How a father relates to his daughter has an enormous effect on her soul—for good or for evil. Numerous studies have shown that women who report a close and caring relationship with their fathers, who received assurance, enjoyment, and approval from them during childhood, suffer less from eating disorders or depression and “developed a strong sense of personal identity and positive self-esteem.”
Mothers in particular have the opportunity to offer encouragement to their daughters by treasuring their daughters unique beauty.
What was your childhood like? What lessons did you learn as a little girl? What did your parents want from you? Were you delighted in? Did you know to the core of your being that you were loved, special, worth protecting, and wanted?
The passive wounds are not as obvious. Passive wounds give a blow that is harder to define, because it didn’t come as a blow; it came as an absence. Words unspoken, affection withheld . . .they are subtle, they often go unrecognized as wounds.
Example:
“Not receiving any blessing from your father is an injury . . . Not seeing your father when you are small, never being with him, having a remote father, an absent father, a workaholic father, is an injury.
Some fathers give a wound merely by their silence, they are present, yet absent to their children. The silence is deafening.
Example of how a passive father wounds the heart:
Debbie’s father had an affair when she was young. He was not a violent man. There was nothing abusive about him. In fact, he was kind to her mother, as he was to Debbie and her sister. They shared Sunday dinners, went to church together. Only, he chose another woman.
“I guess she wasn’t enough to keep him.” Debbie said about her mother. Then she paused and said, “I guess we weren’t enough to keep him.” Affairs and divorces strike at a woman’s worst fear—abandonment. They wound, not just the mothers, but the daughters as well. The wound is sometimes hard to identify because the transgression seemed to be against his wife. But what does the girl learn?
What made it confusing was that in many ways, he was a good man. The message that settled in her heart as a teenage girl was:
You’d better do more than she did or you won’t keep your man.
After this came a young man who pursued Debbie, and then left for no apparent reason. Why is she always trying to “improve” herself? Debbie is always looking for something to work on. Prayer, exercise, financial responsibility, a new hair color, more discipline. Why is she trying so hard? Doesn’t she know how amazing she is? What makes her search so frustrating is that she doesn’t know what is wrong with her. She simply fears that somehow she is not enough.
Abusive Fathers
The horror that abusive fathers inflict on their sons and daughters, wounds their souls to their very core. It breaks their hearts, ushers in shame, embarrassment and a host of defensive strategies that shut down their hearts.
Most people minimize the wound. You either . . .
Deny it outright: deny that it happened, deny that it hurt, and certainly deny that it's shaping the way you live today.
Leave it in the past.
Minimize the impact of the wound.
"Yes it was awful, but I deserved it."
"But what he said was true about me."
Take on a victim mentality and let the wound define you.
I think by now you have some idea of the impact your wound has your heart. Much of our life ends up being shaped by it, in one way or another. We take a wound, and with it comes a message, a lie about us.
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