asleep while drinking and smoking, and a fire began, which burned the whole house down to a blackened shell. My grandmother, trapped in an upstairs bedroom, was killed in the fire. Though my father had tried to save her, it was too late, and he was hospitalized with serious burns. How he must have suffered the guilt of this and a lifetime of self-destructive experiences! Yet, he would not or could not talk about it. Perhaps the deterioration from a lifetime of drinking was too great. Finally, two years later, he died.
My father’s death was a great shock, affecting me deeply. Now it was too late to talk to him, too late ever to tell him how awful I felt for having rejected him, and how, finally, I felt some compassion for his life of suffering. Our unresolved relationship was an open wound in my psyche.
Shortly after his death, on my thirty-eighth birthday, I put on the opal ring. And then I began writing this book. Whether it might actually be published was not an issue for me. I knew then that for me to write about the father-daughter wound was imperative. Perhaps the act of writing could bring my father and me closer together. Closeness had been impossible on the outer level, but perhaps on the inner level, through this writing, I could redeem my “inner father.”
Writing has been a long and difficult process for me. When I write I have no idea beforehand what I will say. I have no planned outline and I simply must wait and trust that something will come. Writing has required a commitment and an act of faith that something will appear from the depths of my psyche that I can name, that I can express, however momentarily, in words. At the same time I know that whatever I write, although it may illumine the father-daughter wound, it will also cast its shadow. There will always be a darkened spot, a side which my limited finitude cannot capture. I have had to accept this mixture of limitation and possibility, this paradox which was my father’s nemesis. In the process, I have often become angry; I have often cried as well. My rage and my tears are behind every page, no matter how serene the final result may seem.
When I started writing this book, at first I saw mainly the negative patterns. I was aware of my father’s legacy—his self-destruction through alcohol and how that had affected me. Although I knew there was a positive side—both to my father and his effect on me—in the early stages of writing this book I could not find it. The last chapter of my book, “Redeeming the Father,” remained unwritten. Beginning with a theoretical point of view helped me gain some perspective on my conflicts. Through describing the various patterns and the underlying archetypal bases, I could better understand how these patterns worked in my life and the lives of my female clients. It was only when I started writing my personal story that my positive feelings about my father fully emerged. I realized the promise of magic he had given me when I was a little girl, the promise that later appeared in my dream of Zorba, of the Tibetan temple, and in the opal ring. My father had the promise of magical flight. But he was like the mythical Icarus who, not knowing his limits, flew so close to the sun that its heat melted the wax which held his wings and thus he plunged to his death in the sea. Similarly, my father drowned his magic in alcohol. He gave me his magic, and this was the positive part of his legacy. But as I saw him change, I saw the magic melt into degeneration. In reaction I had first denied that magical promise by trying to control everything. And then, when the controls cracked, I identified with my father’s self-destructive side. My alternatives seemed to be either sterile control or Dionysian dissolution. Recognizing these two opposing extremes in myself led me to analyze the psychological patterns that I call the eternal girl (the puella aeterna) and the armored Amazon. Yet the resolution, the redemption, lay in the images of Zorba, the Tibetan temple, and the opal ring my father gave me. My way back to the magic of my father was to allow these images to live in myself.
This is my personal tale of a daughter’s wound. But in my work as a therapist, I have discovered that many other women suffer from a wounded relationship with their fathers, although the details may differ and the wound may hurt in myriad ways. From many of my female clients I heard my own story—the alcoholic father, the resulting mistrust of men, the problems of shame, guilt, and lack of confidence. From others I learned that fathers who were strict and authoritarian might give their daughters stability, structure, and discipline, but often gave them little in the way of love, emotional support, and valuation of the feminine. Still others had fathers who wished for boys and made their daughters (usually the first-born) into sons by expecting them to accomplish what the fathers had failed to realize in their own lives. And then there were daughters whose fathers loved them too much, so that the daughters became a substitute for the lover that was missing. These women were usually so bound by their father’s love that they did not feel free to love other men and thus were not able to grow up into mature womanhood. I have heard the stories of women whose fathers have committed suicide and how they themselves then had to struggle with the legacy of the death-wish and self-destruction. Women whose fathers died early have their wounds of loss and abandonment. And women whose fathers were sick often were made to feel guilty for their sickness. There are daughters whose fathers brutalized them with beatings or via sexual advances. And there are daughters whose fathers did not stand up to powerful mothers, thus allowing the mother to dominate the daughters’ lives.
The list of injuries could go on and on. But there is a danger here—to blame the father for these wounds. And this would be to overlook another factor—these fathers themselves have been wounded, both in relation to their own feminine side and their own masculinity. The healing for women is not to be found in the quicksand of blame. The attitude of blame might lock us forever into the roles of passive prisoners, victims who have not assumed responsibility for our own lives. I believe it is important for such a wounded woman to understand her father’s failed promise and how his lack of fatherhood has affected her life. Daughters need rapprochement with their fathers in order to develop a positive father image within themselves—one a woman can draw upon for strength and guidance and which enables her to appreciate the positive side of masculinity in both the inner and outer worlds. They need to find the hidden pearl, the treasure the father can offer. If the relationship with the father has been impaired, it is important for the woman to understand the wound, to appreciate what has been lacking so that it can be developed within. But once the injury is understood, that very wound needs to be accepted, for through acceptance of the wound comes healing and compassion—for the daughter, for the father, and for their relationship.
I.
THE WOUNDING
my father was not in the telephone book
in my city;
my father was not sleeping with my mother
at home;
my father did not care if I studied the
piano;
my father did not care what
I did;
and I thought my father was handsome and I loved him and I wondered
why
he left me alone so much,
so many years
in fact, but
my father
made me what I am
a lonely woman
without a purpose, just as I was
a lonely child
without any father. I walked with words, words, and names,
names. Father was not
one of my words.
Father was not
one
