“I love you, Dad, but you’ve hurt me.”

Last week, we broke the silence on mothers. We pulled back the rug on the subtle, complicated wounds a narcissistic mother leaves behind, and how those patterns unpack their bags in your adult life. But a family system has more than one engine room. Today, it’s time to talk about the other side. It’s time to talk about Dad.

The father-daughter relationship is one of the most critical developmental bonds we have. Why? Because it has a quintessential influence over the emotional blueprint and architecture of an adult woman’s internal world.

Yet, so many of us are trapped by what I call the "father fantasy" – that tidy social script of what a father should be. We get tangled up in family loyalty and a quiet, internal shame that prevents us from looking at the reality of how we actually grew up.

"Daddy’s little girl." My father called me “Little One” until the day he died. I loved him, but he was a complicated, volatile man who created an immense amount of emotional uncertainty and low self-esteem for me. That pet name didn’t just show affection; it kept me trapped in the role of the child. I was never allowed to grow up, to step out of his shadow, and be seen for who I truly was. Until I did a lot of my own deep therapy, I didn't realise how much that relationship was secretly running the show – dictating my self-worth, the partners I chose, and how I showed up in the world.

The relationship we have with our fathers is the very first masculine energy we encounter as a young girl. The interactions within that bond are exactly where we create the narrative of who we are. It is an absolute imprint for how we expect to be treated in adult relationships – what we will tolerate, what we will avoid, and what we will actively look for in another. Most importantly, it is the foundation of how safe we feel in the world.

But it can also be an incredibly messy, complicated space.

Secure, Consistent and Curious

Before a young daughter can even begin to learn who she is, her nervous system needs to know she is safe. A father’s role is to provide a stabilising, protective, predictable presence.

When a father fails to provide that security, her developing nervous system is forced to adapt to a baseline of chronic survival. Without paternal protection, a young girl's body registers the world as an inherently hostile, unstable place. She learns that she is entirely on her own, hardwiring her brain for constant hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and a profound somatic dread that follows her right into adulthood.

When a father is consistent, predictable, and physically and emotionally present, it creates a beautiful baseline of structural safety. This safety directly translates into adult resilience. A woman who grew up with a secure paternal foundation doesn’t look at the world as a minefield where she must constantly walk on eggshells. Her nervous system is hardwired to know she can handle challenges, tolerate discomfort, and bounce back from failure because she has a deep-seated cellular memory of being backed up, valued, and protected.

However, when the opposite occurs – when a daughter experiences an absent father, a dismissive father, one who invalidates her, makes fun of her, shows constant disapproval, or struggles with the volatility of addiction and alcoholism – the internal landscape looks completely different.

In a healthy developmental relationship, a father’s gaze and words of affirmation are the primary drivers of a daughter's intrinsic self-worth. If you are ignored, dismissed, or invalidated by your dad, your ability to form a solid sense of self-worth is shot from the get-go.

You needed him to actively listen to you, encourage your curiosity, and validate your emotional reality. But for you, that didn’t happen. You were likely told you were "too sensitive" when you were upset, or the entire scenario was turned into a (sometimes cruel) joke so he could avoid dealing with your pain.

In this type of dynamic, there is zero curiosity. There is no encouragement for you to grow, to make mistakes, and be gently guided on how to learn from them. If you did something special or excelled at something, it was shunned, ignored, or picked apart. It was never quite good enough. You were left criticised, deflated, and with zero ability to celebrate your success or own your smallest wins. Your childhood world became a series of experiences that made you feel small, insignificant, and completely unseen.

Fast Forward to Today

How do you show up in the world as an adult?

You show up as a woman who is deeply uncertain, second-guessing her choices, and drowning in insecurity. Hyper-vigilance takes over – scanning the room the moment you arrive, reading everyone's facial expressions, and shape-shifting into a people-pleasing chameleon just to secure the affirmation you missed out on as a child. You give your power away in a desperate bid to keep the peace and make everyone else happy.

You see, my friend, your brain and your nervous system were hardwired to that initial paternal uncertainty. You became trapped in the narrative that said, "I am not worthy, I’m not good enough, and I don’t measure up." Your psychological foundation of safety, resilience, and emotional intelligence simply wasn’t allowed to form in a functional, flexible manner.

And as a daughter of this type of father, you likely grew up to seek out adult partners who carry those exact same volatile, unavailable attributes. This is what you know. Your nervous system automatically checks into what is familiar, even when that familiarity is completely toxic. Your brain normalises the chaos, leaving you stuck in the murky, paralysed water of what I call "the comfortable uncomfortable."

Then, naturally, ambivalence sets in. You get caught in the agonising loop of: "I want to change, but I don’t know how." It all feels too heavy, too hard, so you stay exactly where you are. Doing the same things. Suffering. Feeling like crap a lot of the time, and telling yourself that you have become a pathetic human being.

But I am here to tell you directly: you are certainly not pathetic. Not even close. You need to give yourself a break. You learned to survive an environment where your needs were not being met.

Your Life. Your Peace. Your Responsibility

But – and here is my gentle, but no-nonsense stand on this – you do need to do the work.

No one is coming to fix this for you. You need to build new, manual skills that allow you to heal those raw, unmet needs of the little girl inside you. You have to heal those parts of yourself if you ever want to find true peace and liberation.

Healing means consciously building the personal values that align with the security, validation, and safety you were denied. The skill of trusting your own voice, and making deliberate, values-based choices day in and day out, is the bedrock of building an unbreakable shield. It is the only way to soothe those messy triggers that constantly set you off course. For example: security, self-validation, and safety can become values that you actively live by and practice through the behaviours and choices that enable these needs to be met in your life.

Your healing also means having a voice. It means acknowledging what has happened to you and calling it out. Not in an adversarial or accusatory manner, but rather in a way that allows you to share what your actual experience was in your relationship with your dad. It does take courage, but it is so empowering to say, “I love you, Dad. But you’ve hurt me.” Doing this allows that space for the little girl in you to finally be heard, seen, and validated. 

This is where the pain is healed and the past stays where it should. 

If you are ready to step up, enter a completely new phase of adulthood, and take accountability for owning your own power, your own self-worth, and holding the highest respect for yourself within healthy boundaries – come have a chat with me. Or, get yourself into The Change Experience book series and learn how to break these patterns at home.

In order to heal your past and completely transform your today, you have to choose to do the work. It is all within you, my friend. The choice is entirely yours.

I’ll be right here, holding your hand.

Fleur Elizabeth x