Trigger warning and gentle reminders: This story contains multiple instances of abuse, including sexual trauma, abandonment, religious trauma, and abuse of power. With that, it is important to see others name the parts of stories that live within us with proper accuracy. That is the purpose of sharing in this way. If you relate to the words below, I hope you feel permission to hold close the parts of you that have carried similar pain.

Last week I recorded a podcast interview with a close friend. We had planned the conversation a month in advance, which built up her excitement. What I noticed during the interview was that my friend, who is a self-professed people-pleaser, was having an extraordinarily difficult time directly answering my questions.

The questions were about a story where she witnessed trauma and another where she experienced it firsthand. It was not the details or the impact she had a hard time sharing about. It’s that she veered so far off topic, explaining that maybe the one man (who was 40 and publicly humiliated a 15-year-old girl) didn’t mean it because it was a different time. The other story was about her ex, who had put her in an extraordinarily life-changing/stressful position overnight.

She spent so much time defending these men that I had to pause and let her know we were pretty far off topic and I needed her to get to the answer. She had discussed what they “may not have meant as harmful” for so long that she didn’t remember the original questions.

When writing the outline for this piece, the first thing that came to me was to explain that I am not a father and because of that, may not be qualified to talk about the father wound. The reality is, being a good father is a choice. My father’s choices kept me in survival mode for the first twenty years of adulthood. With that, I am not writing today on behalf of fathers. I am writing on behalf of those they have wounded. I applaud any father who steps out from the cradled palm of patriarchy and shares his mistakes and what he is doing to course-correct. In the meantime, those who have survived their wounding deserve their stories being told without needing to cater to their father and his potential reasons why.

First step for anyone carrying the father wound: Stop apologizing for your father.

I reached out to another friend, letting her know I was writing on this topic. She is also a writer and someone who tells stories with context that does not allow you to pass the words without feeling those tugs we spend much of our day trying to silence.

She agreed to have me write about her story. I think you, like me, will have a greater understanding of the way so many daughters have been hurt in a multitude of ways by trying to love and be loved by their fathers.

Meet Lucy.

For many years, Lucy was the baby in her family. She was the third of the three children, with two older brothers. Her parents divorced long before she was old enough to know what divorce was or how it would impact her. While Lucy understood how much her mother sacrificed to work hard and provide, her father distanced himself from the kids (in every sense) and took on the role of a Disneyland dad, but without the perks of actually going to Disneyland. Some of Lucy’s first memories of her father were noticing how difficult it was to capture his attention or time.

Lucy’s brothers were given a greater responsibility to make sure she got places safely and knew what to look out for.

There was one story Lucy shared when her mother, before or after one of many shifts at work, sat Lucy and her middle brother down and explained that there was a kidnapper in their town and for them to be extra careful on their walk to school. Their mom went on to share the details of his car—a station wagon, wood paneling, etc.

On their walk to school, Lucy, around 7 years old, says to her brother, “What is wood paneling?” Not knowing how to describe what wood paneling is, her brother looks around and points to the station wagon with wood paneling that is making a turn in their direction. “There, it’s like that.”

Both kids immediately realize who is driving towards them, and they take off running, luckily only a block from school.

I think one of the things we fail to realize is the effort a child makes to normalize sadness and/or confusion that makes them feel shame. Lucy, like all of us as kids, was gathering information about why she did not see her father when other kids at school did. Lucy, like all of us as kids, did not have words like “grief,” “abandonment,” and “shame” to name what was tugging at her innocent young heart every day.

The visits with their father were sporadic at best. They were not predictable or lengthy. The kids were no longer his kids when they visited him. They were mere visitors to be entertained.

Lucy’s normal was a life without her father. There was no conversation to help her understand if she had done something wrong for him not to be around, so she assumed she had. She would sit by the phone when she was told her dad was going to call. Most of those moments were met with further disappointment. The silence of the phone never ringing would hold her still, allowing the shame to increase deep into the places where she hoped to be met with her father’s approval.

There were a multitude of these experiences. Promised visits were on the calendar, with a no-show from Dad. He missed child support payments while claiming the kids as dependents on his tax returns—an agreement he insisted on in their divorce. At one point, Lucy’s father had built a decent career for himself, but when the courts ordered him to catch up and pay more in child support, he quit said job.

This drove home the narrative deeper into Lucy’s identity: that earning his time, attention, and love was going to be a difficult task, but in order for her to shed that icky feeling of being unlovable that her dad bore in her, she would have to work, as only an innocent, empathetic young daughter can, to earn his acceptance.

Not only do we, as kids, build up false narratives, but we carry them with us long into adulthood. How is it supposed to be that Lucy does not believe she is at fault for her father’s absence? A young child looking for the small ask of consistency and finding constant and sudden shifts and changes and no one explaining what this means and how her heart is being shaped by it all.

There is no hard stopping point on a person’s timeline where pain like this ends because of time or age. It takes the skill and willingness to feel those vulnerable stings of feeling forgotten, unwanted, and undone and to find a way to help those parts of us begin their process of exhaling that pain.

Lucy’s adoration and confusion about boys and men were beautiful and tender. She was shaped by two older brothers and an absent father. A naturally empathetic, kind-hearted little girl trying to establish her life while a foundation that keeps moving beneath her.

Lucy’s mother, 23 years old with three young kids, was physically present when able but relied heavily on the church being the village to help raise them. She was not prepared for motherhood nor the ongoing battle of needing support from Lucy’s dad. Lucy was learning to manage things like faith and purity culture for little girls and carrying the pain from past years of what no one explained while having secrets of her own. Religion gave her structure of how things work and an exact to-do list of her responsibility in it.

In observing her story from the outside, I think of a little girl who was searching for rescue. She was moving around each day in a life that didn’t make sense to her. The one loss she understood was that her dad was once there and now he wasn’t, and the daily sting of what went on inside her home left her little room for hope that she would ever feel safe there. For several years, Lucy was abused by her brother. The same brother who walked her to school and made sure she got there safely also took away the internal safety that comes from sexual abuse.

Where is my father?

Why do I feel dirty?

Is my being dirty what keeps my dad away?

If I can stop this abuse, will he come back?

I hate these feelings.

I hate these thoughts.

I hate this body.

Help.

Lucy’s mother went on to marry what Lucy describes as a good man who was present and brought a stability to her life that she hadn’t known in her first ten years. Her mom and stepdad welcomed two younger sisters to the family, and to this day Lucy takes tremendous pride in them and talks with them every day.

Survivors of this type of dysfunction have to work harder at building relationships and understanding stability. The craving for both does not stop because of the trauma, but the expectation to establish either is farfetched for a person who has had their internal and external compasses turned upside down.

Lucy made great grades. She went to college. She rebelled on a very low scale of what would be expected.

She felt like the grownup with her mother. She often felt she was not so much navigating her mother’s poor decisions and behaviors as much as trying to teach her how they were inappropriate. When her mother announced that she was divorcing Lucy’s stepfather, Lucy felt an old wound come back with different types of salt being poured in.

In her desire to have a say and get her mother’s attention, Lucy made a decision to go live with her father. At 19 years old, her father is a stranger to the narratives she carries from his neglect, but she needs a new chapter. This was her ultimate attempt to get her mother to wake up and look towards Lucy.

Lucy describes her boyfriend at the time as caring, patient, and remarkably kind. She has become concerningly ill and ends up in the ER. Her father has given her a curfew that is meant to somehow show his genuine care, so she leaves a message for him about where she is. Forever the responsible and respectful daughter.

Lucy has just been treated for mono. She is exhausted and afraid. She returns to what she knows as home, and her father is waiting for her. She didn’t miss the curfew per se, as much as she was not able to oblige his curfew and her visit to the ER. He was intoxicated and did not listen to the message that was left for him. Without an ounce of curiosity or proper pause, her father berates her for being late.

Lucy has many ideas about who her father is and how she could be different or better to get him to treat her well.

As outsiders it is easy to give feedback that we think a person should see about their abuse experience, but that is not how lived history works inside a traumatized body. Experiencing abuse of any kind comes with shame that feels like a flood and the worst thunderstorms you’ve heard. The shameful narratives, when not interrupted, take root in how we see ourselves and the world around us. We are walking pain with open wounds, hoping someone will at least not increase that pain, because our belief of self is hanging on by a very thin line.

Lucy’s father, empowered by his position in her life, offended that the curfew was not met, looks at his daughter, and then pulls from the weakest place in himself, and he tells Lucy’s boyfriend all the reasons why he should leave her.

Lucy, physically sick, wounded soul, listens as her father takes those narratives that were born from his neglect and her brother’s abuse and her mother’s dysfunction, and he tells Lucy’s boyfriend out loud all the things Lucy thinks about herself in silence.

A few years ago I was being pursued by a few big publishers and literary agents. They each had the same taglines about how impactful my work is and how they had been following me on social media for some time but wanted to wait for the right time to reach out.

I love writing, but I was not sure if publishing a book was the right outlet for me. I was communicating with a very well-known and respected agent and finding myself feeling a bit out of my league. Said agent requested I write the first chapter of my book. “What book?” I thought. I was not prepared, but I told her to give me some time.

There was a particular memory in my life that I had only shared with my EMDR therapist and two close friends. Due to the nature of the sexual trauma in it, I have found that the healing was helpful, but it wasn’t a story I wanted to repeat. In my desire to impress this agent, I decided to write about this story. I felt the context alone would be what made me worthy of her commitment.

It took me a few days, and looking back on that time, I remember exactly where I was and how it felt to type those words out. But I did. And I sent them to the agent to get her feedback.

Within two hours I got an email from her that said, “This needs a lot of work. You’ll need a ghostwriter.”

I swallowed hard. I stood up from my desk and felt this wave of shame that scoffed at me for thinking I was gifted enough to write my own story. I had opened this door to something that took me decades to remember in therapy and now desperately want to close it back, but someone else is holding the knob.

Lucy is a writer–a ghostwriter, in fact. Having written books and book proposals, she is well acquainted with the publishing industry. I sent Lucy a text including the context around me needing to get the agent a draft. She knew this agent well. Lucy and I had known one another for a couple of years at that point, and while she has shared her appreciation for my online work, we had not discussed much of my story. Her first response was immediate, “You don’t need a ghostwriter.” Her next response was explaining her evening with her son and husband and letting me know she most likely would not be able to get to it tonight, but she would text me the next day with notes.

I sit and prep the email for Lucy, explaining what I understood about how to write this chapter and being unable to name, at that time, the intense pangs of discomfort in my mind and body.

Within an hour, I get a text.

“Nate, I just read this piece. I just wanted to tell you I need some time to think through this story. It truly horrifies me as your friend to think of what was done to you. I will have more of a response later, but I just want to go hold my son. I love you. Lucy.”

This is Lucy. This has always been Lucy. This will always be Lucy.

What I needed was kind eyes and a soft voice to let me know that what I shared was understood. I didn’t know that. And that is an unfair expectation to have for a busy literary agent. But, because of the way Lucy responded, part of my story was restored. It was given back to me, and it felt like I had choice again.

This. Is. Lucy.

Lucy spent over a decade in her early adulthood, living in the same city as her father. His office was ten minutes from her apartment. He came to see her there—twice.

There have been many attempts where Lucy has tried to present information to her father for him to somehow, some way step into a place of ownership, kindness, and a little bit of awareness. Each attempt failed. Not because Lucy did not do it right or well. Her communication is powerful and present. It failed because Lucy has a bad dad.

During these years, Lucy was drowning in religious beliefs that had her returning to things like forgiveness, spiritual authority, and honoring her parents, when what she needed was a safe place to talk about things like pain, trauma, anger, and the real results of what it means to be a young girl in a world that harmful men rule without consequences.

Through the years, Lucy made the choice to sacrifice more of her time to begin healing from these stories. These stories are a mere few of many that she absorbed from an innocent place while attempting to simply exist. Attempting to love, be loved, and be connected to those who brought her here.

When asked what has helped her heal, she explains an exercise her therapist had her do where she had to draw a pie chart of who was responsible for her abuse and was not allowed to write her own name. She has returned to this visual often to remind her, on the days where it is easy to believe she is unlovable or unwanted, that there is a tender young girl in her that sometimes experiences the world like a threat rather than an invitation, and this is that young girl’s way of trying to hide.

She tells me inner child work profoundly changed how she saw that young child in her. Seeing her son at 2, at 7, at ages where she can’t rest until she knows he has what he needs, and understanding her trauma was never because of who she was or how she showed up in the world.

Lastly, she states, “Friendships with other people who’ve had traumatic childhoods. While I believe you don’t have to understand in order to honor someone, there is a kindness when you find someone that just gets it with a deep knowing because they’ve experienced it.”

Today is Father’s Day. For some of you, it is a day of loss and great grief because your father was a gem and you miss him. For some, your father has not been a part of your life the way you’ve needed, and it feels like more loss is on you. There are many other stories, layers, and nuances in between.

I wanted to take this Father’s Day and honor the stories of those who avoid today, because it has too much heartache. To honor the complexity for those, like Lucy, who will do something special for her husband with her son and not be able to escape the parts of her that ache a bit from that generous act.

The father wound is not discussed enough. It somehow fades in the backdrop with muted expectations and shames people for believing it could be different. But it can. Lucy’s son is experiencing that now. Many of you are married to, or have become fathers that the younger version of you would have healed with.

I hope reading this story at least helps you name something that you’ve been taught doesn’t matter. Something that helped you feel connected to the complex and messy narratives that come under the umbrella of being a complex trauma survivor carrying the father wound within them.

I asked my dear friend, “What do you want your name to be for this piece?”

She said, “Can I be Lucy? That sounds like such a cute little girl name. “Lucy” means “light” or “light bringer.” I like the idea of bringing light to my younger self in your words.”

“Yes!” I replied. “You can be whatever name you want.”

I’m glad you’re here.

Nate

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Reflections:

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Today is a hard one for many who have those complex narratives that are not easy to share because they are not sure if they will be blamed further for naming pain they carry that they didn’t contribute to. The father wound is visceral and deserves a gentle approach. I hope this story makes today hurt less for you—for you to know these stories, while complicated and isolating, are vast among many innocent souls looking for lighter days.

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Last week, I opened registration for my online group for the first time this year. If you’d like to connect with other stories like these, you can check out the space here.

Truly, truly, I’m glad you’re here.

Nate