Scars That Didn't Heal
Your childhood is a special but sensitive time in your life. As a child you are free to dream. Truthfully, everything you desire, wish, hope, and yearn for seems to be attainable. We are free to grow up and chose the path we aspire to travel. Yet, our experiences, challenges we faced, our parents, and the lack of whatever follows us into adulthood. These factors play a huge role in the way we act, who we are and the choices we make as adults. Honestly, it's amazing how we all internalize the things we endured; good or bad, so differently.
“The Good Ole Daddy Issues”
The lack of a father is a huge factor in our lives. I only stress the lack of a father because it’s more common for the father to be absent than the mother. Nevertheless, the absence of a father has long lasting effects and most of them tend to be negative. For females, the absence of a father projects onto our relationships. Girls with daddy issues always seem to get ridiculed because men tend to believe that we should be over the absence, hurt, or pain caused by the lack of our fathers’ presence by the time we are comfortable enough to date. "Daddy issues" create insecurities that are taken lightly, but they are serious and should be taken seriously.
Growing up without the love and presence of your father as a female is hard. A father is supposed to love you, treat you like a princess, protect you, and provide for you. When you don’t have that fatherly love, it creates a desire to experience a love that only a man can provide. This is a special kind of love, the type of love that makes you feel safe and complete. Many females with “daddy issues” struggle to love who they are because they’ve spent their entire life trying to be loved by a man to fill that void, when they should of been investing that love into themselves.
The Effects:
Many females struggle with misplaced resentment. Those struggles, feelings, and insecurities stemming from daddy issues are projected onto the men we chose to deal with. You are attracted to all the wrong men because you don’t know exactly what to look for in a man. Of course no one is perfect, especially not our fathers, but it’s nothing like seeing some type of idea of how a man is supposed to treat you. As a woman struggling from daddy issues you mistake all the wrong characteristics as love. Your fathers' absence or lack of time spent together was considered as silence and that silence was equivalent to not caring. NOTE: It is easy for a man to simply pay child support and make sure you are good financially but by doing so you starve the child’s emotional needs. Now as an adult those insecurities start bleeding through in ways that you don’t even notice because.... "when you are starving you’ll eat anything whether it's good or bad." -KP.
Arguing =
Equivalent to Caring:
When a woman is starved emotionally she tends to be vulnerable, gullible, and easier to manipulate because she is just yearning for love. When a man notices these traits he takes advantage of it and her. Love requires patience. Sex requires passion. It is easy to mistake the two. When a man is aggressive and overbearing those traits are easily mistaken for passion. However, passion does not mean caring or valuing you as a woman.
“He only hits me because he cares”
“He loves me enough to even get that upset…”
“He sees my pain because he apologized”
“He didn’t mean it”
“It’s my fault, I provoked him”
“If I wouldn’t have done what I did he wouldn’t have responded this way”
“Maybe if I cut everybody off around me he would realize he’s the only one that matters”
But, to what extent will I go to feel loved or to guarantee approval/validation on who I am. How far would I go to prove my love and loyalty? How much of me will I sacrifice to feel accepted by you? How many people will I isolate myself from? How many times will I accept what I do not deserve? Understand that love is patient and kind. You do not have to go through hell to feel loved by someone that genuinely loves and cares about you. We all struggle with our own insecurities that stem from different experiences. However, do not let those experiences keep you in an unfavorable relationship, job, friendship or environment. Face them head-on by acknowledging the toxic traits you own because we all have them. Once you acknowledge them find ways to cope and heal to create positive outcomes.
Don’t hide your scars, embrace them with grace.