by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
You Don’t Need Your Father’s Approval As an Adult Man
A phenomenon that I’ve witnessed over the years (in my own life and in the lives of some of my coaching clients) is that there’s a particular kind of man who looks like an adult from the outside but – somewhere beneath the surface of things – is still waiting for his father to tell him that he is doing a ‘good’ job or to approve of him in some other way.
Maybe he’s forty years old, has a successful career with all the trimmings like a mortgage, a partner, children, responsibilities and a bank account. Maybe he even seems completely independent but, nevertheless, when it comes to the things that really matter, there’s still a little boy inside him asking a simple but powerful question:
“Will my Dad approve of this?”
This question can run an enormous amount of a man’s life from behind-the-scenes and can determine what he does, what he doesn’t do, who he becomes, what he believes, the risks he takes, the relationships he chooses, and even what he thinks he is ‘allowed’ to want so he can stay out of ‘trouble‘.
A way to describe this type of man is that he’s actually an ‘Adult Boy‘ which is basically just a man with a fully grown adult body but with a ‘boy’ inside him who is still acting and feeling according to old patterns and conditioning picked up during childhood:
This doesn’t mean there is anything ‘wrong’ with him – in many cases, these patterns are simply normal reactions to a messed-up situation because, as children, we adapt to whatever environment we grow up in and the various lessons we learned about what wins us approval, what gets us rejected, what keeps us safe and what we have to do to feel that we’re worthy ‘enough’ to receive love.
The problem, though, is that these types of adaptations can continue long after we no longer need them which results in unfinished business from the past that keeps us from showing up as the men we know we can be.
One of the most common ways men remain locked into the Adult Boy state is by continuing to seek approval and validation from their fathers which is exactly what this article is going to explore.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Your Father's Approval: What We'll Cover in this Article
- You Don't Need Your Father's Approval As an Adult Man
- When Dad's Opinion Becomes Your Life Compass
- The Symptoms of Being an Adult Boy
- Your Father Is Just a Man
- External Regulation vs Internal Regulation
- Is it Time to Take Him Off the Pedestal?
- Learn to Meet Your Own Need for Validation
- Practical Exercise: Follow Your Own Compass
- The Final Word: The Moment You Become the Man
When Dad’s Opinion Becomes Your Life Compass
Looking up to your parents is completely normal in terms of how we grow and develop as human beings:
This is because – when you’re a child – your parents are effectively your entire universe as well as being bigger, stronger and more experienced than you; you depend on them for food, shelter, protection, guidance and emotional regulation and this is exactly how it’s supposed to be (children are literally incapable of meeting their own needs which is why their parents do it for them).
When you look at it like this then it makes total sense that you wanted their approval when you were a kid:
- If Dad thinks you’re doing well at something then you feel good about yourself.
- If Dad is disappointed in you you feel bad about yourself.
- If Dad approves of something then it becomes safe.
- If Dad disapproves then you learn to question yourself for wanting it in the first place.
- Etc. etc. etc.
This is a perfectly ‘normal’ and understandable part of development and so the problem isn’t that you once-upon-a-time looked to your father for approval:
The problem is that you never stopped.
Even today – as an actual adult – you might still find yourself only taking action when you know your father will approve of it (or, on the other side of the coin, you might play everything incredibly safe because you don’t want to disappoint him and have to face is disapproval).
For example:
- You might choose a career because it’s ‘respectable’ rather than because it’s actually REAL.
- You might dedicate yourself to a particular version of ‘success‘ because you believe it’s a version your father will recognise and approve of.
- You might constantly defer to him by asking what he thinks rather than developing your own opinions.
- You might feel unable to express your real thoughts, feelings and goals because some part of you is still anticipating his judgement and can’t handle it.
- You might even put him on a pedestal and unconsciously treat him as though he is something more than a man (which he isn’t even though “a man” is a very powerful thing to be).
Ultimately, the deeper this pattern affects you, the more disconnected you become from yourself and the more you begin to live from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out.
Instead of asking “What’s REAL here?” you default to asking “What will Dad think about this?” and this leads to a much more unreal way of living your life.
The Symptoms of Being an Adult Boy
A man who is still seeking his father’s approval can experience this pattern in all sorts of ways.
Here are some of the most common ‘symptoms’:
- Only taking action when it’s been approved by his father.
- Playing everything too safely because he is terrified of taking risks and getting it ‘wrong’.
- Choosing a life vision that he thinks his father will approve of rather than one that is actually REAL.
- Constantly deferring to his father rather than making his own decisions.
- Struggling to develop his own opinions because he automatically assumes his father’s opinions are always more valuable than his for some reason (this doesn’t mean that some opinions aren’t more true than others)
- Feeling driven by shame because he has spent years denying his own reality (shame is what we feel when we judge the truth about ourselves and reality instead of cultivating acceptance)
- Putting his father on a pedestal and unconsciously treating him as though he is omniscient or all-powerful (when, again, he’s ‘just’ a man).
- Clinging to childhood patterns that affect his relationships and romantic partnerships because they block intimacy.
- Feeling scared to express his real thoughts, feelings, ambitions and desires.
- Feeling trapped in a life that looks good from the outside but doesn’t feel right internally (because he’s lost in the Void).
- Experiencing resentment towards his father while simultaneously craving his approval (because his father has become ‘false god’ in his life).
- Constantly trying to prove himself through achievement and performance instead of presence.
- Feel like he is never safe and enough regardless of how much he does.
This last point is especially important because when your sense of being safe and enough depends on someone else’s approval then you’re never going to reach the end of the line and you’ll always be running around in circles:
You can always do more, achieve more, earn more, prove more, or perform more and maybe Dad will even finally look at you and say “Well done, son” but it won’t change the fact that you’re trying to solve an internal problem with an external solution.
Your Father Is Just a Man
The first step towards breaking this pattern involves accepting a surprisingly simple truth about life.
Here it is:
Your father is just a man.
That doesn’t mean you have to disrespect him, hate him, or even mean that he was a ‘bad’ father – in fact, he might truly be be a very good man but – no matter which way you look at it – he’s still ‘just’ a man and not a god.
He’s not omniscient or omnipotent (because none of us are or ever will be) and so he’s not ultimate authority on reality.
Believe it or not, he has his own history, conditioning, fears, blind spots, strengths, weaknesses, opinions, and interpretations of reality…just like everybody else that ever has been, is, or ever will be!
This leads us to another important truth about life which is as follows:
His validation is always an interpretation of reality and never reality itself.
- If your father thinks your career is useless then that doesn’t make it actually useless.
- If he doesn’t understand your ambitions then it doesn’t mean your ambitions are ‘wrong’.
- If he thinks you should live your life differently then it doesn’t mean you should blow your life up to make whatever changes he thinks you need to make.
- Most importantly, if he doesn’t approve of something that’s REAL for you then his disapproval doesn’t magically turn it into something unreal.
As a man and not an “Adult Boy”, you need to be able to develop your own relationship with reality and not only experience it indirectly because you’re giving your father’s interpretations of reality a power they can never have.
External Regulation vs Internal Regulation
When you outsource validation or approval to your father then you also end up outsourcing your ability to regulate yourself.
In effect, you’ve internalised the core assumption that:
“I can only be okay if Dad thinks I’m okay”.
This creates a form of external regulation which means that you need someone outside yourself to tell you that you’re safe and enough before you can actually feel safe and enough.
This is unfortunate because “safe” and “enough” are two of the most important things necessary for us to have a real relationship with ourselves and life:
- Safe means that your nervous system is regulated so you feel calm enough to be present and engage with life rather than constantly anticipating ‘threats’.
- Enough means that you know (not believe) that you’re good enough as you are, regardless of results, outcomes, achievements, or performance (this doesn’t mean you have an excuse to stop growing and evolving – just that you have a real foundation on which to build).
If you believe your father’s approval means more than it actually does then you just end up stuck on a hamster wheel and never getting where you know you’re supposed to actually be going.
The hamster wheel basically works like this:
- You take some kind of action.
- You look for your father’s approval.
- You get it and feel good for a little while.
- Then the feeling starts to fade.
- Now you need more approval.
- You achieve something else.
- You look for approval again.
- Around and around you go.
This is the pattern most men who feed on their father’s approval as adults were conditioned with as boys (when such approval genuinely has a tangible impact on your sense of safety, ‘enoughness’, and belonging).
Nothing ‘wrong’ with that but – if you didn’t get the memo – you’re not that boy anymore:
You’re an adult man and the adult man’s job is not to keep asking the boy’s question but to answer a new one:
“What’s actually true now?”
Is it Time to Take Him Off the Pedestal?
The way back home to your realness begins by taking your father off the pedestal:
This doesn’t mean throwing him off it or smashing it to pieces – just recognising that he doesn’t belong on it in the first place.
(Like any ‘good’ thing that’s not the ‘ultimate’ thing which is your relationship with life itself).
All you need to do is to allow yourself to see him as a man – a perfectly imperfect human being who has lived his own life and made his own mistakes, whose opinions might sometimes be extremely useful, and – at other times – sometimes completely wrong.
You can listen to him without automatically obeying him, you can respect him without surrendering your own power over your life, and you can love him without needing his permission to exist.
If you can get to this place of acceptance then you can finally allow him to have his opinions an interpretations without making them your reality.
Alongside this, you also need to step up and start seeing yourself as a man:
- A man who makes his own decisions.
- A man who has his own opinions and knows that’s all they are (we have opinions but they’re not who we are).
- A man who takes responsibility for his own life.
- A man makes mistakes and learn from them.
- A man disappoints people sometimes but is still safe and enough.
- A man who might choose a path that other people don’t understand.
- A man who can do what he needs to do without justifying his existence.
That isn’t rebellion against your father and his ‘approval’ – it’s being a fully functional adult human being who knows how to meet his own needs instead of externally regulating and outsourcing self-worth.
Learn to Meet Your Own Need for Validation
Another important distinction here is that you don’t need to pretend that you don’t have a need for validation if that’s actually what you still need.
If you currently need validation then you need validation.
There’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with this but trying to make your father responsible for meeting the need is just going to cause problem in the long-run and bring unnecessary friction and frustration to your life.
As a fully functional adult man, you can train yourself to meet your own needs and this is where self-validation comes into play:
Self-validation isn’t telling yourself that everything you do is brilliant or deluding yourself with toxic positivity – instead, it’s about developing an internal compass for success based on what is actually REAL for you.
The basic pathway for this is that you create a REAL VISION, break it into GOALS, and then dedicate yourself to HABITS that allow you to become the version of yourself capable of living up to the vision.
The most important ingredient here is that you do it for real reasons – not because Dad will be impressed, because society will applaud, or because it might impress the people on Instagram.
Not because you’re trying to finally prove that you’re ‘worthy’ but simply because it’s REAL.
If you’re a man who wants to create a real relationship with your father then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men contains a Father Wound Workbook and can help you dig deeper.
Practical Exercise: Follow Your Own Compass
Take a piece of paper and answer these questions in as real a way as you can (you don’t have to show what you say to anybody else):
1. What am I currently doing with my life because I truly want to do it?
Be brutal in aiming to discern what’s REAL from what you think you ‘should‘ want.
2. What am I doing only because I think my father would approve of it?
Look at your career, relationships, lifestyle, ambitions, appearance, money and, even your self-image (or anything else that seems relevant).
3. What would I choose to do if I knew my father couldn’t judge me?
This question can reveal a lot about your shadow self.
4. What opinions have I inherited from my father that I have never actually examined?
Write them down and then figure out WHY you believe what you believe instead of just WHAT you believe.
5. What would my life look like if I measured ‘success’ from the inside-out instead of from the outside-in?
Turn your answers into a REAL VISION, then identify the goals required to move towards it, followed by the daily and weekly habits that will make that vision inevitable.
Every time you act according to this inner compass then you reinforce your adult identity and teach yourself to trust yourself and life first and foremost
The Final Word: The Moment You Become the Man
It’s inevitable that you’ll come to a moment where your father doesn’t approve of you, even after having read all of this.
When the moment comes then CHOOSE not to collapse into old patterns and give up the scramble to change your mind (so you can externally regulate):
Instead of feeling like a little boy who’s been caught doing something ‘wrong’ and is about to get in ‘trouble‘ the CHOOSE to listen and to consider what he says.
Take whatever wisdom is useful and then make your own decision without justifying or explaining.
When you do this then you’re no longer trying to become the man your father wants you to be and instead you’re becoming yourself which what realness ultimately demands.
Your father is a man and so are you and the goal isn’t to defeat him, surpass him or rebel against him but to simply make the choice to become responsible for your own reality.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If it’s time for you to step up and start meeting your own needs in a real way then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.
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