There’s a whole generation of women who grew up with an uninvolved father or without a father at all. Those fathers mostly did not have a father themselves due to all the hardship of the historical events in the past centuries and the consequential emasculation.
No matter if you had a father who was physically present, but emotionally absent or a father who left you in some way, it shapes you and leaves an immense mark on your psyche.
Originally, fathers provide their daughters with a role model of the masculine archetypes and qualities. It’s about respect and boundaries as well as feeling safe, supported and loved by just being who you are.
If that’s missing in your childhood, you are likely to develop depression, anxiety, addictions, intense feelings of unsafety, low self-esteem, lack of self-love and struggle to build relationships.In my case, I had a father who was physically present, but not emotionally available at all, let alone mature in his masculinity to teach me about life. I always felt his tremendous existential fears and hence, would never ask him for support in any circumstance.
When I was around 5 years old, I would tell myself that my father loves my sister more than me because she was interested in being in the garage with him fixing and cleaning the car whereas I would prefer playing with my dolls which he didn’t know what to do with. This created a story in my head that being “classically” feminine is not attractive. Many more experiences followed that made me feel rejected as a girl.
From the beginning of my life I would be the one being asked for advice from my parents. Conversely, I would have no one to look up to or lean my head on a strong shoulder to feel safe and held for a moment.
It’s inevitable that you develop a sense of being too much or not good enough (or both at the same time), an insane amount of fear of rejection when dating a man as well as a seemingly insurmountable existential fear and lack of inner safety and basic trust in life.
What you do in order to survive is developing inner self-holding strategies with yourself. I remember imagining that I would lean on a man’s shoulder when falling asleep already as a teenager. Without this felt visualisation I would not be able to doze off.Later on, when you start to unravel your conditionings and traumas and do all the personal development stuff, you create even stronger abilities to hold yourself, to hold your emotional pain, your heavy heart.
All of this is great. And needed, in fact. It matures you into a woman who also is in touch and communion with her inner man.
However, there also comes the moment in your life when your true feminine desire is to feel held by and safe with a real physical man. It’s the point when you wish for all the inner work you did to be reflected in the external as well as to just take part in the organic dance of polarities between the masculine and feminine energies. When the imagined shoulder to lean on becomes a real physical body.It’s the moment when you realise that as a human both needs to exist at the same time: The self-holding as well as the holding by the other.
Yes, this is a very tender unravelling process.
WEIBLICHE ALCHEMIE 
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