To the One Who has a Complicated Relationship to Their Father

Dear friend,

There’s a particular kind of ache that comes from needing someone who was never quite able to give you what you needed.

Maybe your father was physically absent.

Or emotionally unreachable.

Maybe he was right there, in the room, day after day—yet you still felt like a ghost in his presence.

There are fathers who leave. Fathers who stay but never really arrive. Fathers who confuse provision with presence.

Fathers who try, in their own broken way, to love—but whose attempts land like silence, or shame, or a strange kind of hollowness.

Most didn’t know how to parent. They were taught to provide without knowing the depth of what that really meant. No one modeled for them how to hold emotions without flinching. How to make space for tenderness without shame. How to remain when someone else is hurting. Many were taught that strength meant silence, that love meant control, that fatherhood meant performance, not presence.

And some… some did it differently.

Some fathers loved with full hearts, with arms that never withdrew. Some stayed emotionally open, willing to evolve, willing to listen, willing to be shaped by the love they offered and received. If you had or have a father like that—hold that miracle close. Let it remind you what’s possible.

But for many, the story is more complicated.

If this is part of your story, know this: you are not ungrateful for naming what hurt. You are simply telling the truth of what was missing.

This letter isn’t meant to vilify.

But it is meant to be honest.

To acknowledge the rupture of needing to reparent yourself in the wake of someone else's limitation. Of having to grow up early. Of having to teach yourself how to feel, how to listen, how to hold space—because the person who was supposed to model that for you couldn’t or wouldn’t.

And yet... you’re still here.

Still learning how to meet yourself with the very tenderness you once longed to receive. That’s a holy reclamation.

Your tenderness is not a flaw, even if your father never learned how to meet it. The absence wasn’t your fault. And it never meant you were too much or not enough.

It meant he didn’t know how.

Some fathers try. Some don’t. Some change, eventually. Some never will. This letter is for you—for the ache, the complexity, the liberation that comes with finally letting yourself feel it all.

You don’t owe anyone the performance of being okay with what never was. And you don’t have to pretend you weren’t shaped by what was either.

Yet now—you get to choose what shapes you next.

From my heart to yours,

Practice Postscript

Where the letter stops being read—and starts being lived.

The Reflection:

• What did you most long to receive from your father—and how have you been trying to get it elsewhere?

• Where have you told yourself to minimize or justify what hurt, simply because “he did the best he could”?

• What does it mean to honor both the ache and the hope?

The Practice:

Find a quiet moment to write a letter to the version of your father you most needed as a child. Not to the man he was, but to the one you needed him to be.

Say what you never got to say. Then write a short note back from that version of him—one that affirms your worth and validates your experience.

Let your nervous system feel the difference.

Living in the Question:

• How would I show up differently if I no longer tried to earn the kind of love I deserved all along?

• Where in my body do I still hold his absence—and what might it look like to tend to that space with care?