11 Things Women Who Grew Up With Emotionally Distant Dads Still Struggle With
Their dad laid the foundation for how they would deal with men for the rest of their lives.
CarlosBarquero / Shutterstock When we think of absent fathers, our minds might automatically go to men who lack a physical presence in their daughters' lives. But dads can also be emotionally absent, distant, or cold. For their daughters, how their father showed up for them can leave an imprint that can last a lifetime. Emotionally distant dads were not mean or abusive, but they weren't there for the moments that mattered most in their children's lives.
That presence without connection created a ripple effect that lasts long after childhood ends and adulthood begins. Women who grow up with emotionally unavailable dads can carry silent wounds that impact their relationships for the rest of their lives. Understanding these struggles can build self-awareness and open the door to healing.
Here are 11 things women who grew up with emotionally distant dads still struggle with
1. Not trusting men emotionally
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The first man who was supposed to love them and support them let them down, so it's no wonder that women with emotionally distant fathers have trouble trusting any men who come after him. Their fathers kept their feelings locked away deep inside and only participated in superficial interactions with their daughters, depriving them of a deep, meaningful connection.
When the first man you knew couldn't be bothered to open up to you, it's hard to believe that the ones who follow will show up any differently. You automatically anticipate men being detached, shutting down when things get hard, or keeping you at arm's length, so you expect it, even when they don't. This continues the cycle of not being able to form connections that sit in your soul.
2. Second-guessing their self-worth
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When your dad can't even give you the time of day, you might start to question your self-worth. In your mind, he didn't find you valuable enough to show up in your life, so you're not sure anyone else will. You needed that validation as a young girl and didn't receive it, so you have to fix the damage by finding ways to validate yourself and never relying on outside sources.
An emotionally unavailable father left his daughter feeling like she wasn't good enough to earn his affection and time. Now she measures her worth by how much attention and validation she gets from men. Rejection can send her spiraling down a rabbit hole of low self-esteem and cause her to tolerate treatment she would not approve of if she had a healthy sense of self.
3. Becoming hyper-dependent or super independent
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The goal for most women is to be able to form healthy, secure attachments. But when you do your best to get your father to care about you emotionally, and your needs still get ignored, you may develop an anxious attachment style that will follow you through life if you don't do something about it. Women whose dads weren't there for them emotionally, and hang onto people they should let go of.
For others, because they never had a reliable emotional anchor as a child, they had to self-soothe, self-protect, and had no one to truly count on. So, they became overly independent, stopped seeking help when they needed it, and carried the weight of the world on their shoulders. Independence can be a strength, but when overutilized, it can become a barrier to emotional intimacy.
4. Feeling uncomfortable with vulnerability
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If you grew up with a closed-off father, you never had your emotions validated or nurtured. You quickly learned that they were pointless and a waste of energy, so you bottled them up and ignored them. You refused to ever show vulnerability again because the man who was supposed to love you unconditionally never showed that he cared.
Your stoic father inadvertently forced you to internalize the idea that expressions of emotion are weak and unwelcome. Now vulnerability feels foreign, and the thought of opening up to someone is downright scary. You have built an emotional armor stronger than Fort Knox, and it's going to take therapy and a patient man to break through those walls.
5. Seeking approval in romantic relationships
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My parents loved their children endlessly, but because they had not had emotional availability modeled for them, they didn't show it to us. We all learned pretty early on that the best way to get a semblance of emotion out of them was to do something that they approved of. In my adult life, that translated to walking on eggshells, so my partner still thought highly of me.
The women who never got the emotional approval they needed from their father figures as children may grow up to chase that affirmation in romantic partners. We can unknowingly look to them to fill the void that our dads left behind, and that is a lot to ask. It's when we learn that the most important approval we could receive comes from within, we begin to drop the need to be validated by others.
6. Being drawn to emotionally unavailable partners
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They say that women typically grow up to marry a man who reminds them of their father. If your dad happened to be a person who never expressed emotion, you might find yourself being inexplicably drawn to emotionally unavailable men. You know that they will eventually hurt you, but they feel like 'the devil you know', so you are comfortable in discomfort.
There is a painful familiarity in being with a person who refuses to open up, the same way your dad did. It mirrors what you perceived as love when you were just a girl, and that idea burned itself into your brain, causing you to pursue people who aren't good for you. Without becoming aware, it's easy to fall into the trap of making emotional distance normal.
7. Difficulty asserting needs
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When your needs are routinely ignored, it signals to you to just stop bringing them up. It became abundantly clear that expressing your emotions was fruitless and might even be punished with silence and avoidance, so you kept them to yourself to keep the peace and stay in your father's good graces.
When young women have had their emotional needs met with indifference or ignored, they start to feel as if opening up is risky. They have been conditioned to believe that wanting more out of life is selfish, so they downplay their needs so they don't appear to be "too much" to deal with, even when they are fully grown women.
8. Fear of rejection
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If your dad was there physically, but emotionally abandoned you, you know what it's like to be rejected. Try as you might, you were never able to be the perfect child that inspired him to be more present and supportive. So, you settled for a surface-level relationship and held on to it with all of your might because it was all you had.
That lack of emotional presence had led you to believe that rejection and abandonment are inevitable, so try your best to brace for it, but stay drowned in fear that it might happen. It's common for women who were not emotionally close to their fathers to fear that people whom they care deeply for will disappear, too.
9. Misreading emotional cues
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We learn in childhood how to interpret emotional cues if it is modeled to us in an appropriate way. Because some women's dads bottled their emotions, they lack real-world knowledge about what other people's feelings mean and can easily misunderstand them.
Without a healthy example of emotional intelligence, women tend to overanalyze other people's emotions or remain silent and assume the worst. They make up negative scenarios in their minds when others withdraw and overreact to subtle things that have nothing to do with how a person feels about them. To overcome this, they have to reparent themselves and learn how to be emotionally intelligent.
10. Keeping their emotions under strict control
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Not only do women who did not have emotional closeness with their fathers have trouble expressing their emotions to others, but they also do their best not to feel them. As soon as they have a strong feeling about something, they tuck it away and distract themselves with things that require head-over-heart thinking.
In the household where they grew up, it was taught that emotions are something to be managed privately, not to burden everyone else with. This led to emotional suppression, difficulty crying, even when they needed to, and putting a smile on their faces while dying on the inside.
11. Quietly resenting their fathers
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Even though they love them, women who had emotionally unavailable fathers growing up resent them silently. They struggle because they truly have deep love for them, but the hate that he did not give them what they desperately needed as little girls. A tight relationship with their dad has always been just out of reach.
There is a complicated tug-of-war going on inside them where love is on one side and resentment is on the other. They mourn the emotional bond that they never had with him, knowing that it is a loss they just have to grieve. The inability to tell him how his actions or lack thereof impacted her makes it so much harder to heal from that childhood trauma.
NyRee Ausler is a writer from Seattle, Washington, and the author of seven books. She focuses on lifestyle and human interest stories that deliver informative and actionable guidance on interpersonal relationships, enlightenment, and self-discovery.
