LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
RELATIONAL TRAUMA
If Father's Day feels hard for you, read this.
If Father’s Day brings up grief, anger, complicated numbness — or all three at once — you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. This post is for you.
Father’s Day is almost here. If it feels warm and celebratory for you, I’m genuinely glad.
SUMMARY
- Father’s Day can evoke a range of emotions, especially for those with complicated or absent paternal relationships.
- Experiencing sadness or disappointment on this holiday is valid, regardless of your personal circumstances.
- Acknowledging and allowing yourself to feel all emotions is an important step in processing your relationship with your father.
- It’s helpful to give yourself permission not to enjoy the day if it feels painful or difficult.
- Focusing on self-compassion and cultivating healing experiences can support emotional well-being around Father’s Day.
Summary
Definition: Paternal Wound
And if it doesn’t feel that way — if it brings something heavier — I want to speak directly to you today.
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 Father’s Day 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 next Sunday.
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..
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 next week.
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 post:
Is it okay to feel all the complicated feelings that Father’s Day brings up?
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.
Paternal Wound
The paternal wound refers to the psychological impact of an absent, emotionally unavailable, harsh, or otherwise wounding relationship with a father figure. The father wound shapes a person’s relationship to authority, self-worth in the world, capacity for protection and safety, and — in many cases — their earliest template for how powerful people treat those who depend on them.
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.
Do you need permission to not enjoy Father’s Day?
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
RUMI
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.”
How do you acknowledge yourself on a Father’s Day that feels hard?
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).
Ambiguous loss, coined by Pauline Boss, PhD, family therapist and psychologist and author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, refers to the grief that arises from losses that lack the social recognition or clear closure that accompanies death — including the loss of a parent who is physically present but emotionally absent, or the loss of the father you needed but never had.
In plain terms: It’s the grief that doesn’t have a funeral. No one sends flowers when your father was alive but checked out. No one acknowledges the loss of what should have been. That lack of acknowledgment is part of what makes this grief so difficult to carry — and why it can intensify around cultural celebrations that assume everyone has something worth celebrating.
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?
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Father absence before age 5 associated with OR=2.04 (p=0.002) for early sexual activity by age 16 in girls (PMID: 12795391)
- Father absence before age 5 associated with OR=2.91 (p=0.001) for adolescent pregnancy in girls (PMID: 12795391)
- Paternal psychopathology (BSI GSI) r=-0.25 (p=0.033) with adolescent daughters' quality of life (PMID: 37570360)
- Paternal psychological distress at age 3 → child emotional symptoms at age 5 β=0.04 (p<0.001) (PMID: 32940780)
- Fathers’ narcissistic traits correlated r=0.16 (p<0.001) with children’s narcissistic traits (52% daughters) (PMID: 32751639)
How Father’s Day Grief Shows Up in Driven, Ambitious Women
In my practice, I see a specific pattern in driven, ambitious women when difficult holidays approach. They don’t stop working — they double down. The calendar fills. The projects multiply. A deadline appears from nowhere that makes attending the painful family dinner impossible. Or the opposite: they attend, smile, hold everything together for everyone else, and cry in the parking lot afterward. Neither response is avoidance in a judgmental sense. Both are the psyche doing what it knows how to do: survive the unsurvivable.
Parentification is a form of role reversal in which a child takes on the emotional, caretaking, or practical responsibilities typically held by a parent, as described by Salvador Minuchin, MD, family therapist and psychiatrist, in his work on family systems theory. Emotional parentification — in which the child becomes the parent’s emotional confidant, regulator, or support — is particularly common in homes with absent, addicted, or emotionally immature fathers.
In plain terms: If you spent your childhood making sure your parent was okay — managing their feelings, smoothing their moods, being their emotional anchor — you were parentified. It’s one reason Father’s Day can feel so complicated: you’re not just grieving what you didn’t receive. You’re also grieving the childhood you spent providing it to someone who should have been providing it to you.
Vivian, a 39-year-old partner at a venture capital firm, described her Father’s Day ritual with the kind of precision that comes from years of practice. “I always schedule a long run in the morning, a work call in the afternoon, and dinner with a friend at night,” she told me. “I never leave myself a gap.” When I asked what she was afraid would happen in the gap, she was quiet for a moment. “That I’d feel it,” she said. “That I’d just… feel it.” What she was protecting herself from was the grief she’d never been permitted to have — for the father who showed up for everything except her, for the childhood spent being the responsible one, for the permission she still, at thirty-nine, hasn’t fully given herself to simply need. Learning to sit with that grief — not fix it, not optimize it, not schedule around it — is often the beginning of genuine healing.
If Father’s Day brings up grief, anger, or ambivalence for you, know that those responses make clinical sense and they don’t require explanation or justification. They are appropriate responses to real relational history. You can explore that history in depth through individual therapy, and Fixing the Foundations offers a structured way to work through attachment wounds at your own pace.
What I notice most consistently in driven, ambitious women navigating Father’s Day grief is the disproportionate effort that goes into managing the external performance of the day. The card chosen carefully, the call made and kept brief, the family gathering attended with a smile that costs more than anyone around her knows. This effort — the emotional labor of appearing unaffected — is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it. You’re not just having a hard day. You’re performing not having a hard day while having a hard day.
Vivian, a forty-three-year-old partner at a Bay Area law firm, told me that Father’s Day was “the one day a year I can’t maintain my usual systems.” Everything else in her life was organized, managed, optimized. The grief about her father — absent, then intermittently present, then absent again in a different way — didn’t respond to her usual tools. It arrived on that second Sunday in June every year and sat with her whether she wanted it to or not. Learning to make room for it, rather than running from it, was the beginning of a different relationship to the grief — and to herself.
The grief that lives in adult daughters around their fathers isn’t always about fathers who left. Sometimes it’s the deeper grief of fathers who stayed but were never truly present — fathers who were physically in the home but emotionally unreachable, fathers whose approval was the central organizing principle of childhood and who gave it capriciously or withheld it entirely. This is what’s sometimes called ambiguous loss: grieving someone who is technically still alive, whose harm was often invisible, and whose absence lives inside the relationship rather than outside it.
id=”section-8″>Wrapping up.
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.
You didn’t get the father you deserved. That’s a real loss — one that doesn’t need to be minimized or rushed through. And it doesn’t have to be the only story.
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.
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).
You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.
References
- Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
- Masten, A. S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist.
- Lamb, M. E. (2010). The Role of the Father in Child Development. Wiley.
- Schore, A. N. (2001). The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health. Infant Mental Health Journal.
- Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
- van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
- Worden, J. W. (2009). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. Springer Publishing Company.
- Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press.
- Rogers, F. M. (Various). Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (TV series). PBS.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery. (PMID: 33972795)
Both/And: Love and Harm Can Come From the Same People
One of the hardest things about healing from a difficult childhood is the pressure — internal and external — to pick a side. Either your parents did their best or they failed you. Either your childhood was “that bad” or you’re being dramatic. In my practice, the women who make the most progress are the ones who stop trying to resolve this tension and learn to hold it instead.
Vivian is a startup CEO who grew up in a home that looked enviable from the outside — good schools, family vacations, a mother who volunteered at every event. It took Vivian years to name what was missing: emotional attunement. Her achievements were celebrated; her feelings were dismissed. “You have nothing to be upset about” was the family refrain. By the time she reached my office, she’d internalized that message so deeply that she felt guilty for being in therapy at all.
Both/And means Vivian can love her parents and still be honest about the ways their limitations shaped her. She can acknowledge that they did their best with what they had and simultaneously acknowledge that their best wasn’t enough in some critical ways. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the full truth of most family stories, and particularly the stories of driven women who learned early that performance was the price of belonging.
Tasha is a 35-year-old product manager who grew up with a father who was physically present and emotionally unreachable. “He came to every game,” she told me. “He was always there. He just never… saw me.” Father’s Day for her isn’t about absence — it’s about the grief of presence without attunement, contact without connection. Both/and: he was a dedicated father by every external measure, and she grew up feeling profoundly unseen. Those two things are both true. Holding them both, without having to resolve them into a single story, is part of what genuine healing requires. Individual therapy can provide the space to hold that kind of complexity without collapsing it.
Rachel, a thirty-eight-year-old physician who grew up with a father she describes as “brilliant and terrifying,” put it this way in one of our sessions: “I can miss the father I wanted while knowing that the father I had was not someone I should have missed while I was still in that house.” That’s a both/and. It’s a genuinely mature, painful, compassionate place to stand — neither minimizing the harm nor abandoning the love, neither pretending it was fine nor destroying what was genuinely real and good. Getting to that place doesn’t happen quickly. But it’s where the grief can finally begin to metabolize and transform.
The Systemic Lens: The Cultural Forces That Shape Family Dysfunction
When we talk about childhood wounds, we tend to locate them exclusively within families — this parent failed, that household was dysfunctional. But families don’t operate in isolation. They operate within cultural, economic, and social systems that shape what parenting looks like, what support is available, and what dysfunction is normalized or invisible.
Consider the driven woman who grew up with an emotionally unavailable father. Her father wasn’t emotionally unavailable in a vacuum — he was operating within a cultural framework that told men that providing financially was sufficient, that emotional engagement was women’s work, and that vulnerability was weakness. Her mother, likely overwhelmed and under-supported, may have coped by over-functioning or by placing emotional demands on her daughter that belonged between adults. These aren’t just family patterns. They’re cultural ones.
In my clinical work, naming the systemic dimension of childhood experience serves a critical function: it reduces shame. When a driven woman understands that her family’s dysfunction wasn’t a random aberration but a predictable product of generational trauma, cultural expectations, and structural pressures — including economic stress, immigration, racism, sexism, or the simple absence of mental health resources — she can begin to hold her parents with more complexity and herself with more compassion. The wound is real. It’s also bigger than any one family.
If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
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There is also a systemic dimension to the cultural discomfort around Father’s Day grief that’s worth naming. We have built, as a culture, a mythology of fatherhood that is almost entirely idealized — protective, strong, emotionally available, proudly invested in his children’s flourishing. When your actual father doesn’t match that mythology, the grief isn’t just personal. It’s a collision with a collective story that has no room for your experience. The cards at the drugstore are not written for you. The social media posts are not for you. The holiday itself, in its commercial form, is structured around a version of fatherhood that some of us never had. Feeling out of place on that day is not weakness or oversensitivity — it’s the accurate recognition that the cultural container was designed for a different experience than yours.
If this resonates with you, I’d gently invite you to explore this work more deeply — whether through individual therapy, the Fixing the Foundations course, or simply beginning to name what Father’s Day actually stirs in you rather than performing your way through it. You deserve a container for this grief. It’s real. It matters. And it doesn’t have to be carried alone.
One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own — every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.
How do I know if therapy is right for me?
Therapy is worth considering any time you’re experiencing persistent distress that’s interfering with your daily life, your relationships, or your sense of self — and when your existing strategies aren’t providing lasting relief. You don’t need a crisis or a diagnosis to benefit from therapy. Many of the most meaningful therapeutic work happens around patterns of relating, self-limiting beliefs, and grief that never quite got processed.
What should I expect in the first session of therapy?
The first session is primarily about you sharing your history and what brought you in, and the therapist assessing whether they’re a good fit for your needs. You’ll likely be asked about your current concerns, your background, and what you’re hoping to change. It’s also your chance to assess whether this feels like a safe and productive space. A good therapist will make room for your questions and not expect you to have everything figured out in session one.
How long does therapy take to work?
For specific, recent challenges, 8–16 sessions of focused work can make a meaningful difference. For deeper relational and identity work — the kind that often traces back to childhood patterns — longer-term therapy (1–3 years) tends to be more effective. The research is clear that consistency matters more than any specific technique: a strong therapeutic relationship, maintained over time, is one of the best predictors of positive outcomes.
Is it normal to feel worse before I feel better in therapy?
Yes — and it’s worth knowing this in advance so it doesn’t catch you off guard. Therapy often involves making contact with feelings that have been defended against or pushed down, sometimes for years. When that material comes to the surface, things can feel more difficult before they feel easier. This isn’t a sign that therapy isn’t working; it’s often a sign that you’re doing the real work.
How do I find a therapist who understands trauma?
Look specifically for therapists who use trauma-informed approaches: EMDR, somatic experiencing, Internal Family Systems, or sensorimotor psychotherapy. Ask directly about their experience with relational and developmental trauma, not just single-incident PTSD. The therapeutic relationship itself matters enormously — you should feel genuinely seen and safe, not managed or pathologized. A consultation session before committing is always worth doing.
The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, 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.
