Life Without Father : Newport Beach Therapist Explores How Growing Up Deprived of Dad’s Love, Time Wounds Psyche

Whenever you think of your father, do you feel sad or angry?

Do you find it difficult to break away from your mother’s influence to become your own person?

Are you confused about your role as a man? Do you, as a woman, lack confidence in your femininity?

Do you have difficulty making intimate relationships work for you?

Do you feel that people you love will leave you?

If so, you may be suffering from what Newport Beach psychologist Jane Myers Drew calls a “father-wound.”

In “Where Were You When I Needed You, Dad?” Drew says that if you recognize yourself in any of these descriptions you may not have had the quantity or quality of fathering you needed while growing up. And, she writes, “experiencing the loss of your father’s love or involvement, or perhaps enduring his abuse, could have left you scarred.”

Illustrated with drawings by participants in Healing Your Father Wound workshops Drew has been conducting around the country for a decade, the trade paperback (Tiger Lily Publishing; $16.95) provides a guide “to releasing the pain of the father wound and finding your own personal power.”

There’s a potentially large market for what Drew calls her “user-friendly, practical book.” Most adults in the United States, she contends, did not have adequate fathering while growing up.

“When I look at inadequate fathering I’m looking particularly at four kinds of dads,” she said in an interview. These are the dads who were:

* Absent over a significant period of time either through death, divorce, military service, travel or for other reasons. (“Deprivation of a dad sets up a profound hunger for fathering.”)

* Abusive: This includes dads who were physically violent, “rageholic,” sexually intrusive, or substance-addicted. (“Because the assault is too much to comprehend, youngsters may react by cutting off from emotions, bodily sensations, and even memories.”)

* Overly judgmental: These fathers were critical, shaming and controlling. (“Controlling dads injure their offspring emotionally by imposing too many limitations and rules.”)

* Emotionally withdrawn: They’re in the house but they’re not really there. These are the dads who are glued to the TV or spend the majority of their time with a sport or some other activity. They’re also workaholics who leave the house before the kids get up and don’t return until they’re already back in bed.

“When you put that all together,” said Drew, “there is just an overwhelming number of men who were unable to adequately father their children.”

An adequate dad, on the other hand, is present to his children.

“He’s there and he cares,” said Drew, “and there certainly were a number of those in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But also I don’t think there was cultural support for good fathering when we were growing up.”

Drew says the number of “adequate dads” has been increasing since the rise of the women’s movement in the early ‘70s. “As women moved out into jobs, it just left a gap and forced men into the role of caretaker of children and many men found out they loved it,” she said.

But while there are dads who are doing a “marvelous job of fathering,” Drew said, “there’s also more children who are not having good fathering at all. There is a vast increase in physical and sexual abuse. There is also more divorce, more abandonment, and there are more women having children without fathers and more teen-age pregnancies.”

Drew’s interest in the “father wound” grew out of personal experience: Her own father died when she was 14 months old.

Growing up, she said, “I was very aware I didn’t have a father, but that’s just the way things were and I was in denial that his absence had any real impact on my life. I thought that my problems stemmed from my relationship with my mother.”

But about 10 years ago--”through reading and going through my own personal therapy”--Drew realized that losing her father “was one of the most significant events of my life.”

“I realized my difficulties with intimate relationships, depression and lack of direction in my life all connected back to my not being fathered,” she said. “I didn’t have a dad who could mirror back to me that I was pretty and that he liked being with me. I didn’t see parents relating to each other. I didn’t have a dad to go to when my mother was upset with me. I didn’t have a dad to focus on my future and prepare me for it.

“And when I realized that these issues had to do with my dad, then I could start working on them.”

Until six years ago, Drew’s Healing Your Father Wound workshops were only for women. But then a man in Minneapolis filed a lawsuit against the organization that had sponsored one of her seminars. The lawsuit was settled out of court, but Drew said it made her realize that “men have this father wound as much as, or more than, women do because they need that role model about how to be a man.”

(She’s still conducting the workshops, holding them eight times a year in Orange County--through Coastline Community College, Pathways to Discovery in Fountain Valley and the Church of Religious Science in Huntington Beach--and in major cities around the country.)

To heal the “father wound,” Drew believes men and women have to stand in two pairs of shoes: the child’s shoes and the father’s shoes.

It’s important, she said, to get in touch with those unexpressed feelings from childhood--feeling hurt, angry, lost and lonely. “We have to feel them in order to release them.”

After doing that, she said, “we can stand in the dad’s shoes and understand that he’s a person in his own right--that he too had parents that probably wounded him , that he was just another link in a chain of dysfunction.”

It’s important, she said, “just to understand all the pressures and influences on him. Once we can do that, it shifts our idealization of him (so that we realize) he’s really just another human being with a lot of problems too and it brings him down to our level.”

Most of us, she added, “unconsciously look up to the dad, hoping that he will take care of us and protect us and when we stand in his shoes we usually realize he just didn’t have the tools to do that. Then we need to give up those expectations and get on with finding the ways we can have purpose and satisfaction in our own lives.”

“Where Were You When I Needed You, Dad?” is available at B Dalton Bookseller and Waldenbooks, or it can be ordered by calling (800) 950-DADS.