I have been a marriage and family therapist for more than fifty years and have written seventeen books including best-sellers like Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places and The Enlightened Marriage. I have helped thousands of individuals and couples find the love of their lives and have the relationship they’ve always wanted. Yet, my own love life was a disaster. If you come to my website, MenAlive, you will see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”
You will learn about my first two marriages and how they ended in divorce. All relationship breakups are confusing and painful, but even more so when you have been making your living helping other men and women find real lasting love. The good news is that I discovered the secret for finding the right partner and having a great marriage. My wife, Carlin, and I have been happily married for 46 wonderful years.
It took me a long time to realize that the key to having a successful love life was a hidden wound I didn’t even know I had. Millions of men and women suffer from a father wound, a wound that has become so pervasive in our society that most people don’t even know they have it or that they need to heal it in order to have relationships that are truly satisfying and successful.
You can learn about our healing journey in our book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why The Best is Still to Come and take your own self-paced journey to success in my on-line course, “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love.”
My business card reads, “Jed Diamond, PhD, Healing Men and the Women Who Love Them since 1969.” That was the year after I completed my initial graduate training and began working as a mental health professional. 1969 was also the year our first son was born. When I held him in my arms shorty after his birth, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were fully healed and engaged with their families throughout their lives.
Discovering and Healing the Family Father Wound
Although I have written 17 books, it took me a long time to deal with my father wound. My Distant Dad: Healing the Family was my 15th published book. The book began with the following two epigraphs:
“A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he may not have acquired.”
–Dr. James Hollis
“Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is unwilling or unable to fill that role, it can leave a wound that is not easily healed.”
–Roland Warren
The first chapter began with the following memory:
I was five years old when my uncle drove me to the mental hospital. I was confused and afraid.
“Why do I have to go?” I asked my Uncle Harry.
He looked at me with his round face and kind eyes. “Your father needs you.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I was beginning to cry and I clamped my throat tight to stop the tears.
He turned away and looked back at the road. In our family, we didn’t talk about difficult issues.
It took me a long time to understand what happened to my father and to overcome the silence and denial that clouded my life for many years beginning at age five.
I went with my uncle to visit my father every Sunday for a year. It took me most of that time to realize he was not in an ordinary hospital but was in a mental hospital. It took many years to learn that my father had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved.
I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and I could do to prevent it from happening to other men and their families. It isn’t just males who have “a hole in their soul in the shape of their father.”
I knew that my mother grew up without a father in the home. Like my own father wound, it took years before I learned about the nature of my mother’s early life. She and her younger sister were born in Toledo, Ohio. When my mother was five years old, her father died suddenly. My grandmother and her two small children were forced to move to Savanah, Georgia with my grandmother’s father and stepmother. That family wound was denied and hidden, but impacted all aspects of my mother’s life, including her four dysfunctional marriages.
Healing the Family Father Wound
Here are some of the things that indicate that the family father wound may be undermining your relationships:
- Your present relationship is not working well.
You may be having constant fights that never seem to get anywhere or there may be angry silences that can last for days, weeks, or months. Your relationship may be wonderful one moment than turn bad the next. As the Eagles song, “Victim of Love,” says:
“You’re walkin’ the wire, pain and desire, looking for love in between.”
- Looking back on past relationships, you recognize a similar pattern.
This isn’t the first time a relationship has started out well but eventually went south. We often think we had just picked the wrong partner, but now realize there is something deeper, something more hidden.
- Reflecting on your family of origin, you feel a certain resonance.
Your parents’ relationship may not be the same as the ones you have experienced, but there definitely are similarities.
- Your father was absent physically or emotionally.
You may have lost him through death, divorce, or dysfunction. His absence impacts your mother, yourself, and other members of your family. You begin to suspect that you have been, “looking for love in all the wrong places,” (the title of my second book).
- There is a longing, a hunger that you feel.
Falling in love feels like you have finally filled an inner void, that you have found that magical partner that will make everything all right, but it never seems to work.
I share my father’s and my own healing journey in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. I also developed an on-line course that anyone can take to explore your own father wound, how it may be impacting your life now, and what you can do to heal. You can learn more about the course, “Healing the Family Father Wound” here.
If you would like to read more articles about life and love, please consider subscribing to my free weekly newsletter: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/
Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by healthlydays.
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