I'm gonna structure each type along with the impact on a daughter in the following ways. I'm gonna talk about the impact on a daughter's sense of self. I'm gonna talk about the impact on a daughter's mental health. I'm gonna talk about the impact of a daughter's sense of men, like the blueprint of men.
What is modeled. And outside the home and the impact on a daughter's replication of childhood dynamics and projection. And after, I'll talk about healing goals to kind of achieve with each type and what might be good to specifically do or work on if you identify with these types of fathers, many daughters of toxic fathers.
Can be caught up in what feels like perpetual cycles of dysfunctional dynamics with men because of that direct early influence of their father, like the father's moods, his inability to connect with you, how he saw you, how he didn't see you, how he treated women in general, and if he was a stranger to you.
And if you struggle with or have struggled with toxic dynamics, with unavailable men. Unsafe men. Men you can't seem to like get through to about their mental health. Men who are close to you, but they feel like they're still a stranger. Navigating and getting out of those dynamics with men will start with looking at our first relationship with a man, which is gonna be a father.
It's possible to catch these dynamics and step out of them, which is kind of like what every child had trauma. Survivor kind of wants, whether it's with a male, you maybe work with a male, you're dating, or you're still caught up with issues with your own father right now in the middle of this video. So if you identify as queer or you don't date men, this video will be applicable and hopefully helpful to you as well.
If you are a male and you wanna understand your female partner better and yourself better and possibly your own father, the info here can also help you too. All childhood trauma survivors have men in their story, and if you didn't know your biological father, he affected you. When I got to therapy, I didn't really think I had much work to do around my father because I had already like psychologically written him off.
And I didn't get at that time how much unfinished psychological business I had with my own father. And maybe you relate to that, like writing him off perhaps early in your life. 'cause that is actually a common thing with childhood trauma. Despite my language here. This video is not about bashing men or making sweeping anti-male statements.
We are specifically talking about a highly abusive and or toxic types of fathers in this video. And they are not universal to every single man. And there will most likely be a counterpart video about what happens to men in toxic relationships with their mothers or with their fathers as well. Today we're going to be exploring those specific types of toxic fathers and their impact on daughters specifically.
If we can understand that, then maybe we can fix patterns that we're having with men in general. And if you don't know me, I'm Patrick Tian. I'm an MSW, and this channel is all about childhood trauma, specifically coming from our family of origin. Like as a system, as well as discovering ways for our recovery and for our better mental health before I start.
While any child, a trauma survivor can be exposed to toxicity in childhood by a parent, it's not what that child would've chosen. So when I say toxic father and daughter dynamics, I'm not saying it's your fault. Nor is a daughter responsible for the father's mess or his legacy with his own children. I am saying that because of unfinished unconscious business from our fathers, we can get caught up in toxic dynamics with them or with people in our present lives, which leads us to the first lasting problem.
What we need to address is that we can end up in toxic adult relationships in our present lives due to having a toxic. Parent. That's the part that we really need to get real about and kind of step out of. And also, I'm listing what I've seen in 14 years of private practice as a group therapist and individual therapist as a couple's therapist, and also with nearly 30 years of my own recovery in general, a.
But I want you to really take this in. You are the expert about your relationship and your reactions in context of your father. This is your process. I'm listing patterns that I've seen. You don't have to necessarily agree with it. And as a male, I've experienced both a toxic mother and a father, but obviously not as a daughter, along with how society views and treats daughters.
So now let's explore some lasting problems or the cycles of having a toxic father, even if he's not in your life. Here are the big three lasting problems in having a toxic father for daughters. Number one, most importantly with a toxic father. Daughters tend to get stuck in replicating dynamics in their relationship, mainly their romantic relationships.
This is in the form of projection that's gonna look like that replication and projection. Replicating the old dynamics is gonna look like dating the same kind of dysfunctional person like in a pattern. It's gonna look like giving up power. Your personal power or defaulting to men, or defaulting to the masculine to avoid being in trouble.
Replication's gonna look like trying to control a partner, like trying to get them healthier or save a partner either from themselves or save them from somebody else. It's gonna look like seeking connection or approval from older men. I know that that sounds icky, but that's a thing for both men and women in childhood trauma or trying to get in aloof or moody man to see you or tolerate you.
Replication's also gonna look like being extremely dysregulated around men or flat out hating them in general. All of these are examples of the replication and most importantly, that our inner child projects those dynamics. It's just how that stuff works. Like it's maybe your job to rescue a man, or that all men are rageful and unpredictable, or men are incapable.
So you have to do all the work, like in the concept of weaponized and competence, which is a thing in the present to our inner child. These can feel viscerally true to survivors, and we have to explore projection of the toxic father that we had. That happens. We're projecting that onto our present. I'm not saying in any way that men are a thousand percent safe, past and present.
Childhood trauma work is highly nuanced and tricky. I'll say more about that later. The second of the big lasting three is that you might be currently still struggling with a toxic father in your present life. Do you maybe still have to chase him to connect and you have to put in five times the effort?
Does maybe he blame you for your emotions or put you down or that you're scared of him even when he isn't around. Does he behave in an immature way or create chaos or drama? Is he still a stranger to you? Like does he put in any work to get to know you or is he a mess that you have to help out and rescue and be a parent for?
Do you have to deal with him or navigate him? Instead of enjoying his company, like with any toxic parent, when we are still engaged in a battle with them or a power struggle with them, or we default to a weird codependent dance with them, we are still in it and it highly affects us despite. You as the daughter, you might be used to it on some level.
Actually, when we get healthier, we tolerate less and we kind of really recognize that things are really taxing to our system. So in these present problems, part of healing might be about the need to engage less. Or withdraw or shift your energy around this parent not to do the same old, same old, like trying to get him interested in his own daughter by trying again and again or trying to get him interested in his grandchildren.
And the third one of the big three is how a daughter feels about herself as a lasting problem as a society. We still don't recognize how important fathers are for our sense of self and our development. Like an example is, do you still struggle to feel lovable or valuable, not just with your father? Has your worth ever been only based upon how you look?
Do you still believe you have to be a certain specific way to be loved by a man? This is hard, but are you more familiar with. Things like neglect or disrespect or immaturity from a man. And maybe the opposite of those things feel uncomfortable or, or foreign. And this is hard, but are you more familiar with things like neglect?
Or disrespect or immaturity from a man, and maybe the opposite of those things feel foreign. Remember what I said earlier about these are not things that we would have chosen, meaning we are not responsible for those stuck places. I mean, we are responsible for the healing. But no one would've asked for those things.
So parents have a lot of power, if not all the power to tell their children who they are, and either directly or indirectly or through neglect. So deep in our core, how they felt about us. Is how we feel about us, but toxic people no longer get to tell us who we are. Remember that. Moving on. Here are some complicating outside factors in these toxic father daughter dynamics.
Here are some things we need to address before getting into the types of toxic fathers. And there are some additional complicating factors for Daughters of Toxic Fathers. These are things that daughters are taught at home. And in their community and cultures that will amp up the toxic father daughter.
Dynamics first is growing up and living in a patriarchal male dominated culture. And actually we're kind of hard pressed to find a culture that isn't patriarchal in that way. But as daughters, you might have had to grow up in things like a toxic belief that girls are more likely to bring shame onto a family.
Or a community rather than what boys do in kind of in a very hypocritical way, a part of what can bring a woman down more in society and in her family, for the most part is perpetuating men. But we see this as a culture that shames women about an interaction with a male versus seeing the male's behavior first.
Also at home. What a mother models in response to the toxic father at home, like minimizing the abuse of. Father's behavior or concluding that all men are like that is a powerful complicating factor that affects daughters and their conditioning. An abused mother can model self-blame. A toxic mother can model unstable relationships with men.
A mother can be a hostage without any power. If your mother spent her life defaulting to or chasing moody, unavailable men, that's gonna have an impact on both daughters and sons. Another complicating factor is there can also be internal misogyny from a mother. To her daughter or being taught that it's your fault about whatever happens because you're a woman and you should know better, or women are manipulative.
And as a side note, men who have gone through childhood trauma with a toxic mother also have their own damaging paradoxes at home and in society. No child in the toxic family is unaffected by these kind of dynamics. Two common paradoxes in men is that the man who is too submissive to a woman. Due to having an abusive mother, like that mother had a belief that men should never upset a woman and be totally selfless, and that could be an additionally modeled by a codependent father.
He was taught that women are always innocent, which gets him into abusive relationships, or he can be very unreal or passive if he's in a relationship with you. The other paradox, and this is difficult to explain, but men having a lot of projection and rage and contempt for women, this is like toxic masculinity because their mother was potentially codependent or manipulative, or it was modeled by.
A toxic father, and I see unsafe men as often having this hypervigilance about seeking out and finding hypocrisy in women. You'll kind of see it if you think about it in a way that they're always trying to find the shadiness in women. As part of a trait in toxic masculinity, daughters can get caught up in similar damaging choices and dynamics to submit to the opposite sex or have conditioned contempt for the opposite sex.
And then there is patriarchal and misogynistic and mis injury that happens inside and outside of the home. It's really a mess for childhood trauma survivors and there are always two highly impacted inner children in a relationship of any and all gender identities, not just cisgender, as I've discussed here that come from dysfunctional or toxic families.
Think about it this way, what. Biases did your father perhaps have about women? What biases did your mother maybe have about men? What biases did your father have about men? What biases did your mother have about women? For a lot of childhood trauma survivors, that is a huge kind of can of unconscious worms to unpack and everyone's situation will be nuanced.
I'm just suggesting to you, the viewer, to explore deeper about what. Where some of these issues can come from, especially around projection and replication, and I'll explain more in a moment. Okay. So to check in a little bit about those complicating factors, what came up for you around that? How might the culture that you grew up in, both inside and outside of your home, how might have all of that has kind of supported the abuse from a father?
Just kind of a thought around that. Just as simply, if I were to say the type of men. In my home. Like my father were similar to the men on like the baseball field for coaches. Not all men. Some men were very, very helpful in that way, but the town that I grew up in was like agro. So that's what I mean. And those two things had an impact.
And in, in other way, the outside stuff was supporting the inside stuff and vice versa is what I'm trying to say. Okay, so here are the types of toxic fathers and the impact on their daughters. So let's look at the types and the types of dynamics with the toxic father and how they impact their daughters.
I'm gonna give a trigger warning here as some of these are intense. I'm gonna structure each type along with the impact on a daughter and the following ways. I'm gonna talk about the impact on a daughter's sense of self. I'm gonna talk about the impact on a daughter's mental health. I'm gonna talk about the impact of a daughter's sense of men, like the blueprint of men, what is modeled inside and outside the home, and the impact on a daughter's replication of childhood dynamics and projection.
And after I'll talk about healing goals. To kind of achieve with each type and what might be good to specifically do or work on if you identify with these types of fathers. So I've isolated the five types of fathers that contribute to toxic dynamics as the unsafe perpetrator or the monster, the absent father or the untouchable father, the inea who kind of creates special relationships, the tragic codependent, who's also an abused person too, and the crazy maker who creates a lot of chaos.
So let's start here. Is the unsafe perpetrator or the monster trigger warning with this type, getting the most damaging type of toxic father out of the way? First, the unsafe perpetrator can be physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive and unsafe. They are ruled by anger. Manipulation and cycles of mood escalation.
They can range from being like the boogeyman with legal issues and no one seems to be able to control to simply the guy at home who has outburst and punches walls as a way to communicate what he's feeling, or make a statement, make people afraid. They tend to not really have relationships. They usually take hostages.
They can have a serious mental health diagnosis. They can have substance abuse or they can have C-P-T-S-D. A daughter of a monster experiences them as terrifying. Very powerful. It's a very extremely tenuous relationship. It's hot and cold, and it's also unpredictable. Here is the impact on a daughter, her sense of self.
A daughter of an unsafe perpetrator can always feel like she's in trouble and her real self is bad and unwanted, and it's highly dangerous and confusing to be the real you. The impact on our mental health is you can struggle here with intense general hypervigilance, anxiety, dissociation, shame, and fear, along with the fawning trauma response, as well as some consistent dread.
The impact on our sense of men is the blueprint is like men dominate by weaponized mood, and you need to comply to be safe. Or hide the real you men are dangerous and not to be trusted or dealt with because they're like time bombs. And the dynamic is you might have to walk on eggshells regardless of the type of man that it is.
And the impact on the replication and projection with the monster is a daughter can find herself in very similar. Relationships with partners who are unsafe or a daughter can project that perpetrating father onto other people who are actually safe. That looks like interpreting a partner's frustration as violence instead of seeing.
The frustration is normal. So more on that later. Moving on to the next type of father is the absent stranger or the untouchable father. The absent father is a range from never knowing one's biological father to having a father or stepfather in your entire childhood. A. He is a stranger to you and vice versa.
He doesn't intervene in any way in your life growing up or even now. He doesn't protect you from siblings or an abusive mother. He doesn't know your birthday or what you do for a living. He defaults to your mother who has to put him on the phone and it's awkward at. Best. He avoids all parental responsibility.
When he does engage, it's still neglectful somehow or feels off, and he can show up at times if it's easy or beneficial to him. The absent stranger fathers can be any of these. They can be totally physically absent and you don't know him. They can be present, but a stranger, they can be totally self-consumed.
Um, they can be emotionally immature. They can be emotionally limited. Shut down and preoccupied with anything but his daughter. He can be disinterested or profoundly blocked in not knowing how to connect, which is another version of it. What makes him an him? Untouchable could be his childhood, could be substance abuse, could be a mental health diagnosis, or he can range from being really narcissistic to really being limited.
And shut down, and not knowing how to connect with a daughter or connecting with anyone else, not even knowing himself. It often feels like, sadly, that a pet would be more important to him than his own daughter. The absent stranger can also be more connecting with a son, but not a daughter. That's another dynamic there.
Here's the impact on a daughter. Her inner child can assume that a father like this just doesn't think you are maybe worth it enough, which actually wasn't true. The impact on her mental health is that she can have core beliefs that contribute to depression and anxiety. That can often be about not feeling good enough and some shame.
There can also be hyper vigilance about being forgotten or abandoned. Her sense of men can be, men can become icky people to avoid as if. They were aliens because they were aliens, or that you have to work a million times more to convince a man to be interested in you, which is really too much on anyone to put in that amount of work.
The replication and projection dynamic. A daughter here can get caught up in chasing, being known by men, and since there wasn't protection, a daughter can also project that their partner is aloof. Or disinterested over normal stuff like a partner being tired or preoccupied, there can be rage about not connecting.
The third type of toxic father is the ENM Meher who creates a special relationship. While I don't see them as common as a last two, it is an issue with a. Father, when the Father overs shares, crosses boundaries is more like a high school kind of messy friend than an actual father. The Enea is looking for comradery and care and validation from you.
The enea can seek out from you what he does not get. In his other relationships with adult women, he struggles with maturity and his daughters tend to have to parent him. He might be actually be very fun and feel safer, but he isn't. Father, it's about him. Here is the impact on a daughter. Her sense of self with the imsu can feel like her sense of self is about being available to others only.
And reciprocal relationships feel very foreign or uncomfortable. The impact on her mental health can be anxiety about what is shared depression related to not being seen triggers around things like secrets and sharing and hyper vigilance about information and relationships. There can be shame about loose boundaries, gossiping, being negative or stuff like that.
Her sense of men is, men might be safer than women, but they really don't show up for you at the end of the day, and intimacy is about them. Gossip again or their struggles. The replication and projection issue is a daughter of an enea can find themselves with men who are the focus and possibly projecting feelings of being used or, or rage about things like disclosure rage about trust.
An important side note about replication and projection in all these is I don't believe that childhood trauma survivors attract. Monsters or mes or absent people or crazy makers. Childhood trauma survivors were never taught to identify what's unsafe or given a chance to develop a sense of self that can protect them from what's unsafe.
Childhood trauma survivors have a broken radar system about unsafe people, and that's what we're trying to fix. Okay, so the fourth type of the toxic father is the tragic codependent. This is a father who is also abused, but he doesn't protect his daughter from the other abusive parent. He doesn't protect his daughter from the other parent.
He usually defaults to the abusive parent, and it's like a weird en philosophy that the abuser can't help it. It and taking the abuse from the, the abuser is the morally right thing to do and change or breakthrough or getting out of that is terrifying to him, or he doesn't even contemplate it.
He can range from at least knowing that he is stuck and to not even seeing the abuse to himself and his children, and he might think that that's all normal and he can range from at least knowing that he's stuck and he's being abused to not even seeing it. As abuse to himself or to his children can be very normal to him, which is bizarre.
He can be clueless, he can be martyred. He has a high crossover with the Im Mesure because he can often align with you as a co victim of the mother who was abusing him or you. Typically a mother, he could have a, he could have a same sex partner. Typically, when a daughter tries to address it or get her needs met, he will say stuff like, well, you know how she is.
Or worse, you know what I have to put up with the tragic codependent is the probably the most complex father on this list to process. In therapy, we often view them as safer. They can feel safer in direct comparison to the blatantly abusive parent, and also safer in the way that they may try to connect with you.
They're connecting, but they're not protecting. Here's the impact on the daughter. This is the impact on her sense of self. Daughters of a tragic codependent father like the Im Mesure, can feel like they only exist for someone else's pain. Having watched their father be victimized while not protecting their daughter, she doesn't really know herself.
Here's the impact on her mental health. The daughter can struggle with rage, triggers, and hypervigilance about people not doing the right thing, like it's. An unconscious thing, not being able to pair those two things, the father's behavior to people not standing up and doing the right thing. There can also be abandonment.
There can be anxiety about protecting others or others needing to change triggers around things like cowardice and hypocrisy or big triggers. Her sense of men is the blueprint is men can be impossible Barriers to get through to. Men might need the most help in her mind, like the underdog men are there, but men are absent.
There can be shame about not helping enough or not being helped, or really complicated like projection feelings that men should always be available and always be empowered and selfless. I think that those are good qualities in men, but if it's coming from your inner child about what they should be, a daughter can feel disgusted with anyone who isn't those things.
The replication. Projection is a daughter of a tragic, codependent. Can experience unconscious rage or disgusted with codependent men or feel compelled to support men no matter what, perhaps protecting them from other women, if that makes sense. Daughters can replicate trying to save or awaken a male due to this type of father and also this type of toxic father is.
Greatly contributes to a distrust of other women in general on top of what the mother modeled. Moving on to the last one, the crazy maker, the chaos father, the crazy maker father can range from having substance abuse issues to hoarding to general immaturity. He's like a big kid and he can be seen mature in some places, like maybe his job.
He was really a mess in relationships. The crazy maker, toxic father behaves in contradictions. They can tell you they love you, but they never show up. Their relationships with women are often codependent or highly dysfunctional. They can make poor choices and are oblivious to the emotional impact on their children or even anyone else.
They can be impulsive financially and vocationally and romantically. The crazy maker, toxic father are not. Always outwardly or blatantly abusive, and they often have overlap with the, IM Mesure with their daughters, but they can get nasty, however, if you push them about their dysfunction due to their profound immaturity.
So this really falls under the emotionally immature parent, the crazy maker. No shows to your graduation after just telling you that they will be there and then act like it was F's fault about not showing up, not something that they dropped the ball on or made a conscious choice about. They are incapable of accountability.
He is incredibly hard to pin down or even get. Answers out of and growing up, he could forget to pick you up and then minimize the importance or the impact on you. It's all about him. I'm not saying this is like a narcissistic NPD father. This can be an incredibly emotionally immature father as well. It can be both.
It's not always that they believe that their intentions are the truth they intended. On meeting your firstborn. So what's the problem if they didn't show up? It can be very slippery and avoidant yet sometimes kind of also fun and positive, so it's tough. They can be a little bit of that safer parent as well, but they can also be rigid and detached from their impact on their daughters.
Here is the impact on a daughter. The impact on her sense of self as a daughter of a crazy maker can always feel the burden of having to be the parent in the room and receiving help or being the focus can feel really uncomfortable or foreign parentified. Children do not get to develop a healthy sense of self since they are in a role.
They're not really a self. The daughter can also feel incredibly not important enough for someone to get it together. Like sense of self was skipped over into an instant adulthood experience because the father never took her or their relationship or anything really seriously. The impact on her mental health is anxiety.
Shame and stress possible coping, like overdoing it or people pleasing for people she can struggle with. Letting go over triggers around disappointment or hyper vigilance about trusting people and simply shame that that was your father. Her sense of men is the blueprint is you cannot rely on or trust men in any way ranging into like, say a codependent fantasy that you can change men from immature to mature.
The replication projection is a daughter can find herself again with similar romantic partners, or they can find a good enough partner, but still project onto them. Feelings like that partner is a loose cannon and you can't trust them. Daughters can also project onto anyone that they're a loose cannon and possibly might need to kind of be a bit controlling around them.
Or they can project rage when others are either incompetent or feel like they're manipulative because that crazy make your father was both. Those are the five types and the types of impact that a father has on a daughter. Leave a comment about what really stood out for you if I name something important to you.
And also many of those traits will overlap and it's common, which I'll talk more about later. What really jumped out at you, and if you're a male watching this, how is your experience similar with a father or how does your pattern of struggles with relationship, how is that kind of similar? Here are some general healing goals and ideas with each type of toxic father.
In all of these, if you're still in these toxic dynamics with your own father, seek out resources such as therapy or codependence Anonymous. Or Codependent No More. That's a book by Melody Beadie on getting some skills together about how to detach from them instead of doing the same old battle with a father like this or trying to get them to see you and still getting abused and let down space.
Boundaries and resources, maybe taking a break. Withdrawing things like no contact or low contact are all things you can look into. So here are the healing goals for each of the five types. Let's start with the unsafe perpetrator, the monster. Try to stop trying to figure out the monster's behaviors. And their motives, they aren't safe, and figuring out why they do something abusive doesn't change that they're abusive.
Our inner child wants to know why they do certain things, as if that's gonna really help something. They think The why will have everything make sense when it doesn't. The other healing goal is try to work on and recognize patterns of projecting the monster onto your partners or other men in your life.
We lose a person's humanity. Whoever we project upon projection can also about doing a familiar dance with a man like managing his emotions or believing that their frustration is about you and your fault. It's all about how the inner child reacts to someone. The last is finding tangible emotional anger.
Empowerment about your father of origin while exploring things like the fawning response, getting some information on that. Monsters tend to rob us of our personal power, and we want our daughters to have power in their lives, power in their choices, power in their thoughts and power about themselves.
Here are the healing goals about the non protective and absent father or the untouchable father. One is to process abandonment in therapy and find healthy, tangible anger holding this father accountable as a thought exercise and a process. Another is stop trying to maybe fix the mystery. Our inner child, like the monster, wants to know why this father abandon.
In reality or in the day to day when we were living with them, that inner child actually needs emotional help to process what happened. The why really kind of never heals work with your inner child about projecting abandonment onto maybe other men or your partner. Third healing goal with the I Mesure is recognize that.
Poor boundaries are not actually special, and the missing parental hierarchy that you needed from a dad and the responsibility that he got out of like you lost out on being someone's daughter and became kind of the mother or a surrogate to him. The other healing goal here is to stop confusing poor boundaries or responsibility.
For intimacy. And lastly, is to help your inner child see that fixing them means to abandon yourself. Here are the healing goals for the tragic, codependent. Recognize that they had the power to protect you as their daughter, but they didn't despite how it looks. Recognize that they modeled submission and not.
Power work on catching that you might be projecting rage or you might be projecting, needing to rescue people. That's that kind of projection, replication stuff that I mentioned. Are you able to catch that about this type of father? And lastly, the healing goal with the crazy maker is recognize that you've become the parent and lost out on a childhood and becoming someone's daughter and becoming a person.
See the chaos for what it is. The fixed immaturity is not. Potential. And lastly, stop projecting or try to catch it. That lack of competence onto others or safety onto others. Maybe let people fail or see where they are actually capable and functioning. Having a crazy maker father tends to really trigger people that no one's competent and no one's reliable.
That kind of stuff. How to work on these dynamics. If therapy is available to you or if you resonate with these, or if you're working on your own. If you click right up here and subscribe to a list, you'll get an email with specific journal prompts related to this video on how to work on it. I did it that way so that this video wouldn't be so long in reading these journal prompts, but they're gonna be related to your inner child projection and replication and how to catch this stuff and how to think about this stuff and look at patterns.
So some good news is, is here is what is actually possible, whether you're in therapy or outside of therapy, just working on your own. One is that you can actually step out of the toxic chase or reactivity dynamics with men or the masculine in general. If you can figure out that inner child piece and the unfinished business with your own father, you can be able to step outta this stuff and catch it.
It next is you can actually trust yourself and identify toxic behaviors and patterns and the legacy that your father kind of like left, that you were left holding this bag of just stuff. The more you focus on your father, you can spot these things. More as well as how you project in that projection and replication.
Once we truly see how bad it was and how our father impacted us, that will lead to setting more firm boundaries and communicating your needs, letting things go. Our inner adult can really step in, but only if we see what's really going on. And what comes first is seeing how bad it truly was as your father's daughter.
And the third kind of piece of good news is that we can learn to prioritize our own emotional wellbeing. A general rule of thumb is that our, if our inner child is going to keep trying with. Or reacting to difficult people, but like with the toxic father, it doesn't go anywhere and you had nothing to work with.
So that inner child needs an inner adult to step in and protect them from continuously trying with our actual fathers or chasing partners or chasing the wrong ones or reacting to them. And that is the blueprint and something I'll talk about in a minute called the trauma bias as well. So some final thoughts.
And some loose ends. Some loose ends to kind of get these outta the way. These are patterns that I've seen in my practice of childhood trauma. Some will feel pretty accurate to you, others won't. I can't realistically name all the nuanced situations. Some of these may feel generalized to you, or overly simplistic, or maybe even too specific to you, and I hope you're able to eventually find someone's.
Safe, who can hear your story with your father and be seen in that way. We all need that safe person to process our fathers. Another loose end is there are many fathers like these types of fathers, and there are many fathers who are not like these at all. There are fathers refusing to look at their trauma.
There are fathers putting everything they have into raising healthy daughters. Don't just look for the toxic fathers. You'll get stuck in your own trauma. Another loose end, and this needs to be named, is that women are shifting and they're voicing more dissatisfaction about their relationships with men, about equality, about hetero roles.
That's an important present piece. Going on. It's not just a past piece to be explained through Toxic Fathers. Hopefully that is clear. Another loose end is yes, some parents actually do get stuck with an abusive partner, like the tragic codependent, and they just can't leave. That is a reality, but one other part to process is could that parent have at least been real with you about the abuser?
That's another kind of piece to process. Another loose end is. And this is intimate here as a man. I might have triggered you in this video, explore if I've actually triggered you about being too casual about these big issues or seemed insensitive about something, or thoughtless about the topic in some way to you that might feel really big in this video.
Did it feel like I didn't understand things like toxic masculinity or that I was potentially mansplaining to you? That's what I mean about projection or replication. Who might I have taken you back to, if I did trigger you maybe to your own father? What are some things that I actually got right in the video?
How might I be different? That is the reason to explore the projection kind of issues, or I could have sucked to. So could have been that. So another thing to name is that projection is tricky. Your partner can be like your father or they can be the opposite. Projection is about what our inner child puts onto another person that actually belongs to the abuse of.
Father or another version of is that we can give up all of our power to someone when we are projecting that they have all the power and it's not safe to have some power. It's nuanced, and it may sound like it's always your fault if you have any feelings in general, that's not what I'm saying. You might be in an abusive relationship or you might have been in one, and I'm not saying, oh, you're just projecting, but what if it's not abusive?
You feel like it viscerally is we are all gonna need some outside help to figure that out. Before we close here, here are some final thoughts about healing and processing a toxic father projection. It can be true that you are with a partner that is dysfunctional, messy, has their own trauma, or is unsafe or there actually may be good enough.
However, while you may need to shift and deal with or make big decisions about your partner or the men in your life or your partner who isn't a man, um, the work is going to probably be about the toxic father of origin. You can be in similar relationships with men, but it's different from the past in two ways.
This is really important. You have more power now as an adult to shift and change, but you had none as a toxic father's daughter growing up. Anytime we say all men are like that, or all women are like that, or I'm never gonna be able to feel comfortable or safe, or I'll always get let down by people like that.
That's that projection replication stuff. People can be a-holes, I get that. But when we project, we go right back to feeling powerless. And then we're looking for evidence about how we're not safe. Our inner child is looking to confirm past perpetrators with present people. There are some present perpetrators, but if we're only focused on confirming what isn't safe, we'll actually never find what is safe and find some healing there.
All five types of toxic fathers can overlap. We can have a monster and an absent stranger combination. You can have a tragic, codependent father who's also a crazy maker, but those overlaps are not really that important. You probably will have some overlap. What is important is about being able to recognize your triggers and the dynamics that still need to be dealt with.
I'm trying to say don't get caught up in like, it's really bad because my dad had all five kind of categories. One other final thought is something called trauma bias that I mentioned. Trauma bias in choosing our partners. Let's just say your father was a tragic, codependent, and enmeshed, and you were his surrogate spouse, person you're dating, or a man you're dating who seems like he doesn't overshare a.
Or maybe he doesn't even share at all or can assert himself and maintain his own autonomy, might be really attractive to you. But because of our inner child feels, it might feel intolerable to our inner child to be with someone again, who is somewhat cowardly or tragic or enabling or unprotective. The trauma bias is that we are amping up certain qualities in a potential partner.
And not recognizing or not seeing, it's like tunnel vision that the person might actually be dismissive, avoidant in their autonomy or independence, but because of your trauma or your trauma bias, you might construe that independence as healthy when maybe it isn't. We often have a broken radar system due to that trauma bias, and our inner child just does not want to be stuck with a similar type of partner or a man again.
Another example is being attracted to someone who seems like they really have their stuff together because your father was a really messy, crazy maker, but because of that trauma bias, you don't catch that. The person who has their stuff together is actually incredibly controlling and rigid, and it's actually not that they're well adjusted.
Trauma bias is like our inner child looking for the rescue from dynamics that were horrific to us, but we need help seeing the whole picture. That's different than tunnel vision. I know that that was a lot to take in. Thank you very much for staying with me so far. If you want a good place to connect on issues like this, check out my monthly healing community where issues like a toxic parent, how to parent our inner child, how to deal with triggers, how to make choices, not coming from trauma, how to know what's healthy and maybe what's not.
We discuss this in the community and we work on all those things through courses, journal prompts, live q and as. You can just check it out right up to the link, right up here. And before I go, when it comes to the impact of a toxic father and what a daughter goes through, both in childhood and later in life in regards to men or the masculine, A teacher, I really wish I remembered where I saw this clip.
A teacher said this profoundly powerful thing about children who come to school. The teacher said, healthy children come to school to learn and be social unsafe. Children come to school to be loved. And I'd also add that children going to school to be loved. Don't maybe see that school isn't the place for that, or that school isn't fully safe.
With relationships with men in, in relation to toxic fathers, the work is about showing up without that like wound and deciding what isn't safe and deciding about what actually is, and coming to things from our sense of self and developing one instead of just looking for a rescue, if that makes sense.
So I hope this video was helpful to you. I would love to do a video in a similar way for. Boys who grow up with toxic mothers or even boys with their toxic fathers. And I would love to hear from you if you have questions about, I imagine you would have questions about anything that I said here. Comments if this was helpful, like subscribe, all that jazz.
