My Dad Was Complicated: Sometimes Hard to Love and Harder to Lose

A Father’s Day Reflection

There are certain holidays where the card aisle feels like it was written for somebody else’s family.

Father’s Day can be one of those.

You stand there looking at cards that say things like “Thanks for always being there,” or “You taught me everything I know,” or “You’re my hero,” and maybe some of that is true. Maybe none of it is true. Maybe it is partly true, and that is what makes it hard.

Because what do you do with a father who provided, but did not know how to be close?

What do you do with a father who loved you, but mostly showed it through work, pressure, criticism, sacrifice, money, silence, or expectations?

What do you do when the man who hurt you also helped you?

What do you do when you are grateful and angry, loyal and wounded, grieving and still sorting through old resentment?

That is the part of Father’s Day I want to talk about. The complicated part. The part that does not fit neatly into gratitude or blame. The part where a person can miss their father and still tell the truth. The part where you can recognize what was given, name what was missing, and stop trying to force the whole relationship into one simple emotional category.

Missing a Complicated Man

I’ve been reflecting a lot about my dad lately, probably more than I expected to this year.

He died in January of 2025, and Father’s Day has a different weight when the person is gone. It is strange because I can talk about father wounds all day clinically. I can sit with clients and help them sort through absence, criticism, volatility, emotional distance, addiction, abandonment, resentment, grief, all of it.

When it comes back around to your own father, the clinical language has limits. You can name absence, criticism, emotional distance, resentment, repair, and grief with precision. Then Father’s Day comes around, or a memory hits out of nowhere, and it becomes painfully simple: he is gone, and you miss what was there, what finally got repaired, and what never had enough time.

If you’ve listened to me for a while, you’ve probably heard me mention him before. I hope it has come through as more than criticism, because I know I’ve talked about how critical he could be. I know I’ve talked about how hard he could be to be around. I know I’ve mentioned some of the father wound material because it is part of my story and it shows up in a lot of the work I do with clients.

I also do not want my dad to become a punching bag in my story.

He was more complicated than that.

Most people are.

The Father Who Provided

I don’t have many memories of my dad being very present in my childhood. He was a true workaholic. Seventy-plus-hour work weeks. Always working. Always providing. Always carrying something. A lot of my childhood memories of him are connected to being in trouble, being corrected, or feeling like I was being measured against some standard I probably was never going to meet.

That had an impact. I don’t need to pretend it didn’t.

And there was also repair later.

After I became an adult, after he retired, after his life slowed down, and especially after some health issues limited his mobility, we bonded in ways I never would have expected when I was younger.

When I was in graduate school, he would volunteer to read a lot of my assignments. He would offer critiques, and by “offer critiques,” I mean he would basically try to rewrite the entire assignment into something the professor absolutely did not ask for.

I would send him something about counseling theory, trauma, addiction, family systems, or human development, and he would come back with some neuroscience-heavy explanation of human behavior that may have been interesting, and may have even been true, but had almost nothing to do with the actual assignment.

Then he would get irritated that I didn’t want to use his version.

And as much as that could drive me crazy, I miss that now.

I miss the fact that he would have listened to this and probably told me I needed to explain the brain more. He would have wanted more neuroscience, more mechanism, more explanation. He probably would have critiqued the structure, the argument, the pacing, and then told me he was proud of me in some sideways way that sounded like a performance review.

I would give a lot to have that conversation again.

Grief Misses the Annoying Parts Too

That is one of the strange things about grief.

You miss the beautiful parts, obviously, but sometimes you also miss the annoying parts.

You miss the quirks. You miss the friction. You miss the predictable ways they would irritate you. You miss the stuff that used to make you roll your eyes because now even the irritation feels connected to love.

I would love to have him overcomplicate one of my podcast episodes right now.

I would love to hear him say, “Well, you’re missing the biological mechanism here,” and I would probably argue with him for ten minutes and then later be grateful he cared enough to listen that closely.

That is grief in its complicated form. It does not just miss the idealized person. Sometimes it misses the actual person. The difficult person. The awkward person. The critical person. The person who loved you through correction, criticism, money, work, and sacrifice because tenderness was not always available to him.

The Gift and the Cost

One of the things I’ve had to sit with more and more is that as I work hard, and sometimes overwork, I see more clearly what he gave to the family.

I see the sacrifice differently now.

He worked like that so we would not know financial struggle the way he feared it. He worked like that so the family would have stability. He worked like that so bills got paid, opportunities existed, and there was less fear around money than there could have been.

And that came at a cost. It cost him. It cost us. It cost connection, presence, warmth sometimes, and memories we did not get to make.

That is the hard part of being an adult child looking back with more honesty. The story gets more complicated. There were things lacking. My dad also paid for my college and my master’s degree. I know that may sour a few people’s faces, but it is true. Unlike a lot of people in this field, I had the real fortune of starting my practice at zero instead of starting $200,000 in debt. That gave me an enormous advantage.

Now that my practice is thriving, and my partner and I have a life where we are not constantly terrified that the next bill is going to break the family, I think about my dad a lot. I think about the work ethic he gave us. I think about the pressure. I think about the criticism. I think about the ways I absorbed some of that drive and the ways I’ve had to soften it so I don’t become consumed by it. Some of the things I had to heal from are tangled up with the things that helped me survive and build.

That is a strange inheritance. A father can give you gifts you later have to learn how to carry.

Work ethic can become overworking. Discipline can become self-attack. High standards can become never feeling finished. Provision can be love that was real, while also being hard for a child to feel as love.

Why Father Wounds Get Complicated

That is where father wounds get complicated.

People hear the phrase “father wound” and sometimes assume it means the father was a monster, or the relationship was horrible, or there is some dramatic story of abandonment, violence, addiction, or cruelty.

Sometimes that is exactly what it means.

Other times the wound is quieter. Sometimes it is the dad who was technically in the house, but emotionally unreachable. Sometimes it is the dad who provided everything except warmth. Sometimes it is the dad who loved you, but did not know how to be curious about you. Sometimes it is the dad who only seemed to notice you when you achieved something, disappointed him, or needed correction.

That kind of wound can be hard to name because from the outside everything can look fine. Your father worked. Your father stayed. Your father paid bills. Your father provided. Your father was respected. Your father may have even been a good man in many ways. And still, something in the child may have gone hungry.

That is the part people struggle to say out loud because it can feel disloyal. It can feel ungrateful. It can feel like you are taking a parent who sacrificed and reducing them to their shortcomings.

Adult healing requires being able to tell the whole truth without needing the truth to flatter anybody.

The Question Under the Achievement

A lot of people carry father wounds into adulthood without realizing how much those wounds are running the show.

They come in talking about anxiety, anger, addiction, depression, relationship conflict, overworking, shame, emotional shutdown, or fear of failure. Somewhere underneath the current problem, there is often an old question:

“Are you proud of me yet?”

That question can run a person’s whole life.

It can make someone chase achievement like it is oxygen. It can make someone collapse when criticized. It can make someone become addicted to being impressive. It can make someone hate needing anything from anyone. It can make someone chase unavailable partners because unavailable love feels familiar.

For a lot of children, a father becomes one of the first mirrors of strength, approval, protection, competence, and belonging. The child may never say it out loud, but the questions are there:

Am I enough?

Are you proud of me?

Do you see me?

Do I have your respect?

When those questions stay unanswered, adulthood can become one long attempt to earn what never came clearly enough.

A father does not have to be perfect. Kids can survive imperfect parents. They need enough presence, enough repair, enough consistency, enough protection, enough interest, and enough humility from the adults who are shaping them.

Telling the Whole Truth

That is where I find myself with my own dad. There are things I wish had been different. I wish he had been around more when I was young. I wish I had more memories of him playing, asking questions, being curious, being soft, being present. I wish some of my memories were less connected to correction.

I also know that the man worked himself hard enough to give us a life where survival was not the daily question. I know I benefited from that. I know my education was paid for because of that. I know I started my practice without the kind of debt that crushes a lot of people before they even get moving. I know some of my stability now is connected to sacrifices he made then.

The wound and the gift came through the same person.

If you are reading this around Father’s Day, maybe that is the reflection.

What did your father give you? What did he cost you? What did he teach you directly? What did he teach you accidentally?

What did you inherit from him that serves you? What did you inherit from him that you now have to heal? What are you still trying to prove?

What approval are you still chasing? What anger are you still carrying? What grief have you never fully let yourself feel?

And what, if anything, is still possible?

When Father’s Day Is Complicated

For some people, Father’s Day is warm. It is simple. It is a phone call, a cookout, a card, a memory, a laugh, a hug.

For other people, Father’s Day is brutal. It brings up abandonment, abuse, addiction, violence, betrayal, emotional neglect, religious harm, family secrets, or the grief of never having had the father they needed. Some people lost their dads too early. Some people never knew them. Some people had to cut contact because the relationship kept causing harm. Some people are still trying to decide how close is close enough and how far is safe enough.

Some people are grieving a father who is still alive. Some people are grieving the fantasy that their father is someday going to become the person they needed him to be. That grief deserves respect.

I am not here to tell anyone they owe access to a parent who was abusive, unsafe, cruel, predatory, exploitative, or unwilling to take responsibility. Sometimes distance is the work. Sometimes grief is the work. Sometimes anger is part of the work. Sometimes repair is the work. Sometimes forgiveness becomes possible.

For me, I am grateful I found some forgiveness. I am grateful I got some repair. I am grateful that my relationship with my dad did not end in the same place it started. I still wish there had been more presence when I was a kid.

Holding the Whole Thing

That may be the reflection I would offer this Father’s Day.

Look at the whole story if it is safe for you to do that. Look at what hurt, what was missing, what was given, what you inherited, what you had to overcome, and what you may still be carrying. If your father is still here, and there is something worth saying, maybe say it while there is still time.

That does not mean forcing a conversation with someone who has never earned it. It means taking seriously the fact that time is real. People die. Health changes. Windows close. Sometimes the sentence you keep postponing becomes the sentence you never get to say.

If he is gone, maybe let yourself tell the truth without forcing it into a Hallmark card or a courtroom.

That has been the work for me.

My dad was not a perfect man. He was my father. He shaped me, frustrated me, sacrificed for me, missed things, repaired some things, and I miss him.

I miss his brain. I miss his critiques. I miss how much he would have wanted to improve something that did not need improving. I miss the way he would have tried to make this more technical than it needed to be. I miss the conversations we got to have later in life and the ones we never got to have.

And I know he would have been proud.

So Happy Father’s Day to the dads who are trying, repairing, learning how to be softer without becoming weaker, providing while also trying to be present, and doing the uncomfortable work of becoming the kind of father they never had.

And for those whose dads are gone, absent, unsafe, complicated, or still painful to think about, I hope you give yourself permission to tell the truth: the grief, the anger, the gratitude, the longing, the relief, the love, the wound, the inheritance, all of it.

Sometimes healing means finally being able to hold the whole damn thing.