How an absent parent in childhood can impact our relationships in adulthood.
Katie’s mother raised her all alone after the divorce.
Mark’s father died when he was 3 years old.
Helen’s father was an alcoholic.
All three of them grew up with an absent parent.
And now in their adult life, they seem to struggle with relationships and with creating deep connection with their partners.
Psychological studies have shown that adults who have been deprived of a parent’s presence, are more prone to struggle with their own relationships in adult life.
And with the term “absent parent” we don’t only refer to physical absence.
What is an “absent parent”?
An absent parent can be one that has left the family for a variety of reasons.
It can be because of work obligations and lots of travelling. A parent who works a lot, and yet when they are back home, they hide behind a newspaper or their fatigue, and they don’t make time to reconnect with their family and to compensate for the long absence.
It can be because of divorce and separation from their partner, the other parent. Does this mean that everyone who has got a divorce is an absent parent. Not at all. You can be separated from your partner, and still be actively present in your children lives. But in the case of an absent parent we are talking about those who estranged themselves from the family and they didn’t visit or meet their children often enough.
In these two cases we just described, the concept of father or mother (it depends who is the absent parent) is also not cultivated at home. Which means that if one parent has left the family, the other one stops talking to the children about them or they share some vague information about them, even though the children would have a lot to say and to ask about their absent parent, but they feel as if they are not allowed to ask. But somehow there is a veil of silence and mystery around this parent and their role. Children learn about this role in life only by observing their friends and their parents.
Or in other cases, there is a lot of anger for the parent who left, and it is openly expressed in front of the children.
Other reasons for a parent being absent are: incarceration, hospitalisation, loss of parental rights, abandonment or death.
However, in many cases the absent parent is not a physically absent, but an emotionally absent parent. It’s the parent who is doing drugs or who is an alcoholic, and even though they are at home they are not there. Their mind is somewhere else, and their children can see that.
It’s the parent who struggles with their mental health, and they can’t be emotionally available for their children.
It’s the parent who is struggling with the loss of their partner or another child, or a long-term illness of theirs.
It’s the parent who is a narcissist and is not able to emotionally connect and support their children, or a parent who is verbally, emotionally or physically abusive.
And it may come as a surprise to you, but an emotionally absent parent can be one who is working a lot. One that has to work long hours or work two jobs in order to support the family. In some of these cases, the children remember spending a lot of time alone at home, or coming back home but without any warm food on the table or someone to drop them off or pick them up from school.
In all these cases, the parent-child relationship is cold, distant, or even non-existent. The child feels abandoned, not seen, not understood, not viewed as important, but what’s worse is that the child ends up viewing themselves as a burden and too different.
Why is having a present parent important?
To name a few reasons:
A parent’s role is to be there, and to meet the physical and emotional needs of a child.
The need for unconditional love, connection, support, validation, comfort and acceptance.
The need for playfulness, fun and creativity.
The need for discipline and guidance.
The need for education but also for life skills.
What happens when a parent is absent?
The child can’t explain why this is happening and in their own self-centred mind they find only one possible explanation: their parent is gone because of them. They did something wrong, they are “too much”, they are not good enough, they are not worthy of their parent. Therefore their self-confidence drops significantly, they suffer from guilt and their self-image is formulated around the idea that they are different since all the other children have their parent, but they don’t.
How is all this affecting our adult relationships?
When we have never connected with one of our parents, it feels like a wound that is always open.
Like a tab on your computer that is always on even though you’re not working on it.
The “father wound” or the “mother wound” as we call it.
The wound that keeps all the questions inside us unanswered:
“Why me?”, “How would it be different?”, “What could I have done more?”.
This traumatic experience makes us adopt (self-limiting) beliefs such as:
“People leave me. They always leave.”
“I don’t deserve love and attention.”
“There is no time and space for me in other people’s lives.”
“Other people’s needs are more important than mine.”
“I need to accommodate others and their needs otherwise they will get upset with me, disappointed and eventually leave me.”
“I am not important.”
Now imagine entering the relationship world in our adult life with this mindset, with these beliefs about our self.
Here are a couple possible scenarios that may occur:
- Feeling less important than others and putting their needs higher in our priority list, leads us to people who take advantage of our kindness. Feeling less important is not something we are always aware of, so keep that in mind. Feeling less important comes together with shame — with the feeling that it’s our fault for what happened (even though as we said before this is not true, but this is the narrative we had created in our head when we were little).
Feeling less important comes with the belief that we were responsible for the parent’s leaving, or for their emotional unavailability, and we should always try to make amends for that.
2. This is when we get attached to partners with narcissistic traits, partners who give us bread crumbs while they expect everything from us. Or partners who are emotionally unavailable, with little empathy, and little space in their life for us. This is where we are trying to change the story, to change the ending for that childhood loneliness and heartbreak, and fix a person who needs us. And to add more to this scenario, these kinds of relationships are usually a never-ending on-and-off, with little stability, security, and predictability in them. The more we become clingy and fearless that we will lose the relationship and be left alone, the more imbalance and turbulence grows in the relationship. And the more we are afraid that we are going to fail in saving this relationship and that’s something we cannot emotionally afford once again, the more codependent we become.
We try to please people, we say yes to everything, we are available 24/7, we sacrifice our dreams and hopes for our partner, and we are kind with no boundaries, until we feel unappreciated, disposable, and unimportant, or burned out. Then we protest, we nag, we get upset or resentful, but at the same time we feel guilty for setting boundaries.
And the vicious circle starts again from the beginning.
Once again, this is not something that we consciously choose or something that makes us happy. We only subconsciously choose it because it is familiar. We have been there before and we know the drill.
3. Another possible scenario that comes as a consequence of the absent parent wound is the one where we built a high and long protective wall around us and we don’t let anyone in. Too rigid boundaries, too much disconnection, too much loneliness. This is us standing at the point where we have already decided that relationships hurt, people abandon, and there is nothing to do in order to prevent that. Therefore, we consider that we are making the best decision when we are not letting our partners come close to us, we don’t open up to them, we don’t rely on them, we don’t ask for their support, we don’t want any deeper connection with them.
Every time our partner is coming closer, we feel suffocated, trapped or overwhelmed. It’s not that we don’t have feelings anymore.
We do.
But they are locked in a dark closet, downstairs in the basement together with all the other ghosts from our childhood, and the key is lost already for a long time. Getting back to feeling the feelings, allowing vulnerability and connection, seems to be too much work, and not worth the effort.
Plus, we don’t actually know how to do that, because we never learned how to build connections.
4. Also do you know what we may turn into if we have been through the absent parent experience? An angry person. A person that feels that everyone is there to upset us, that life is unfair, and we always need to make a point about this unfairness, otherwise nothing will change. A person who is highly mistrustful or critical of others and who gets disproportionately upset with small triggers. In reality though there is a huge amount of anger accumulated inside us for the parent who was not available. Our anger is totally valid, However, we never directly expressed that anger, so this feeling finds outlet in other people or insignificant or unrelated triggers.
5. If you have grown up with an absent parent, and now you have become a parent, you may recognise subtle or in some cases obvious feelings of overwhelmness around this role. You don’t know whether you are going to be a good enough parent, you overtry, in some cases you overcompensate by becoming the exact opposite of your absent parent. Which means omnipresent, too protective, too controlling, too perfectionist, trying to reach the unrelenting standards you have put on yourself.
6. And there is also the other category of people who don’t want to become parents because their own experience of being in a family was not a rewarding, fulfilling or happy one, and they are afraid that they will recreate something similar, and since they don’t want that, they are protecting their unborn children rom the deprivation and loneliness that they went through.
It’s sad to have experienced an absent parent in your life, but also it is something you can heal from.
Therapy helps immensely with that and I know it because I have witnessed it happening: in my practice we have supported thousands of people heal from their past and create the relationships that they want and deserve, and it’s always a very emotional moment to look back together with the person that trusted you and to see the difference, the steps that have been made so far, the new perspective on life and relationships and the freedom from all the past patterns.
You are not alone.
Until next time, take good care of yourself.
