Paternal Hostility

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Following the article on maternal hostility, let's talk about the father's hostility towards the child. In the same way as in maternal hostility, the father has many reasons to show hatred towards his child, and of course, again here we will talk about not being aware of what is being blocked in the unconscious and bursting out in the form of impulses of hostility towards the child in varying degrees of intensity: from devaluation and condemnation to emotional and physical abuse.

To begin with, unlike the mother, the father much later enters into the "role of father" and "feeling of the father." As a matter of fact, the child does not need dad so much in the first months of life and even in the first years.. Emotional connection is necessary for a child with a mother in the first years of life and of course it is important and valuable if from the very first days the mother is supported by her beloved man by the child's father. But it often happens that a man becomes a dad even before he has become psychologically mature and ready for fatherhood. And in this case, he can experience anger at his wife, for the fact that she gives all her attention to the child. And even it comes to resentment and jealousy of his own child. In this case, the man competes with him for the role of the first son of his own wife. He can distance himself from her resentment, go on a spree, demand her attention, accuse her of not loving him.

This, of course, is an extremely harsh case of the father's hostility, which then develops at a later child's age into the father's hatred of his own offspring. This is most often expressed in the devaluation of the child - "everything is wrong in him." "Well, at your age, I was not such a bastard!" - the father often repeats. He criticizes the actions of his child, often humiliates him. Especially if it's a son. Slapping him on the head and hitting him for the slightest miscalculation and not meeting his father's expectations.

In this case, the father, as it were, equates himself (compares) with his son and discovers that his wife loves the child more than him (or so it may seem to him). Although, as a rule, it does not seem to him that his wife - the mother of the child - really becomes more attached to her son, moving away from her husband for the simple reason that it is difficult for her in such a situation to see him as a man - in her eyes he is the same child, and there is no sex with children and no adult relationships. The reason for this scenario is the absence of a man's separation from his own mother, which I have already written about, and a bad relationship, as a rule, with his own father, who was either absent or broke his will. Now the father is trying to reproduce his child-parent scenario and recoup the weak link in this family chain - the son.

And the more the son's mother is obsessed with her child, the more relevant is the child-parental conflict of the father himself, and he is again included in the triangle of relations: he-she is me. He is jealous of his own son, his wife, as if his wife is his mother, and the child is the very competitor for her breast with milk. … And the wife here can act as a provocateur of the father's jealousy towards his son. In general, this is a very difficult situation for a woman - on the one hand, she must see a man in her husband and not “stick” with her “female” love for a male child. But if the husband demonstrates a child-parental conflict in her behavior, then if she herself is not mature and has not passed her separation from her parents, she has to direct all her erotic wave of tenderness to her son and thereby she arouses jealousy and enmity between two men close to her …

The father's hostility to his daughter looks a little different. Firstly, the father rejects her as a girl - he wanted a son, and now he will raise her as a boy, ignoring her gender. But this is still the mildest version of hostility. Which, in fact, saves the father from the next two, since in this case the dad has already secured himself from the sexuality of his daughter.

With his daughter, the father can behave in the same way as in the case of his son, devalue, humiliate, reproach, condemn, shame her, criticize and punish her physically. If his will in childhood was broken by someone stronger, he cannot but break her will, he will again take it out on her for his childhood pain. But there is a nuance.

When a daughter enters adolescence, when she blooms and becomes sexually attractive to him (he certainly will not be able to realize this, since shame will not allow even the thought that she is attractive to him as a woman) and here there are two options development of events.

1. Formerly accepting and friendly dad suddenly at some point beats his daughter. This is a fairly common scenario that women discuss in my office. The daughter is shocked, she does not understand what happened to her father and this pain remains in her soul for life. With this baggage, the father sends his daughter into adulthood, into the world of men. And the girl will learn this lesson forever: "The world of men is dangerous and unpredictable!" In her unconscious, the image of her father is now split and she begins her movement along the "love-hate" axis. She will then find such a man, from whom she will then receive with full of both love and hate. It was for this life scenario that her own dad blessed her.

2. The second variant of the development of paternal hostility, implicated in an incestuous attraction: when she becomes a beautiful girl, he will be frightened (unconsciously of course) of his excitement and will distance himself from her. He will become inaccessible and cold. And the daughter will never know the reasons for his removal. She will understand: “He left me because something is wrong with me” and will suppress her femininity and sexuality. Thus, as in the first case of beating his daughter, he saves his daughter from his sexual arousal in such a traumatic way. And then the girl will go to adulthood with a lesson: "I can be abandoned and I need to do everything to prevent the pain of rejection in my life again." But this is exactly what will happen to her. Since there is a lot of energy in the trauma and she will find exactly the one who will reject her, like a father, will become cold and indifferent to her. Or she herself, fearing that she will be rejected, will reject herself many times.

In my practice, I saw only one father who was aware and accepted his sexual impulses towards his teenage daughter. And it was this (conscious) dad who was able to give his daughter a healthy "ticket" to the world of men. He informed her, without seducing her at the same time, that she was beautiful and that she would definitely meet a boy who would love her, that she could not help but like the boys from her class. This father's awareness of his sexual impulses helped him not to traumatize his daughter, but rather to draw her attention to the world of boys in a supportive way, without rejecting her.

So, as in the case of maternal hostility, of course, the origins of hatred or indifference towards one's own child are in the father's own childhood and his relationship with his parents. And as in the case of maternal hostility, this phenomenon requires awareness and acceptance that the world is not ideal.

Happiness to your children!