‘Daddy’ Issues in Men: The Hidden Shame that Men Carry and How it Holds Them Back from Real Life

In this article, I want to explore something that I’ve seen so many times with men that I work with:

A deep, core wound that many of them don’t even know is affecting them but which is something that’s been DRIVING them unconsciously for most of their lives: ‘DADDY ISSUES’ that have caused them to become detached from their masculinity either because – when growing up – their father was either absent, emotionally unavailable, or just an asshole.

(I’m not trying to be insensitive calling it ‘Daddy Issues’, btw – just what it is).

The core issue in all cases is UNRESOLVED TOXIC SHAME about who they are in their realness. This is because the original ‘wound’ that their Dads inflicted upon them caused them to become disconnected from the truth about themselves at some level and to go into hiding because they started to believe that the REAL SELF was ‘wrong’ or defective in some way (when it’s always quite the opposite – the REAL self is always perfectly imperfect and beyond ‘right’ or ‘wrong’).

This shame causes them to create a false version of themselves – the Ego – to try and survive and cope with life (either leaning into being overly-masculine to compensate or not masculine enough and stagnating and failing to take any action in life) and leads to them interacting with life, other men, and women in an inauthentic and unreal way.

Often, when people come to me, they don’t know that this is the core problem (and it doesn’t always even get mentioned even though it becomes clear that this is the main thing driving them to live an unreal life instead of a real one) – what often happens is that people roll up with a list of ‘symptoms’ that they’ve been trying to work on instead.

Here are some examples of these symptoms (there are no doubt many more):

A general nagging feeling of tension and anxiety that won’t go anywhere – especially around other men but also more generally in relation to one’s purpose and way forward in life.
A constant need to ‘prove’ themselves because they’ve put other men on pedestals – because their own masculinity has gone into ‘hiding’ (for whatever reason) – and so they almost always have a feeling of being ‘not good enough’ haunting them in everything that they do.
Being unable to be present with other men because they’re constantly comparing themselves in relation to perceived achievements but also at the physical level of ‘sizing them up’ to see who’s bigger or smaller etc. (though this is more of a protective thing than anything else because most of these “Daddy Issue” guys have a fear of conflict).
Feeling a deep sense of uncertainty either because they don’t know how to set their own path (because they didn’t have a solid role model for doing so) or because they had an overbearing father who made them doubt everything they were doing (so they froze up and stopped taking action).

What’s worse for these guys is that not only do they sense uncertainty – because they’ve become disconnected from the CORE of themselves that has certainty about the CHOICES they make – but they FEAR uncertainty as well and so they ultimately end up becoming paralysed or distracted and never taking REAL ACTION (though they may take plenty of unreal action – including addiction to ‘mood enhancers’ that just exacerbate the core problem of shame and disconnection from their realness like porn, video games, and overeating crappy foods etc… they may also become addicted to comfortable DISTRACTIONS like isolation so they can create a bubble of comfort for themselves which just keeps them where they don’t wanna be).
A lot of these guys also become PERFECTIONISTS (in order to keep that ‘ego’ in place) but this also just ends up causing them to overthink, over-apologise, and to avoid taking action for fear of not doing it perfectly and reminding themselves of the dread and fear they used to feel around their dads whilst learning to function in the world as kids.
Because of the underlying shame and the fear of expressing or showing off who they really are, another symptom becomes the suppression of emotions. This ultimately leads to them bottling everything up until eventually they explode and unleash everything in an outburst .This is a consequence of not having healthy boundaries and being afraid to speak up – either because they never had this modelled or because when they did speak up it was knocked back.
The fear and dread that they sometimes had of their fathers turns into fear of other, healthy men who are expressing their masculinity in a real way.

A lot of the time (speaking from experience), a lot of men with this problem had weak fathers who feared that their kids would go through puberty and no longer be intimidated by them turned up the volume so they wouldn’t have a ‘challenger’ in the house. In other words, their fathers wanted their kids to be afraid of them – so they’d be easier to control – and they ensured that they were (through threats of violence or worse).

This pattern follows many men through life because the consequence is that they become emasculated. The good news is that their MASCULINITY IS STILL THERE – it’s just been hidden in the ‘Shadow Territory’ (as I like to call it) and is being blocked from expression by the EGO (which isn’t real anyway). This is useful for these guys to know as it means if they can get rid of their unreal identity (which they can) they can allow the real ‘stuff’ to go back where it belongs.

This fear and dread can also affect men who had absent fathers – purely because they were raised by their mothers and had their masculinity sent into the Shadow Territory because of this (not necessarily because their Mum’s did anything wrong – just because they didn’t have a healthy model of a guy in the driving seat of his own masculinity).
A lot of these ‘Daddy Issues’ guys find that they struggle with INTIMACY and CONNECTION as adults. This might be intimacy with their girlfriends and wives because they feel that they have to be closed or to show up in an overly stoic way to be a ‘man’ or because they go to the other extreme and become too clingy and co-independent (because they’ve learned to be submissive, basically).

These guys also struggle to be intimate and open around other men and so they can never share anything real or get close to them and bond. Again, they can also go the other way and may find themselves putting men who embody whatever qualities they’ve sent down into the ‘Shadow Territory’ on a pedestal and giving them the ‘hero’ treatment (as well as going the other way and ‘hating’ men who embody certain qualities because they’ve disowned them in themselves).

This blocks intimacy and connection as well because they’re not seeing the REAL man but what they’ve detached from in themselves.
A lot of the men suffering from this issue (Daddy Issues) may also spent a great deal of their lives trying to REBEL against their father or to consciously be the ‘opposite’ of how they perceived him.

This seems especially common with people who had extremely strict, ‘disciplinarian’ type fathers: when they finally leave the house and get into adulthood these men put themselves on a path of unbridled freedom – as a way of continuing to rebel – and this simply has the effect of causing their lives to become a mess because they associate any hint of discipline with their fathers and the things that made them miserable in their younger days (when the bottom-line is that to get where we need to be – no matter who we are – it’s going to take at least some discipline and hard work to get there).

Ultimately, this is all about a lack of BALANCE in relation to the skills and qualities we can end up embodying because we’re not fuelled and motivated by a healthy relationship with life itself but because of an unhealthy relationship with the past and its lingering hold over us.

Another reason that men can rebel against their fathers is because of the STORY they heard about their fathers from their (pissed off) mothers. This is a slightly different can of worms but the solution is the same: figure out who we want to BECOME and then put strategies in place to BECOME that person.
Another serious issue that many of these men can end up dealing with is issues around the perception of their own bodies:

Because they’re left with a lingering sense of powerlessness (really just SHAME), they can end up trying to compensate for this by trying to make their bodies become a protective suit of armour (metaphorically speaking), not realising that the only TRUE and REAL armour that can ‘save’ them in this case is UNCONDITIONAL SELF-ACCPETANCE which reconnects them to truth beyond the shame they picked up.

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with going to the gym of course (I work out religiously like a nutbag) but when we turn our bodies into a MASK then we just end up confusing and losing ourselves even more because we’re adding extra levels of complexity and disconnection between the truth and our interpretations of it.
In short: many of these men end up walking through life with a lingering and niggling feeling that something is missing.

This feeling gets worse whenever they are motivated to action that is either about rebellion from their fathers or about trying to meet their father’s expectations – neither of these paths will take them anywhere REAL because they’re both about living according to somebody else’s life and way of being in the world instead of finding their own PATH and becoming their own man.

Nothing else can help them escape from these symptoms besides returning to their REALNESS, healing that core wound, and not letting their fathers – or lack of fathers and what they think it means – dictate their lives.

If you’re a man who resonates with what you’re reading here and you want to do something about it in your own life, then I really recommend booking a call with me because I’ve been there and I can help you to start living YOUR OWN REAL LIFE.

Ultimately, what’s required is a container for you to explore the TRUTH about things and to learn to distinguish the REAL from the UNREAL when it comes to your relationship with yourself and the way that you’re filtering your life through outdated emotions.

That ‘niggling’ feeling – no matter who we are (man or woman) – is always just FEEDBACK from life that we need to return to life.

It’s not too late and when you start to unblock your masculinity again then you’ll start to get where you need to be in life.

Peace and hope this helped,

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