19/11/2025
I saw this the other day and it stopped me in my tracks, because for so many of us that isn’t a quote, it’s the beginning of our story.
We weren’t born with trust issues, we didn’t arrive in this world questioning love, anticipating abandonment,
or learning how to regulate emotions on our own.
We learned that slowly, quietly in the small, daily erosion of worth that comes from growing up under the weight of someone else’s unhealed pain.
For some children that looked like emotional unavailability, a dad who was physically in the house but emotionally out of reach, and others it was anger, addiction, infidelity, or volatility watching the man who was meant to protect us, hurt the woman who held everything together.
And the truth is these men loved us, just not in the way children understand love. Not consistently, not safely and not in a way that felt predictable or grounding.
Their love was scattered something we had to decode, earn, or piece together like a puzzle that never quite formed a picture.
We learned to read emotion like weather, scanning every room for signs of a storm before it hit. By the time we were adults, we were already experts in emotional labour.
We spent years interpreting their silences, absorbing the impact of their tempers, and cleaning up the emotional debris that was never ours to begin with.
Before we could even think about our own dreams,
we had to climb out from under their chaos. Before we could rise into our own potential, we had to sort through the shame and confusion that didn’t belong to us at all.
So no, we don’t have “daddy issues”. We have dads with unhealed trauma.
Men who were never taught to apologise, how to stay patient or how to father gently. Men who were taught providing was love, silence was strength and vulnerability was weakness.
And because they never did their emotional work, we ended up doing it for both of us.
We became the cycle breakers, the healers, the ones who had to understand “their” childhoods just to make sense of our own.
Without realising it, our fathers conditioned us to live from our masculine, to be capable, self reliant and endlessly resilient.
Continued in next post
