862 How the Father Wound Impacts Emotional Safety in Relationships
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In This Episode
If calm feels uncomfortable to you, there may be a reason. Having an unhealed father wound impacts your ability to create emotional safety in your relationships.
If you grew up in a house where emotional safety was not part of your relationship with your father, calm can feel weird or unfamiliar, and vulnerability can feel risky. Trusting another person to be there for you, if that wasn’t your experience, may feel counterintuitive.
In this episode, we’re exploring how father wounds impact our ability to feel safe in relationships, why calm can feel so unfamiliar, and what emotional safety can look like as we heal.
We may have learned to protect ourselves through high-functioning codependency, hyper-vigilance, or hyper-independence. These strategies made sense at the time, but they can keep us from the safety we actually want now.
Key Takeaways
- A father wound is a worthiness wound. We may have learned in childhood that we weren’t good enough as we were.
- Without emotional safety from our fathers, we find other ways to protect ourselves: high-functioning codependency, hyper-vigilance, or hyper-independence.
- When your system is more familiar with hypervigilance than with safety, you may be drawn to relationships that are familiar but not necessarily good.
- We repeat what we do not repair. If you’re not attracting someone who’s calm and securely attached, we may need to heal the wound first.
- Emotional safety is the felt sense that you can be yourself and still belong. You can have needs, say no, and make mistakes without being punished or rejected.
Want to go deeper with this episode?
Download the free episode guide to help you connect the dots between your father wound and your relationships.
Ready to heal your father wound?
I wrote a whole book on father wounds to help you understand how they show up in your relationships, your sense of safety, your self-worth, and the way you give and receive love. If you’re ready to start healing those patterns at the root, preorder your copy today.
Plus, when you preorder now at fatherwoundbook.com, you’ll get a free 3-hour virtual healing retreat.
Resources
- Pre-order Father Wound
- Free episode guide
- Previous episode: Six Ways to Build Emotional Safety in Relationships
“A safe relationship is a soft place to land in a hard world.” — Terri Cole