RELATIONAL TRAUMA
If Father's Day feels hard for you this year, read this.
Father’s Day is here. 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.
Father’s Day is here.
RELATIONAL TRAUMA
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
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.
SUMMARY
Father’s Day can be genuinely painful when your father was absent, harmful, limited, or gone. This post speaks directly to that experience — validating the complexity of father wounds, the grief of what wasn’t there, and the quiet work of healing attachment to the first male figure in your life.
Definition
Father Wound: The collection of relational needs, attachment injuries, and unresolved grief stemming from an inadequate, absent, harmful, or emotionally limited paternal relationship. Shapes a woman’s sense of her own worth, her relationship with masculine energy, her attachment patterns in romantic relationships, and her relationship with authority and safety.
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 – myself included – 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.
1) Feeling All the Feelings.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
RUMI
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.
2) A Big Ol’ Permission Slip NOT To Enjoy This Day.
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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.”
3) Acknowledge Yourself on Father’s Day.
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.
4) Cultivate Healing Fathering Experiences.
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.
Maybe this is 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 longings for good fathering.
5) Celebrate How You Father Yourself.
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?
My Invitation For You if Father’s Day Feels Hard.
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?
The father wound doesn’t have to be the last word on who you are.
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 upcoming 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.
Let me know what you thought of the article and what Father’s Day brings up for you in the comments below.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
Resources if Father’s Day Feels Hard
- For a truly excellent model of kind, gentle, compassionate fathering, watch these vintage episodes of Mr. Rogers.
- Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family by Dr. Peggy Drexler.
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Frequently Asked Questions
This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Childhood Trauma: A Therapist’s Complete Guide.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
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References
- Drexler, P. (2019). Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family. Harper Wave.
- Masten, A. S. (2014). Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development. Guilford Press.
- Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. Norton & Company.
- Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
- Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown and Company.
- Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
- Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for Identifying Infants as Disorganized/Disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation. Attachment in the Preschool Years: Theory, Research, and Intervention, edited by M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, and E. M. Cummings.
- Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001). Television series. PBS.
Yes, the ‘father wound’ often quietly influences driven, ambitious women, impacting their sense of safety, worth, and how they relate to others. It can manifest as undermining confidence or confusing patterns in relationships, even when you appear strong on the surface.
This feeling can stem from attachment trauma, which involves disruptions in early caregiver bonds. These ongoing patterns of emotional unavailability or inconsistency can leave your nervous system on edge and make it difficult to feel secure in your connections with others.
The ‘father wound’ can create deep relational blind spots, especially for women used to controlling outcomes. It shapes your inner experience of strength and vulnerability, sometimes masking a quiet longing or fear underneath that impacts how you connect.
It is absolutely okay for Father’s Day to feel painful or impossible to celebrate if your father was absent, harmful, or emotionally unavailable. Acknowledge your grief and the complex feelings that arise. Giving yourself permission not to enjoy the day is a valid part of healing.
Healing involves acknowledging the lasting impact of these early wounds, rather than blaming. It’s about recognizing how these experiences shaped your sense of self and your relationships. This process allows you to gradually build a stronger sense of safety, worth, and trust within yourself and with others.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
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Annie Wright
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist, trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
