How being a bad father may ruin your daughter for life

Have you ever known beautiful, accomplished women—lady bosses who can command an entire room of alpha males, women who have everything going for them—who are reduced to pathetic girls who continually forgive cheating partners or tolerate physical abuse as if they have no other choice?

Do you know of a girl in your life you’ve always looked up to for their kindness, their generosity, their verve, married to a monster who is her complete opposite?

Do you know women who settle for a bitter loser who is beneath her?

You’ll probably excuse such behavior with, “Ah, but love is blind.”

On the other end of the spectrum, you might have met a woman who just can’t commit to anything permanent in her life, and who has built more walls than China.

Love may play a part, sure, but dig deeper, and you’ll find out that most women who have been in problematic relationships have had complicated relationships with their father.

The Father Complex

The term “daddy issue” may sound so Tiktok-y, but there’s solid research behind it, beginning with Sigmund Freud’s “Father Complex,” an umbrella term that loosely means a person’s (not just a female) impulses are largely defined by their relationship with the first important man in their lives. The term “daddy issues” is being contested by some psychologists who think it casually “dehumanizes a woman’s needs or desires” or even “slut shame.”

But the “Father Complex,” as argued by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, literally and overwhelmingly, if subconsciously, informs our attachment and relationships well into our adulthood.

How do you know if you’re battling daddy issues?

Do you have trust issues so you completely just avoid being in a relationship, and split before things get too serious? Are you a woman others laud for being super independent, super strong, just super. someone whom men won’t ever get a chance to hurt because you won’t let them? Do you never allow other people to get close to you? Are most of your relationships on a superficial level? Have you been married to someone for the past 10 years and yet you’ve never shared with them your deepest, most honest thoughts and feelings?

Your attachment style, thanks to your relationship with your father, may be “Dismissive Avoidant.”

Are you super clingy and always anxious and always paranoid? Do you feel like your partner is going to cheat on you, just you wait? Are you always just waiting for the other shoe to drop and live in eternal fear? Are you continually tortured with images of your partner with another woman?  Are you so insecure that you never enjoy yourself in public places because you’re checking out your partner if he’s checking out other women? Your attachment style is “Anxious Preoccupied,” where you are plagued with the constant fear that your partner will leave you—which makes you clingy and insecure (and therefore not such a fun person to be around.)

Do you often wonder if you’re worthy of love? I mean, there are other girls who are prettier, funnier, smarter, more educated—for sure, you’re not worth it, you think (sometimes you won’t even admit it to yourself). Do you often test your partner’s loyalty and even self-sabotage and push your partner as far away as possible, to check if they will stay? Do you often feel lost in your relationship? Do you often feel detached, or even violent? You may fall under the “Fearful Avoidant” style of attachment.

The bottomline is, attachments styles molded in childhood prolong into adulthood. Isn’t it a relief to know that we aren’t completely hopeless? That we can undo whatever it is that may be wrong with us now that we know how we got to this point? We cannot change our past, but we can learn from it. We cannot change our fathers, but we can stop basing our life decisions on the kind of person he is.

Who’s Your Daddy?

If you’ve been struggling with issues all your life, and may have had a challenging (or non-existent) relationship with your father, here are some of the reasons you may be built this way.

You don’t really trust men.

It’s because you trusted your dad and he let you down/he hurt your mother/he ruined your family.

You always need male validation.

Your dad never gave it to you so you’re always seeking it even in unworthy males.

You like older men.

You want someone to take care of you (a) like your dad who spoiled you did, or (b) because you were never taken care of by your dad. You want an authority figure, and you crave for protection.

You’re always chasing emotionally unavailable men.

Your dad was never around, never really there even when he was, was always busy—so you’re always going to seek the familiar feeling of getting the approval of someone who isn’t emotionally available.

You always end up in toxic relationships.

It’s the only kind of feeling you associate with “love,” as you don’t know what a healthy relationship looks and feels like.

Letting go

If your own father couldn’t love you properly and unconditionally, the first male in your life, are you really worthy of love? Why would a man love you if your own father found it so easy to abandon you, neglect you, hurt you, abuse you, or leave your family for someone else?

How do you really live a well-adjusted life after that? Trust is the most major ingredient in a positive relationship. It dispels all negativity and is the most solid foundation—but it is also the most difficult to attain for women who have never known the love, tenderness, protection, and affection of a physically and emotionally present father.

Women with daddy issues develop defensiveness and protectiveness, and they subconsciously ruin or self-sabotage their relationships.

The first step is always to recognize you have problems and issues stemming from your relationship (or lack of) with your father, and the second is to acknowledge that you can still change. We can work on our negative behaviors, we can disrupt the pattern, and we can change them—and ourselves, in the process.

Remember: You were never daddy’s girl, and now is the time to stop allowing him to affect your life.