong warmth and strong rules often predicts a God image that is accessible and protective. But a dad that is neglectful or not attuned makes us feel like God is distant or indifferent to our needs. But here's what's interesting. In this study, one of the women still saw God as loving. So the fact that dad wasn't there didn't change what she thought God was like. But her belief that God was trustworthy, that he would show up when she was in need dropped to under 10%. And her belief that God is available to her, that that she can go to him when she is in need, it dropped almost 70%. So what this study is showing is that for women, the absence of a father often doesn't change what we know or believe about God, but it does change our felt sense of if we can trust him to show up for us. That's that felt sense. Father absence doesn't appear to damage a woman's God concept, but it can damage her felt sense that God will show up when she really needs him. And that makes a lot of sense. So how does all this mapping happen? It sounds very complicated, but I've created you a chart. This comes from schema therapy, which was developed by Jeffrey Young, and it gives us some more precise language. We're looking at five father schemas or paternal schemas, and each of these produces specific distorted God image, which means the way that we experience our fathers, if it's in a negative way, has a different and predictable effect on how we will see God. Let's walk through it. Look at row one, defectiveness and shame schema. This is often from a father who is constantly critical or devaluing or even abusive. The God image that tends to form is that God is disgusted, he's judgmental. Let's look at row two, the abandonment and instability schema. This can come from a dad who has departed or died or divorced or was emotionally unavailable, and it predicts a God image that God is unreliable or that he's silent. Row three, emotional deprivation schema. This can come from a dad who has silent withholding. Maybe he's a cold father. Maybe he withheld blessing from you. This predicts an image of God that he's cold and that he's indifferent to your pain. Then there's the unrelenting standards or self-punitive schema, and this can come from a dad who has performance-based love. He may be legalistic or rigid. You get a lot of dad's approval as long as you get good grades or win the game. And this can predict a God image as a harsh overseer and someone who is never satisfied with you. And then there's subjugation and self-sacrifice schema, and this can come from a dad who demanded compliance and punished you with anger when you didn't comply. And this can predict a God image that God is an oppressive tyrant. So if you've recognized yourself in any of these rows, just know that you've identified the wound. And identifying it is a huge step in healing. It doesn't mean that you're stuck. Now, Dale and Juanita Ryan, in their life guide Bible study, named eight specific distorted images of God that recur across a lot of the pastoral counseling that they did. And Insight Anchors added three Catholic-specific names. And together you get a reference guide that hundreds of thousands of people have used. So when our image of God is distorted, it can look like these eight. One, like the God of impossible expectations versus the God of compassion. Two, the emotionally distant God versus the God of empathy and grace. Three, an inattentive God versus a God who knows us intimately. Four, the abusive God versus the God who heals. Five, the unreliable God versus the God who's trustworthy. Six, the God who abandons versus the God who pursues, seven, the God who withholds versus the God who provides. And eight, the God who's weak versus a God who's all powerful. And the Catholic-specific names come from insight anchors, the Drill Sergeant God, the Statue God, or the Robber God. And the reason I'm introducing these to you is not so that you'll learn them or memorize them, but sometimes when we are dealing with a father wound or a God wound or a distorted image of God, it can be really helpful to have some words to know and to name what we're talking about, because then that moves that into conscious awareness and then we can work on changing it. Long before any of this neurobiology was known, before schematherapy or attachment research, the Catholic Church already named the exact problem that this whole episode is about. So let's go to Catechism 239. By calling God Father, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority, and that he is, at the same time, goodness and loving care for all of his children. It continues that the language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood or motherhood. He's neither man nor woman, he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard. No one is father as God is father. All of this to say human fathers receive their fatherhood in so much as they mirror or image God the Father. It's not the other way around. But it makes sense that when our first experiences are of our earthly fathers, that we can kind of work backwards and map that onto God. Does that make sense? And there's actually an entire school of thought and works of scholarship that suggest that Martin Luther's own relationship with an abusive father is part of what damaged his God image and spurred the Protestant Reformation. That's pretty big, but the science makes sense. Okay, so if Father's Day hurts, then we need to talk about why. There can be anniversary reactions, which are predictable annual resurgences of grief that are triggered by seasonal cues or date on the calendar. This could be the smell of the season that he died in or the angle of light. It could be the feel of the air. Your body remembers what your conscious mind has stopped remembering. And within typical grief, anniversary reactions are time-limited peaks. And I will link my video on birthday and here if you want to learn more about it. There can also be complicated grief, which is where their pain stays really high year-round and it significantly impairs function. So if this is you, just know that it's treatable. But if you have a peak at a certain point during the year or at an anniversary, it doesn't mean that you're somehow back at step one or that you haven't griefed right. These are predictable and known. Father's Day can intensify disenfranchised grief. This is that grief that didn't have a name because we have a cultural demand to celebrate. And that can overshadow the grief that we carry if you're someone who has a father who is there but not there in any of the different ways that we talked about. There can be the ambiguous loss that Pauline Boss talked about, where dad is physically there but psychologically absent. That can be the workaholic dads or the addicted dads or the cold dads or the dad who it felt like looked through you instead of at you. And with this, the hard work is to learn to live well with what is unreal. So if Father's Day is hard, whichever of these categories seems to fit, just know that there are names for the particular type of grief that you may be carrying. And most parishes have a liturgy for the first kind, but we don't really have rituals for the other. So that's why I'm trying to name them here, give them a name, and then we can talk about what healing looks like. So then what do we actually do with all of this? Because here's the thing just forgive him and move on does not work. Because that is not talking about real forgiveness. It is often talking about spiritual bypassing. Here are seven concrete steps by naming the grief. What are you feeling? What is the name? By earn secure attachment. Our attachment style is changeable across adulthood. So your nervous system can learn new templates or new operating systems with corrective emotional experiences. That often happens in therapy or state. Relationships with mentors or in your faith community. Three, there's trauma-focused therapy, things like EMDR or trauma-focused CBT, schematherapy. These bypass the left brain and work to heal at the limbic level where the wound actually lives. Five, there are Catholic pastoral pathways like Siemens Healing of Memories, Heart of the Father ministries, ignition gospel contemplation, 500 years of Catholic pastoral practice doing what neuroscience is describing is helpful. And number six, forgiveness when it's done right. Worthington has a reach model of forgiveness, and Siemens also described three tests to know if forgiveness is real or a spiritual bypassing. Step seven, spiritual fatherhood. Find it in the church among priests or mentors or guards like St. Joseph. I'm gonna walk you through the most important of these, so keep staying with me. If your wound goes very deep, if there was abuse or severe rejection, chronic neglect, please consider trauma-focused therapy. There's four modalities with really strong evidence. There's EMDR, internal family systems, trauma-focused CBT, and schematherapy. And I'll tell you where you can find more information about that. These work through limited reparenting, like where the therapist actually steps into those developmental deficits and provides within appropriate professional boundaries what your father maybe failed to give you, like emotional validation and warmth and firm benevolent limits. There's also imagery rescripting where you can re-enter a childhood scene of paternal trauma. Now, you don't want to do this alone, you do it with a therapist. The therapist can enter the scene with you and help you to reimagine or to stop the abuse or to rescue the vulnerable child. And there are faith-integrated versions where you let Christ enter the scene as a protector. There's also something called chair work where we use different chairs that reflect different internal modes. So the internalized harsh father may get played out by sitting in one chair and saying all of the harsh things that the harsh father said. But then you may get up and walk to the other side of the room and sit in another chair and then confront or to say back with the healthy adult self. And the walking and the sitting in different places helps your nervous system understand that these are just scripts, they're not you. And you can learn which chair, so to speak, you're going to live from. Now, all of these are far more complicated than this. You'll need to work with a therapist. But if you've been thinking about therapy for years or you feel stuck, or your wound is specifically about authority or performance or feeling defective, then these are some of the modes of therapy that might be helpful. Within Catholic pastoral care, there's also an eight-week manualized God image therapy. There's also Heart of the Father ministries, Ignation Contemplation. Spiritual directors can help with these, but just know that we've been doing this work in the church for hundreds of years. So let's talk a little bit about forgiveness, reach, and Siemens 3 test. When we talk about forgiveness, we have to be very careful. This is not saying that what happened was okay. Forgiveness is also a process. And the reach model gives us five steps: recalling the hurt, not minimizing it, not catastrophizing it, just naming what happened. To empathize with the one who hurt you, this is a very hard step. Empathy is not an excuse, it just means trying to see the person who hurt you as a wounded person themselves. A is altruistic gift, offering the forgiveness as a gift, not because it's earned, but because it's a gift. C, commit publicly or privately. So forgiveness is an act of the will sometimes daily, and it takes time. And then H, hold on when the feelings come back. They will, and you renew the commitment. But remember that forgiveness and reconciliation are two different things. You can work on forgiveness and still not reconcile with an unhealthy person. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation with a person, especially if they're harmful. You can forgive someone and never see them again, and it's not a minimization. If the hurt is small, then there's nothing to forgive. The will has to act to replace the feelings, and then the feelings follow. But because Siemens knew that people will often use spiritual bypassing to just forgive him and move on, or to just offer it up and move on, he created three tests that we can ask ourselves to see if we've truly forgiven or not. So the first is called the resentment test. Does thinking about him still flare with bitterness inside? The responsibility test, are you taking responsibility for your healing or still waiting for him to apologize or someone else to fix you? And that's a hard one. And then number three, the reminder and reaction test. When something similar happens in real life, when something similar happens in our present day, does it trigger memories and responses and reactions from the past? You can't fake your way through any of these tests. The body will always tell the truth. And things like confession, the Lord's prayer and works of mercy, they actually rewire neural patterns from grievance to forgiveness. Let's end though with an important theological frame because for anyone in the audience who may be carrying a father wound, this is where we ultimately get to. John Paul II said that authentic fatherhood is a vocation, that it's grounded in the fatherhood of God as imaged by the incarnate son. Men become authentic fathers not by performing fatherhood, but by radiating the fatherhood of God Himself. And Henry Newman, when he wrote about the return of the prodigal son, said that we may begin as the younger son who runs, we may mature into the elder son who stays and resents. But the healing move here, Newman says, is to grow into the father position, to become the one who runs out, who embraces, and who restores. Saint Joseph is the silent, faithful father. He claimed a child who is not biologically his. He gave him a home, his name, his trade, his occupation. And Catholic in Recovery's testimonials describe men recovering from father wounds who call Saint Joseph the patron saint who shows them what fatherhood is supposed to be like. Saint Joseph models the father of presence and protection, work and faith out, out the sin of ego, without performance, without applause, just with attuned presence. And just know that Father Gabriel Amirth, I may be saying his name wrong, but he was the late Vatican chief exorcist, and he wrote a beautiful prayer for inner healing that specifically asked the Lord to heal wounds inflicted in the earliest years. And it's been used by thousands of people. I will make sure that I link it below. These are your takeaways. Fathers contribute something distinct, measurable, and biologically irreplaceable. Men, we need you. Your earthly father shaped you, whether he intended to or not. But a father wound is also very real. It is clinically recognized. It's important to know it's not your fault. Your felt experience of God may have been shaped by your father. And the catechism itself tells us that human parents can disfigure the face of fatherhood. It's not a private problem. The church knew this and has been talking about it for years. Healing from a father wound is possible. It doesn't mean that the hurt never happened. And there are times where the father wound can become the door to a real relationship with God. You're not alone. There are research-backed, church-backed paths forward. We have the science, we have the saints, we have the sacraments. So none of this is theoretical. And because I wanted to help, and there's so much to say about this topic, I created an ebook that's over a hundred pages that I'm happy to give you for free. I will drop a link in the comments and you can just tell me where to send it, and I'll send that over to you. If this is a hard week for you, just know that you are not alone, that it's not your fault, and that healing is possible. A good first step is to read more in that free ebook that I created. Take care of yourself this week and remember, there's always room for you and your fathers on the Catholic couch.