Dads are important to kids growing up healthy. Living without a dad is tough. Experiencing a dad who hurt you is unimaginable. Did you know your heavenly Father loves you best of all?
In my early 30s I wrote a poem titled “Shadow Man.” Tears stained the lined paper. Full of grief, I poured out my pain while I wrote it and every time I read it and I leaked. I’d share the poem it here. So personal, I hand-shredded it many years ago. It was “for my eyes only.”
Have you experienced pain so raw, so real, that you cried until you had no tears left? Or perhaps you want to feel something you can’t. Is you pain pushed down and bottled up?
Please know that your heavenly Father wants to heal your father wounds. You aren’t alone. There is a loving solution I outline near the end of this article.
Many girls grow up with fathers who were absent in one way or another.
Others have loving, involved dads. If you are among the girls with fathers who were there for you emotionally, physically, and spiritually, you are blessed.
When Fathers Wound Their Girls
Others — me included — have father wounds.
Some dads slapped their young ones or punched them. This is criminal. They should go to jail, the sooner, the better. Other dads slipped into their daughters’ rooms under the cover of darkness and did unspeakable things. This is sick. Beyond sick. If this describes you, you are not at fault for his sin. He is.
Some dads left the family. Divorce, separation — these legal terms fail to capture the pain of a dad’s absence. Or maybe — like my dad — your dad was there physically but absent emotionally.
The Effect of AWOL Dads
I cannot begin to describe how much my dad’s emotional absence confused me and set me up for depression and anxiety as an adult. Thank God, my early 30s ushered in an intense time of healing. I found the strength to forgive my dad. He never asked for forgiveness. I gave it to him anyway. I had to. For my sake.
He truly didn’t realize how much he hurt me. He didn’t intend to.
Back then, I needed to know he loved me, that I reigned as his princess. His there-but-not-there-ness crushed what I thought of myself. It mangled what I thought God himself thought of me.
But you know what? Years ago, I decided years ago to follow the apostle Paul’s instruction, “forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead” (Philippians 3:13). What is ahead for me is heaven. My “now” is loving my kids as best as I can, together with my husband, because this is God’s desire. Mine too.
A Turn-Around
Now my dad and I have a great relationship. I cannot explain the reason why. In my heart I believe it’s God’s healing.
He phones me. I phone him. (He hasn’t joined the ranks of Facebook. . .yet, and doesn’t know how to text.) When my brother died a year and a half ago, we began having lunch together almost weekly after my Saturday counseling sessions at my office in greater Chicago. First grief and a need to make sense of a tragic death filled our conversations, then pretty boring but important things surrounding legal matters, and finally jokes and laughs as God healed my dad and me. In our loss, we grew close.
You may know this bible verse:
I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten. (Joel 2:25).
The prophet Joes wrote these words to the people is Judah and Jerusalem, reassuring them that when he brings a calamity (in this case, to bring his people to repentance), he is fully able to recompence. And so this is what I experienced in my relationship with my dad. What the locusts ate, God has given back.
What to Do When You Still Hurt
May I encourage you to try three solutions?
- Read the Bible often. Good places to begin are the Psalms, the Gospel of John, and Philippians. God’s words bring comfort and hope.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God (2 Corinthians 1:3-4, NIV).
- Confide in a trusted Christian friend or counselor. Talk with her privately. Tell her what’s going on and ask her if she can make the time to listen well, pray with you, and share healing Scripture.
- Contact me for biblical counseling. I counsel women and girls in person and by Skype. I offer a free phone consultation to help you decide if biblical counseling is what God wants for you.
Counseling hearts to hope,
