How Does One Get Over What they Never Had in Childood

[NotDarkYet]

I never got any attention or mentoring from my father.  He was usually drunk and was clearly disappointed in me from the day I was born.

 

Now he's dead.

 

It's been 10 years now.

 

I still yearn to win his approval.   I fantasize about it.  

 

I'll never get that.  Ever.

 

How do I get over this?

[Merrifield]

This is a rough one and I feel sorry for you. I didn't get much from my dad. He's still alive and I still don't.

I don't yearn for his approval (I dont know if I ever did) I think I may have emotionally cut him off shortly after my parents divorced when I was young.

My solution is to break the cycle and give my kids what I know they need.

I know this doesn't solve the problem of you or I getting over it, but, at least in my case, it makes me feel like I'm making a change that could last for generations, as long or hopefully longer than the generations of fathers of the past have been neglecting their kids.

[thebeardslastcall]

You can't get what you missed, but you can have a kid and give them all the things you missed out on. Getting the approval of a well raised kid may give you a much greater satisfaction and pleasure than what you missed, assuming you can pull it off. Also he wasn't disappointed in you, but himself. That's why he was a drunk. He made poor decisions in life and blamed you as if it was at all your fault, when it wasn't. Don't let someone else's failures rub off on you. If you can have a kid and give them a great father and raise them well. I'm sure that will provide real and meaningful approval and you can remember it's not the child's job to earn the parent's approval, but the parent's job to earn the child's approval. Or if you don't want to have or can't have your own kid you can always mentor another person's kid and help fill in a gap they may be lacking from their own parents and teachers. It's much more enriching to provide meaning and value to the life of a child than it is to a cranky and defeated parent.

You also may want to look into why you feel you needed his approval. There may be some deeper issues here to solve.

[Lens]

What has been missed is gone but what you can do is therapy to feel finally the pain of your childhood and cry about it also you should not get over it but you can integrate it and live with it. This is what Truth means, because if you try to get rid of it (dissociation) you will not learn from it. It's like getting rid of the knowledge that touching fire hurts, you wanna retain that knowledge of pain so to not to hurt yourself again and not to hurt others. So learning how it feels like to not to be loved by your father will certainly help you to no more demand love from others to compensate the lack of it and welcome love when it is available and genuinely offered to you. You wanna have children after you invested a lot of time in therapy and self knowledge I feel it is way much better for the children so they don't have the burden of someone else's past. Stefan did have his daughter after he dealt with much of his childhood trauma and I think that was a wise choice.

 

To help you out this is a quote from the author Alice Miller: Source

 

Pain is the way to the truth. By denying that you were unloved as a child, you spare yourself some pain, but you are not with your own truth. And throughout your whole life you'll try to earn love. In therapy, avoiding pain causes blockage. Yet nobody can confront being neglected or hated without feeling guilty. "It is my fault that my mother is cruel," he thinks. "I made my mother furious; what can I do to make her loving?" So he will continue trying to make her love him. The guilt is really protection against the terrible realization that you are fated to have a mother who cannot love. This is much more painful than to think, "Oh, she is a good mother, it's only me who's bad." Because then you can try to do something to get love. But it's not true; you cannot earn love. And feeling guilty for what has been done to you only supports your blindness and your neurosis.

[NotDarkYet]

Thanks for the advice Beards and Lens.

 

Both are useful perspectives.

[LovePrevails]

I'm sorry that your dad did not take an active interest in your life and you missed out on curiosity and intimacy

 

I am sorry to say it is a long healing process, and these wounds are not likely to evaporate over night, 

however, there is a light at the end of the tunnel

 

it must help a lot to talk about your experiences, the mark they left on you, how it felt at the time, and how it feels in the present moment talking about it. It can also be quite difficult, but the rewards are great.

not all healing activities have to be painful, in fact subjecting yourself to the kind of curiosity you wish you had had as a child now in your life will gradually improve your confidence and self-esteem, and with those - your expectations. 

 

If you are committed to meeting your needs, having enriching experiences, and exposing yourself as much as possible to warm, caring, supportive, interesting people and mentors, then you may find that you have something wonderful to live for in the present! Even if you can never change the past.

 

Love, warm wishes, and good luck.

[_LiveFree_]

I'm so sorry, NotDarkYet. The hole of a missing parent is a difficult space to navigate. 
 
While my father isn't dead, he hasn't been in my life for over a decade. When he was in my life I never got the attention and mentoring I needed either. I cannot praise Internal Family Systems Therapy enough. I learned to be my own father, and damn am I good at it. 
 
You can do the same.
 
http://www.selfleadership.org

[MMX2010]

Short answer: (1) Realize that pretty much everyone else lacked the very same thing.  (2) Learn to build it for yourself, through yourself.  (3) Pass it on to the ones you love. 

[BaylorPRSer]

You can't get what you missed, but you can have a kid and give them all the things you missed out on. Getting the approval of a well raised kid may give you a much greater satisfaction and pleasure than what you missed, assuming you can pull it off. 

This will set both him and his kid(s) up for disaster.  Insecurity must be tackled from within.  If the OP has kids before fully grieving what he didn't get from his Dad, it could be very bad.  My equivalent experience was in sex.  For various reasons including getting teased for being a virgin, religious repression, having my ego absolutely annihilated by my experiences in public school, my mind identified having sex with a hot girl as something that would a massive amount of insecurity.  I was wrong.  Having sex with a beautiful woman had absolutely no healing power whatsoever.  Our relationship was doomed to fail from the day that it started because I had impossible expectations.  She did as well, but that's a different chat.  Parents often make the mistake of seeing their kids as a way to bring healing.  When the children inevitably don't provide that, the parent inevitably resents the children.  I think it's great for philosophical people like the ones here to have kids, but don't do it to make yourself better.  Make yourself better on your own time, then bring children here to make the WORLD better.  

[MMX2010]

 Parents often make the mistake of seeing their kids as a way to bring healing.  When the children inevitably don't provide that, the parent inevitably resents the children.  I think it's great for philosophical people like the ones here to have kids, but don't do it to make yourself better.  Make yourself better on your own time, then bring children here to make the WORLD better.  

 

Exactly this, especially mothers.  Then, when raising children isn't as healing as they expected - (because children require constant care) - they take it all out on the children. 

[thebeardslastcall]

This will set both him and his kid(s) up for disaster.  Insecurity must be tackled from within.  If the OP has kids before fully grieving what he didn't get from his Dad, it could be very bad.  My equivalent experience was in sex.  For various reasons including getting teased for being a virgin, religious repression, having my ego absolutely annihilated by my experiences in public school, my mind identified having sex with a hot girl as something that would a massive amount of insecurity.  I was wrong.  Having sex with a beautiful woman had absolutely no healing power whatsoever.  Our relationship was doomed to fail from the day that it started because I had impossible expectations.  She did as well, but that's a different chat.  Parents often make the mistake of seeing their kids as a way to bring healing.  When the children inevitably don't provide that, the parent inevitably resents the children.  I think it's great for philosophical people like the ones here to have kids, but don't do it to make yourself better.  Make yourself better on your own time, then bring children here to make the WORLD better.  

I agree with this. I tried to make this point with my final separated sentence, but thanks for elaborating and clarifying the point.

[PGP]

It sucks to lose parents, especially when young. I empathise with that. My old man died ten years ago, 2005 and it was sudden. He was being divorced by my mother at the time and I am ashamed for taking her side in the divorce. She would have left him living in a field at 61 in a caravan, because she forced the sale of the house he had built with his own hands. It was such a mess. He was a tee-totaller, but what I have called a "dry-drunk". It was a very unpleasant house to grow up in, but nonetheless, when he died, I cried buckets. The only thing he ws good at was working and I think my tendency toward workaholicism later on is from that. Other than that, I am very grateful to come across FDR to have a model of masculinity that I can aspire to. Also, some others I greatly admire and I have mentioned them previously. 

 

I have thought that the grief I had at the time was what is called "sehnsucht" in German, a yearning for something that never existed. That now, could never exist. It makes one keenly aware that what they spend their time on is all there is. This moment. And, I have had to make some very big decisions to get to where I am now with this in mind. In this, defooing was paramount.

 

Getting over it, for me, was difficult at the time. Alot of cunning people moved while I grieved. It was messy. 

I take what I wished it could have been like and I incorporate that into what can be. Do for yourself what he could not. That grieving for what was never there though, that is tricky. It is important, I think, to write it all down and see him as objectively as possible within the family system. And part of that is judgement.

[cherapple]

Feel it --> understand it --> grieve it --> acknowledge your rightful anger about it.

 

Feel the anger at not being given what you needed, at him making you the scapegoat for not being good enough for him, when in reality he was not good enough for you. He knew he didn't give you what you needed, but made you feel like you were the one who didn't give him what he needed.

 

That is an effing terrible thing to do to a child.

[Lens]

This will set both him and his kid(s) up for disaster.  Insecurity must be tackled from within.  If the OP has kids before fully grieving what he didn't get from his Dad, it could be very bad.  My equivalent experience was in sex.  For various reasons including getting teased for being a virgin, religious repression, having my ego absolutely annihilated by my experiences in public school, my mind identified having sex with a hot girl as something that would a massive amount of insecurity.  I was wrong.  Having sex with a beautiful woman had absolutely no healing power whatsoever.  Our relationship was doomed to fail from the day that it started because I had impossible expectations.  She did as well, but that's a different chat.  Parents often make the mistake of seeing their kids as a way to bring healing.  When the children inevitably don't provide that, the parent inevitably resents the children.  I think it's great for philosophical people like the ones here to have kids, but don't do it to make yourself better.  Make yourself better on your own time, then bring children here to make the WORLD better.  

I agree with you completely as you can see unfortunately people still see kids as tools to use to feel better and this is what we all were conditioned to think and say. It's a propaganda that parents use it against us and then we believe in it blindly then we use it to perpetuate the use of children for personal gains and "happiness". And guess what when children do not bring the happiness that they were supposed to give to their parents and they begin to cry and to be angry? Well then they get beaten, ignored, hated and broken that is how most of us were treated when we did not smile at the parents. The healing power comes from within no from the children or the spouse, thank you so much for your very wise comment!

[FrankHuranku]

Let it go...which is a sentence that brought me madness for a while. What the common saying should be, is identify, face, express/expel, & change.

Emotion & trauma, identify trauma, face what you've been pushing down emotionally, express it until calling upon the details of the trauma doesn't give you the emotional response. Realize while in the trauma moment, that you are not responsible for these moments before 18, & from the learned behavior that resulted from it. Then make light of the events once it's emotionally ok to call upon them, I'm doing this with standup comedy.

 

Then, personal development, the long road of overcoming learned behavior & replacing them with new habits.

[MMX2010]

Then make light of the events once it's emotionally ok to call upon them, I'm doing this with standup comedy.

 

Then, personal development, the long road of overcoming learned behavior & replacing them with new habits.

 

Good for you, man.  Stand-up comedy is both the perfect metaphor for what you need to do, and is much harder than most people think.