Is the father still alive?
Mine is. I’m currently no contact. My brother is in contact with him. I ask to not be involved/ given updates. It was hard to go no contact but it is best for me. I’m working on forgiveness. I think if he were to die tomorrow, I’d be sad but I wouldn’t go to the funeral.
Realizing your father isn’t a perfect human, but also understanding it’s not an excuse to be a terrible one. I used to mourn that I would never have a close relationship with my dad like my friends, but I grew up to be a functional and independent adult without one. I learned what red flags to look out for in a partner, I learned who is there for me when I need it the most, I learned how to live without regrets.
You learn how to be resourceful, but also who you can rely on when you’re in need. Part of healing is accepting that you have control over your narrative and who you let into your life. Forgiveness is for your own peace and not owed to others.
I personally don’t think I can heal from it, I’ve come to terms with it but I’ll never forgive him for what he did and the way that even when he was around he wasn’t.
Sadly I’ve tried various therapies and they haven’t healed that pain. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in 19 years and don’t ever plan on it in the future.
I don’t feel like you need to forgive to be able to move on, like people say you’re only hurting yourself but I don’t believe that. Forgiveness isn’t a necessity to be able to grow as a person.
I am no contact by choice. It’s been about 25 years. He was/is a terribly abusive, mean, mentally unstable man. He used to kick the shit out of me. Black eyes. Fat lips. Constantly.
Except for my body (going through peri right now) I am happy or good with every aspect of my life. No toxic people around. My job is stable and I don’t hate it. My relationships in general are very healthy. I travel when I can. I’m raising a very kind and wonderful child. My home is clean ish (most of the time).
My SO is very understanding and supportive. He knows my past traumas have shaped a huge part of who I am. He knows I have a terrible temper and get defensive a lot. We’ve learned to fight in a healthy way. I’ve learned to walk away till I’m calm. We talk it out when I’m calm. He gets it. I feel bad that he has to at all.
He also helps around the house and with parenting which is a huge burden lifted off of me.
I’ve done a lot of therapy. I constantly try different techniques. Yoga. Breathing/meditation. DBT. CBT. (I ordered a work book online).
Basically I have a stable life, I’m always working on my mental health. I try to keep a balanced lifestyle.
I can’t fully heal as I am the way I am because of him. My need and desire to feel safe and protected by a man is because he didn’t make me feel safe and protected. My fear that if I really open up and let myself be vulnerable with a male partner that they will leave me and I will have to be my own strength and support… is because that’s what he did to me in my childhood.
We had a horrible relationship throughout my teens and early 20s. We reconciled in my mid-late 20s and I became a mother. It was easier for me to view him as a grandparent than a parent. With age and less stress he has also matured. I can see now why he is the way he is and that he did his best. How he was raised impacted how he was as a parent.
I’m 38 and have not had any contact with my bio father since I was 13. I truly do not know if he is even alive. Nor do I care.
When I was younger until fairly recently, I was angry about it. How dare he. How could he? Even with the vast majority of my friends growing up coming from similar situations it just hurt and there was a lot of anger that I had no way to use up. Eventually it became background noise and I just didn’t think about it.
Interestingly, I have had a small relapse on those feelings since having my kid. My husband is the polar opposite of both of our fathers. Loving, attentive, dotes on her while still having boundaries. Literally the dad every kid deserves. And I have found myself with complicated feelings of “I am so glad we can give her this happy and healthy family” and “little gremlin has no idea how good she’s got it”.
Personally I had heard a tone about feminine wounds or mother wounds, I just applied similar principles to masculinity/father wounds. I pondered what the ideal male role model would be and then I became that for myself. I healed my mother wounds by mothering myself and healed my father wounds by fathering myself.
Eventually my dad just became another guy to me, I forgave him for being who he couldn’t when I dropped the hope that he would one day be that person.
You don’t need to forgive or even forget, just understand that the lack of him being in your life is on HIM and not you. Some never start being dads, some leave after a few years, some contact every now and again, and some you find out died and you never knew. Heal without him, those who have never had one are strong in a way that other people can never understand.
Sometimes, you realize that looking for linearity in healing will get you nowhere. That’s what I realized a few years ago in therapy. For so long, I was hoping for an apology, then my acceptance of it, then him wanting to be my dad again, or some kind of relationship with me. But I got an apology that wasn’t an apology. I tried to accept the apology before realizing it for what it was. And that hopeful linearity showed itself to be impossible.
I realized he was never sorry, and I now know that even if he was, I wouldn’t be able to forgive him. Some hurts are just too big to forgive.
Maybe you never completely heal or totally forgive. I got the apology and I can partially forgive, after anger and tears and bad choices. The thing is he will never be the parent I need, not even now, because he never was. Yes, he had his own reasons and traumas, he can’t turn time, he knows it did hurt me. I have a cordial relationship with him, there are good moments and times he did help me, but I see also that he never was the dad I wanted and he never will be and I have to accept that, it is what it is.
I don’t have anything to forgive because I don’t care and I don’t think about what forgiveness looks like anymore. He did what he did and that’s on him.
I healed when I let the issue go, accepted my reality and appreciated the good parts of my life and the people who did want to be in my life. I don’t have a good father and I’d rather not have a father than have to deal with my POS dad. I don’t need a father either when my mom was the one who raised me.
This is an interesting post to me and I’d like to thank everyone for their posts and experiences:
I have a four year old, she doesn’t know her dad even when we walk past him in the street. You don’t miss what you don’t know but I still worry about how this will impact her as she grows.
I didn’t have a father but I guess I just accepted that this is my journey? Idk. It never bothered me I never knew him. It’s like how can you miss something you’ve never known?
i don’t think you ever heal but as someone who lost their father when she was a child, it’s something you learn to grow with. i’ve passively accepted he’s gone and i just push it at the back of my mind
All it did was show me the incredible strength of women honestly. I have a solid support system of amazing women, my mother, my sister, my cousins. I didn’t need to forgive and heal because all it did was benefit me. We were much better off with him gone.
I had an absent father throughout my whole life. My sperm donor as I call him had a huge health scare which led him to finally quit the alcohol. He’s been sober for two years, I went to visit him last week and was going to stay for a couple weeks. However, after a day I started missing my mum, cat and boyfriend like crazy… I am well travelled, loved abroad a month at a time and have never missed home like that. I went up on Tuesday and left Friday, due to his inability to effectively communicate and actively listen. He didn’t ask me one question about me, all he did was talk about grudges he had for 40+ years, how he scares and threatens people, all the violent acts he’s done and how ‘tough’ he is. It was so negative, and I knew if I had grown up with him I’d probably have been subjected to a life of abuse. My passion and career is working with people and I’ve never met someone so full of hate, negative and dangerous. I’m still in shock I came from that, I just can’t believe we’ve the same DNA. For women here like me I didn’t need to forgive or heal, I’m thankful. Thank the universe we got lucky by not having someone so damaging in our lives. Blood isn’t family, people who show up are and I’ll die on that hill.
By not forgiving but by accepting that this is your reality. It is what it is and nothing is going to change. You can decide to keep expending useless energy towards resentment, or you can decide that all of that isn’t worth your time, effort or energy.
I haven’t healed from all of the nonsense mine did, nor have I forgiven him (may he rot in the ground wherever he is.) I have however healed from the anger I held towards him simply by accepting that he wasn’t going to change. All I could do was A) accept that, and B) go full NC with him.
I’ve always hated the notion of forgiveness. It’s used to pressure and manipulate victims into excusing what the abuser did and it’s warped into some bs narrative to try and make it beneficial for the victim.
I’ve been able to heal by cutting off/distancing from him and anyone who supported/enabled his abuse, processing everything and learning to live without having a father.
I was practically invisible in my family because of how emotionally neglected I was, so I only had myself to rely on anyway and got used to growing up without a father or really having anyone in general, since I didn’t have friends either.
I’m not as angry about it as I had been and being around the rest of my family, who haven’t changed either, is very hard and makes it extremely hard to heal because I’m constantly reminded of it all.
I think I’ll finally be able to really heal from my childhood and family abuse when I can move and start my own life to where I’m no longer stuck in the middle of it and constantly reminded of it.
I haven’t seen or heard from my father since I was 11. I’m 38 now. I couldn’t care less. I’m an adult and a mother now. It’s his loss that he will never know his only grandchildren. I’m not going to waste any bit of my life thinking about him.
Focus on overcoming the anger and resentment first, if you don’t it will affect every relationship you have (including the one with yourself) until you do and only create more wounds. It’s hard but its not impossible and it’s absolutely worth it
By not looking for closure and not looking at myself as a victim. Sometimes things happen to people, and for me normalizing it mentally has helped deal with it.
I think accepting that “healing” may never happen is a big start. I can have a happy life, I’m grateful for many things in life, but this is a wound I will always have. I may get lucky and forget about it sometimes, but at other times the pain returns and that’s just how it will always be for me. Some people may totally get past this but I think accepting and being gentle with yourself about the possibility that you may not is important.
I never got to have a relationship with my father. He passed away a few months ago and it was the weirdest feeling. I had a stepfather from the ages of 7 to about 28, when my mother divorced him. She might as well have divorced him ages ago and been a single mother, because he never contributed anything, besides money, and even still my mom had to work as well. He’d be home, but wouldn’t take care of my younger half siblings. He didn’t cook or clean. Had me and my twin do everything he should’ve been doing, while he’d sit in his man cave all day. All us kids grew to resent him. When my mom divorced him he completely cut contact with all of us, and it didn’t even make a difference because he had never been involved in our lives. So I feel like I never actually had a dad. It used to make me sad to think about it, and to see other girls with their dads. But I got married to a man who is such an involved father. He does absolutely everything for our kids, and I’m grateful that my kids are able to experience what I didn’t get to. And I often remind them if they ever try to say anything bad about their father.
An apology will never come. I made peace with my dad (I really don’t like calling him that), about 10 years before he died. I asked him about things that happened that I wanted to have a discussion about, but the first words out of his mouth were “I don’t remember that,” so I dropped it. He wasn’t going to change and I needed to make peace with that for me.
The positive part of all this is that I always knew where I stood with him. I never had to question it no matter how bad I knew he treated me in the past. He never wanted children, he never participated in my childhood because of him not wanting children.
Do I wish things were different between my dad and I? No, the best thing that has ever happened to me is the father my husband is to our children.
What gave me comfort- the fathers on tv shows who act like the kind of dad I wanted became very special to me. My “tv dads” were- the dad from Eight is Enough, the dad from My Three Sons, the dad from Little House on the Prairie, the grandpa from Heartland, and Mr. Rogers. Of course I know that these are just characters they were playing, but the father figure characters they created became my vision of the dad I wish I had. Somehow it gave me and still gives me comfort that dads like this exist even if only in the imagination of the writer and the actor’s portrayal of the character. It means this type of dad is possible. In real life, we will never know what these men were truly like, but their portrayal of these dad characters was outstanding.
I tried to heal it initially by finding another man to love me at any cost. He made me believe I was worthless. I still carry that core belief now as my ptsd won’t let me forgive or forget. The moment that impacted me the most was when I was molested by a friend’s dad. The entire time it was happening I was just staring at the door of the room, wishing in some fantasy world my dad would come rushing in to save me, kick the shit out of my friends dad but of course that didn’t happen. The night after I told my dad what happened. He blamed me for it. I then attempted suicide and was hospitalized. He did not come to see me at any point during my hospitalization.
I have frequent vivid nightmares about my Dad. Even though I’m grown up, moved out, there’s that little girl inside me who’s still trapped in that house, praying to God with every fiber of her being to be dead.
Comments
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Is the father still alive?
Mine is. I’m currently no contact. My brother is in contact with him. I ask to not be involved/ given updates. It was hard to go no contact but it is best for me. I’m working on forgiveness. I think if he were to die tomorrow, I’d be sad but I wouldn’t go to the funeral.
Realizing your father isn’t a perfect human, but also understanding it’s not an excuse to be a terrible one. I used to mourn that I would never have a close relationship with my dad like my friends, but I grew up to be a functional and independent adult without one. I learned what red flags to look out for in a partner, I learned who is there for me when I need it the most, I learned how to live without regrets.
You learn how to be resourceful, but also who you can rely on when you’re in need. Part of healing is accepting that you have control over your narrative and who you let into your life. Forgiveness is for your own peace and not owed to others.
I personally don’t think I can heal from it, I’ve come to terms with it but I’ll never forgive him for what he did and the way that even when he was around he wasn’t.
Sadly I’ve tried various therapies and they haven’t healed that pain. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in 19 years and don’t ever plan on it in the future.
I don’t feel like you need to forgive to be able to move on, like people say you’re only hurting yourself but I don’t believe that. Forgiveness isn’t a necessity to be able to grow as a person.
Therapy.
I am no contact by choice. It’s been about 25 years. He was/is a terribly abusive, mean, mentally unstable man. He used to kick the shit out of me. Black eyes. Fat lips. Constantly.
Except for my body (going through peri right now) I am happy or good with every aspect of my life. No toxic people around. My job is stable and I don’t hate it. My relationships in general are very healthy. I travel when I can. I’m raising a very kind and wonderful child. My home is clean ish (most of the time).
My SO is very understanding and supportive. He knows my past traumas have shaped a huge part of who I am. He knows I have a terrible temper and get defensive a lot. We’ve learned to fight in a healthy way. I’ve learned to walk away till I’m calm. We talk it out when I’m calm. He gets it. I feel bad that he has to at all.
He also helps around the house and with parenting which is a huge burden lifted off of me.
I’ve done a lot of therapy. I constantly try different techniques. Yoga. Breathing/meditation. DBT. CBT. (I ordered a work book online).
Basically I have a stable life, I’m always working on my mental health. I try to keep a balanced lifestyle.
I can’t fully heal as I am the way I am because of him. My need and desire to feel safe and protected by a man is because he didn’t make me feel safe and protected. My fear that if I really open up and let myself be vulnerable with a male partner that they will leave me and I will have to be my own strength and support… is because that’s what he did to me in my childhood.
We had a horrible relationship throughout my teens and early 20s. We reconciled in my mid-late 20s and I became a mother. It was easier for me to view him as a grandparent than a parent. With age and less stress he has also matured. I can see now why he is the way he is and that he did his best. How he was raised impacted how he was as a parent.
Still in therapy trying to work on myself.
I’m 38 and have not had any contact with my bio father since I was 13. I truly do not know if he is even alive. Nor do I care.
When I was younger until fairly recently, I was angry about it. How dare he. How could he? Even with the vast majority of my friends growing up coming from similar situations it just hurt and there was a lot of anger that I had no way to use up. Eventually it became background noise and I just didn’t think about it.
Interestingly, I have had a small relapse on those feelings since having my kid. My husband is the polar opposite of both of our fathers. Loving, attentive, dotes on her while still having boundaries. Literally the dad every kid deserves. And I have found myself with complicated feelings of “I am so glad we can give her this happy and healthy family” and “little gremlin has no idea how good she’s got it”.
You stop waiting for an apology that might never come.
Personally I had heard a tone about feminine wounds or mother wounds, I just applied similar principles to masculinity/father wounds. I pondered what the ideal male role model would be and then I became that for myself. I healed my mother wounds by mothering myself and healed my father wounds by fathering myself.
Eventually my dad just became another guy to me, I forgave him for being who he couldn’t when I dropped the hope that he would one day be that person.
You don’t need to forgive or even forget, just understand that the lack of him being in your life is on HIM and not you. Some never start being dads, some leave after a few years, some contact every now and again, and some you find out died and you never knew. Heal without him, those who have never had one are strong in a way that other people can never understand.
Sometimes, you realize that looking for linearity in healing will get you nowhere. That’s what I realized a few years ago in therapy. For so long, I was hoping for an apology, then my acceptance of it, then him wanting to be my dad again, or some kind of relationship with me. But I got an apology that wasn’t an apology. I tried to accept the apology before realizing it for what it was. And that hopeful linearity showed itself to be impossible.
I realized he was never sorry, and I now know that even if he was, I wouldn’t be able to forgive him. Some hurts are just too big to forgive.
Maybe you never completely heal or totally forgive. I got the apology and I can partially forgive, after anger and tears and bad choices. The thing is he will never be the parent I need, not even now, because he never was. Yes, he had his own reasons and traumas, he can’t turn time, he knows it did hurt me. I have a cordial relationship with him, there are good moments and times he did help me, but I see also that he never was the dad I wanted and he never will be and I have to accept that, it is what it is.
I’m no contact by choice so the absence is something I welcome. But I don’t think I have the capacity to forgive the things that led to no contact.
You can’t fake multiple heart attacks and terminal cancer and keep relationships intact.
I don’t have anything to forgive because I don’t care and I don’t think about what forgiveness looks like anymore. He did what he did and that’s on him.
I healed when I let the issue go, accepted my reality and appreciated the good parts of my life and the people who did want to be in my life. I don’t have a good father and I’d rather not have a father than have to deal with my POS dad. I don’t need a father either when my mom was the one who raised me.
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I never particularly cared, but he left before I was born
I’ll never be healed but I’m more then ok with him not being in my life. I haven’t seen him in ten years and I don’t plant to ever again.
This is an interesting post to me and I’d like to thank everyone for their posts and experiences:
I have a four year old, she doesn’t know her dad even when we walk past him in the street. You don’t miss what you don’t know but I still worry about how this will impact her as she grows.
You find someone who can be the father to your children that you wish you had.
I didn’t have a father but I guess I just accepted that this is my journey? Idk. It never bothered me I never knew him. It’s like how can you miss something you’ve never known?
i don’t think you ever heal but as someone who lost their father when she was a child, it’s something you learn to grow with. i’ve passively accepted he’s gone and i just push it at the back of my mind
I haven’t.
All it did was show me the incredible strength of women honestly. I have a solid support system of amazing women, my mother, my sister, my cousins. I didn’t need to forgive and heal because all it did was benefit me. We were much better off with him gone.
I had an absent father throughout my whole life. My sperm donor as I call him had a huge health scare which led him to finally quit the alcohol. He’s been sober for two years, I went to visit him last week and was going to stay for a couple weeks. However, after a day I started missing my mum, cat and boyfriend like crazy… I am well travelled, loved abroad a month at a time and have never missed home like that. I went up on Tuesday and left Friday, due to his inability to effectively communicate and actively listen. He didn’t ask me one question about me, all he did was talk about grudges he had for 40+ years, how he scares and threatens people, all the violent acts he’s done and how ‘tough’ he is. It was so negative, and I knew if I had grown up with him I’d probably have been subjected to a life of abuse. My passion and career is working with people and I’ve never met someone so full of hate, negative and dangerous. I’m still in shock I came from that, I just can’t believe we’ve the same DNA. For women here like me I didn’t need to forgive or heal, I’m thankful. Thank the universe we got lucky by not having someone so damaging in our lives. Blood isn’t family, people who show up are and I’ll die on that hill.
By not forgiving but by accepting that this is your reality. It is what it is and nothing is going to change. You can decide to keep expending useless energy towards resentment, or you can decide that all of that isn’t worth your time, effort or energy.
I haven’t healed from all of the nonsense mine did, nor have I forgiven him (may he rot in the ground wherever he is.) I have however healed from the anger I held towards him simply by accepting that he wasn’t going to change. All I could do was A) accept that, and B) go full NC with him.
I’ve always hated the notion of forgiveness. It’s used to pressure and manipulate victims into excusing what the abuser did and it’s warped into some bs narrative to try and make it beneficial for the victim.
I’ve been able to heal by cutting off/distancing from him and anyone who supported/enabled his abuse, processing everything and learning to live without having a father.
I was practically invisible in my family because of how emotionally neglected I was, so I only had myself to rely on anyway and got used to growing up without a father or really having anyone in general, since I didn’t have friends either.
I’m not as angry about it as I had been and being around the rest of my family, who haven’t changed either, is very hard and makes it extremely hard to heal because I’m constantly reminded of it all.
I think I’ll finally be able to really heal from my childhood and family abuse when I can move and start my own life to where I’m no longer stuck in the middle of it and constantly reminded of it.
I haven’t seen or heard from my father since I was 11. I’m 38 now. I couldn’t care less. I’m an adult and a mother now. It’s his loss that he will never know his only grandchildren. I’m not going to waste any bit of my life thinking about him.
Focus on overcoming the anger and resentment first, if you don’t it will affect every relationship you have (including the one with yourself) until you do and only create more wounds. It’s hard but its not impossible and it’s absolutely worth it
Therapy, self talk to re-parent yourself and tell yourself you have value.
Sis, you dont need to forgive. Both of my parents are assholes, physically stay away from them saved me.
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By not looking for closure and not looking at myself as a victim. Sometimes things happen to people, and for me normalizing it mentally has helped deal with it.
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I think accepting that “healing” may never happen is a big start. I can have a happy life, I’m grateful for many things in life, but this is a wound I will always have. I may get lucky and forget about it sometimes, but at other times the pain returns and that’s just how it will always be for me. Some people may totally get past this but I think accepting and being gentle with yourself about the possibility that you may not is important.
I never got to have a relationship with my father. He passed away a few months ago and it was the weirdest feeling. I had a stepfather from the ages of 7 to about 28, when my mother divorced him. She might as well have divorced him ages ago and been a single mother, because he never contributed anything, besides money, and even still my mom had to work as well. He’d be home, but wouldn’t take care of my younger half siblings. He didn’t cook or clean. Had me and my twin do everything he should’ve been doing, while he’d sit in his man cave all day. All us kids grew to resent him. When my mom divorced him he completely cut contact with all of us, and it didn’t even make a difference because he had never been involved in our lives. So I feel like I never actually had a dad. It used to make me sad to think about it, and to see other girls with their dads. But I got married to a man who is such an involved father. He does absolutely everything for our kids, and I’m grateful that my kids are able to experience what I didn’t get to. And I often remind them if they ever try to say anything bad about their father.
An apology will never come. I made peace with my dad (I really don’t like calling him that), about 10 years before he died. I asked him about things that happened that I wanted to have a discussion about, but the first words out of his mouth were “I don’t remember that,” so I dropped it. He wasn’t going to change and I needed to make peace with that for me.
The positive part of all this is that I always knew where I stood with him. I never had to question it no matter how bad I knew he treated me in the past. He never wanted children, he never participated in my childhood because of him not wanting children.
Do I wish things were different between my dad and I? No, the best thing that has ever happened to me is the father my husband is to our children.
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What gave me comfort- the fathers on tv shows who act like the kind of dad I wanted became very special to me. My “tv dads” were- the dad from Eight is Enough, the dad from My Three Sons, the dad from Little House on the Prairie, the grandpa from Heartland, and Mr. Rogers. Of course I know that these are just characters they were playing, but the father figure characters they created became my vision of the dad I wish I had. Somehow it gave me and still gives me comfort that dads like this exist even if only in the imagination of the writer and the actor’s portrayal of the character. It means this type of dad is possible. In real life, we will never know what these men were truly like, but their portrayal of these dad characters was outstanding.
you don’t
I tried to heal it initially by finding another man to love me at any cost. He made me believe I was worthless. I still carry that core belief now as my ptsd won’t let me forgive or forget. The moment that impacted me the most was when I was molested by a friend’s dad. The entire time it was happening I was just staring at the door of the room, wishing in some fantasy world my dad would come rushing in to save me, kick the shit out of my friends dad but of course that didn’t happen. The night after I told my dad what happened. He blamed me for it. I then attempted suicide and was hospitalized. He did not come to see me at any point during my hospitalization.
I have frequent vivid nightmares about my Dad. Even though I’m grown up, moved out, there’s that little girl inside me who’s still trapped in that house, praying to God with every fiber of her being to be dead.