If Father’s Day Feels Hard for You
Father’s Day can bring grief, anger, absence, complicated loyalty, or a sense of not belonging in the celebration. This essay offers permission to feel what is true, honor the resilience that brought you here, and look for the forms of re-fathering and self-fathering that support you now.
Make Room for What This Day Brings
Father’s Day is here and for those of you who had wonderful fathering experiences and look forward to celebrating your Dad on this holiday , that’s so wonderful and I truly hope you have a beautiful day today.
And I also want to acknowledge that for many, this holiday can be particularly tough if you don’t have someone you can or want to celebrate on Father’s Day.
Maybe your father has passed, or maybe he left when you were young. Maybe he’s still living but throughout your life could never be present for you emotionally, financially, spiritually, etc.
Maybe you chose to estrange yourself from him given his instability, toxicity, inability to provide you with safety, etc.. Or maybe you’re challenged by the way you’ve been a father yourself, and this holiday feels hard for you in that way. For whatever reason, many of us on Father’s Day may feel sadness and disappointment that there’s no one we can proudly celebrate as “World’s Best Dad!” on Facebook today.
And that’s tough. I’m sorry many of us have had to experience this. Instead, I wish we had all had the experience of a present, kind, caring, honorable, and protective father that we’re truly excited about celebrating today.
But regardless of whether or not you’ve had a positive or negative fathering experience, I have a couple of thoughts about Father’s Day this year that I’d like to share in today’s blog post.
Ambivalence is the experience of holding mixed or even opposing feelings about the same person, relationship, or event at the same time.
In plain terms: You may feel grief, anger, longing, relief, love, or none of the above on Father’s Day. Mixed feelings do not need to be resolved before they can be respected.
Permission Not to Celebrate
First of all, I invite you to pause for just a moment and actually acknowledge whatever feelings might be present for you around Father’s Day. As you know, it’s so important to recognize and feel our feelings and to validate our own inner experience especially when the message of this national holiday may say something different or contrary to how we’re actually feeling.
Next, and I really want you to hear this, YOU HAVE PERMISSION NOT TO ENJOY AND NOT TO CELEBRATE THIS DAY. At the risk of being a broken record, I’m going to share the same virtual permission slip I shared on my Mother’s Day post in May because it bears repeating:
“You have permission not to enjoy this holiday. You have permission to feel exactly how you feel about Father’s Day and to celebrate or not celebrate this day. You also have permission to do whatever you need and want to do on this day that actually supports you and your feelings versus what you think you should do.”
Re-Fathering and Self-Fathering
Next, I invite you to acknowledge how far you’ve actually come despite the absence, loss, challenge of your early father-figure. It takes a lot of resilience, courage, and perseverance to move forward and build a life for yourself without the supportive presence of one or both primary attachment figures. You’ve made it this far and that’s remarkable.
While we can never wave a magic wand and undo or rewrite the past (or make our father any different from what he actually was/is), I strongly believe that it’s never, ever too late to seek out and let in healing experiences of re-parenting (and this applies to both mothering and fathering).
Specifically in the case of Father’s Day, I think it’s deeply healing to seek out and/or acknowledge examples and role models and figures already present in your life (whether in your day-to-day or from afar) who provide you with a semblance of fathering: A former professor who helps you bounce around career decisions; a skilled therapist who provides firm boundaries and caring validation; perhaps a new stepfather or the father of your current partner who makes you feel loved and accepted each time you visit; an author whose integrity and world-view you admire, etc..
All of these models can provide little micro-moments of reparenting, nuggets of fathering that you can acknowledge and, if possible, let in to help meet some of your early and unmet longing for good fathering.
Finally, I would invite all of us , not just those of us missing a father figure , to consider, to reflect on, and celebrate all the ways that we “father ourselves.”
While there is no one way or one list of things or attributes that fathers versus mothers provide for their kids (this is a highly personal and subjective interpretation), for me, fathering has always meant providing safety, firm boundaries, assistance in problem-solving, teaching, and championing who I am and what I do.
On Father’s Day, can you spend some time reflecting on what fathering means to you and how you’re already practicing that in your own life? Can you imagine using Father’s Day to celebrate yourself and all the ways you self-father?
Re-parenting is the practice of receiving or offering experiences of care, protection, validation, boundaries, and guidance that were missing or inconsistent earlier in life.
In plain terms: A trusted teacher, therapist, mentor, stepfather, or supportive community can offer moments of care. You can also practice giving yourself the safety and steady encouragement you needed.
Questions for Your Own Care
We’ve covered a lot of material today and explored quite a few ideas and tools that might be supportive for you in dealing with Father’s Day and in practicing your own self-fathering. As we close today, I’d like to invite you to consider what you know about your relationship to fathering and to Father’s Day:
What does Father’s Day bring up for you? How does this holiday make you feel?
What do you need and want to do to take care of yourself on this day?
What are some of the ways you’ve thrived despite not having received the fathering you needed/wanted? Can you take some time to actually name and feel pride about what you’ve done despite this absence?
Who are some examples of fathering figures in your own life? Who do you know in your day-to-day who provides a sense of fathering for you? Who have you witnessed from afar , whether authors, teachers, TV personalities, etc , who inspire you with the way they father their own children?
What do you know about how you father yourself? What actions, beliefs and ways of being do you practice that help you take care of yourself like a good-enough father would help his child experience?
Can you think of some additional ways to father yourself that would feel especially good and supportive?
Holidays that celebrate parents can be tough when you don’t have/never have had/or don’t want to have a relationship with a family-of-origin figure.
On this Father’s Day, I hope that all of us can find comfort, validation, and the experience of self-fathering and re-fathering no matter what our family-of-origin backgrounds may be, and I hope that we can be kind to ourselves in the process.
Q: Why can Father’s Day feel so difficult?
A: The holiday can intensify grief, estrangement, disappointment, absence, complicated memories, or concerns about one’s own experience as a father.
Q: Do I have to celebrate Father’s Day?
A: No. You have permission to celebrate, not celebrate, or shape the day in whatever way best supports your actual feelings and needs.
Q: What does it mean to self-father?
A: It means reflecting on the forms of safety, boundaries, problem-solving, encouragement, and protection that you associate with fathering and practicing them in your own life.
Q: Can other people offer healing fathering experiences?
A: Yes. Mentors, teachers, therapists, stepfathers, relatives, authors, and other role models can offer meaningful moments of guidance, validation, or care.
Q: What is one way to take care of myself on Father’s Day?
A: Start by naming what the day brings up, then choose an action that supports that truth instead of forcing yourself into a celebration that does not fit.
EMDR-trained, trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational and developmental trauma.
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership, burnout, and identity.
Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery. The framework, in your own time.
Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 (out-of-state telehealth registration) · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Focus · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
Work With Annie