Daughters in the dark: The life-shattering cost of missing fathers
A girl and her mother. Daughters of absent fathers often harbour unresolved fears, doubts, and anxieties, shaping their interactions with the world and leading to self-sabotaging behaviours.
What you need to know:
- Unaddressed trauma from father absence can perpetuate cycles of emotional unavailability, influencing daughters to unknowingly choose partners who mirror their fathers’ deficiencies.
- Daughters of absent fathers often harbour unresolved fears, doubts, and anxieties, shaping their interactions with the world and leading to self-sabotaging behaviours.
According to renowned clinical psychiatrist Susan E. Schwartz, there is a direct correlation between the absence of fathers and the character development of their daughters. In her enthralling manual, The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire Father Wounds, Dr Schwartz convincingly states that the father is significant in the development of a daughter’s psychological and physical life. She elaborates how a daughter’s conduct is predicated upon her father’s presence and parental ability.
Until recently, the effect of absent fathers on daughters remained insufficiently explored and widely ignored. When a father is absent, he neglects the relationship with his daughter and becomes associated with yearning, sadness, frustrated love, anger, rage, oppression and desire.
These contradictory feelings cause stress, resulting in an inadequate, infantile and docile self-image. The daughter becomes ambivalent about herself, leading to profound frustration and depression. A father can be absent in various ways; he may be physically present, but his existence may emanate from emotional stoicism, perverse unreliability, lack of attention, a deficiency of love and scarcity of kindness. When he is emotionally distant or physically absent, a daughter’s early experiences of love come packaged with deprivation. Her anxiety increases and she is connected with the anticipation of re-experiencing the father's loss, and separation from him affects her personality.
The disturbance can cause a daughter to hate and distance herself not only from him, but also from other males. The father is supposed to foster emotional sturdiness, but his absence impedes internal stability. What the daughter absorbs is emptiness instead of love, which she can neither securely attach to nor separate from. This builds an accompaniment of an unloving attitude that is predominantly turned onto herself. The result is confusion and denial of autonomy and she's, in effect, subliminally imprisoned by her absent father.
In the father’s absence, the daughter becomes dominated by destructive impulses and her personality is rooted in his lack of existence. Without the foundation of a father, the daughter is on edge as if falling into an abyss without security, and this feeling solidifies in adulthood. She is overcome by an inner desperation and devoid of self-acceptance. With no male dedication in her livelihood, she feels impugned by her existence and life becomes pointless. This grows into an unconscious barrier within herself and the world. Her satisfaction in life becomes limited. Just as secure attachment shows the positive impact on daughters’ development, an absent father instils the development of a negative-father-complex on his daughter.
From his absence, she learns self-doubt, fear of love and she's overcome by powerful feelings of unworthiness. Girls whose early childhood is characterised by their fathers' absence or unreliability may grow up to extremely demean their intimate partners. Relationships feel like they have to be controlled, she becomes watchful of her sexual partner because of her profound fear of abandonment. The insufficient emotional connection during her childhood subsequently causes suspicion, lack of trust, tumultuous anxiety and feelings of not being worthy of love.
Her fractured persona often leads her to sabotage her relationships by becoming emotionally distant. Her traumatic fatherless childhood also causes a persistent search for validation in adulthood, leading her to normalise exploitative behaviour from her lover and endure excessive physical, emotional and verbal abuse, because of concrete feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness.
Being a father is not just a biological fact. It has psychological implications. An emotionally related and present father accelerates a daughter’s healthy energy and builds an exalted self-esteem. Besides the mother, he is the backbone with whom a daughter establishes individuality. His parenting consistency and moral support constructs a concrete and solid rhythm of self-assurance and serenity to guide her entire life.
A present father is invaluable, he attends to her emotions, supports her mind and fosters self-care while implanting temperance and virtue. An adequate relationship with him provides acceptance, love, stability, discipline and self-confidence. When his presence is sufficient, it grants her the conviction to express her creative potential. He is a doorway to the world and he is integral to developing an identity.
At each stage of a daughter’s development, the relationship with her father affects her sense of self. His absence imposes anguish of unmet internal obligations. A secret psychic death begins in childhood when a daughter is unloved and unseen. She copes by diverting the sorrow into busying herself with external activities. As she develops into adulthood, her subconscious discontentment directs her grief to seek a relationship that depicts traits of her father. If her afflictions are not therapeutically restored, she unknowingly develops an affinity to men who are also emotionally unresponsive, replicating the vicious cycle of a father’s absence. Her relationship with her partner often becomes devoid of emotion, shrouded in insecurity and shaped by hostility and fragility as a consequence of her father’s absence from her childhood.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
