For years, I thought my struggles with men came from a father wound. I assumed that because I had patterns of chasing emotionally unavailable men, wanting to feel chosen, and staying too long in relationships that hurt me, there had to be something unresolved in my relationship with my father.
But when I really looked at my childhood, I realized something completely different:
It wasn’t a father wound. It was a mother wound.
I was a daddy’s girl growing up, and my relationship with my father didn’t become estranged until much later in life, after I began seeing parts of him I hadn’t understood as a child. But my mother was the first emotionally unavailable person I learned to chase.
She loved me, but her love could feel inconsistent. She could be emotionally distant and unavailable, and as a child, I often questioned whether she loved me because I didn’t always feel loved by her.
I didn’t realize then that I was learning something about love.
I was learning how to reach for someone I loved when I couldn’t always feel emotionally close to them.
And years later, I found myself repeating that dynamic with emotionally unavailable men.
In this episode, I’m talking about the mother wound, emotionally unavailable parents, childhood attachment patterns, chasing emotionally unavailable men, and how the love we experience in childhood can shape what feels familiar in our adult relationships.
This isn’t about blaming mothers or reducing every relationship pattern to childhood. It’s about understanding our own stories with more honesty and compassion—and recognizing the patterns we may have learned before we were old enough to question them.
Sometimes the person you learned to chase emotionally wasn’t a man.
Sometimes the pattern started much earlier.
And sometimes healing means realizing that the love you learned to chase is not the love you have to keep choosing.
✍🏽Substack Article: https://open.substack.com/pub/ivebeenthatgirl/p/it-wasnt-a-father-wound-it-was-a?r=kgfiq&utm_medium=ios
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