I have been a marriage and family therapist for over fifty years and have written seventeen books, including best-sellers Looking for love in all the wrong places And Enlightened marriage. I have helped thousands of individuals and couples find the love of their life and have the relationship they have always wanted. Still, my own love life was a disaster. If you come to my website, MenAlive, you will see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”
You’ll learn about my first two marriages and how they ended in divorce. The breakdown of all relationships is confusing and painful, but even more so when you are making your living by helping other men and women find real lasting love. The good news is that I have discovered the secret to finding the right partner and having a great marriage. My wife Carlynn and I have been happily married for 46 wonderful years.
It took me a long time to understand that the key to living a successful love life was a hidden wound I didn’t even know existed. Millions of men and women suffer from the father wound, a wound that has become so pervasive in our society that most people don’t even know they have it or that they need to heal it in order to have truly satisfying and successful relationships.
You can learn about our healing journey in our book, Enlightened Marriage: 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best Is Still to Come And start your self-driven journey to success in my online course, “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love.”
My business card reads, “The Healing of Men and the Women Who Love Them, by Jed Diamond, PhD, 1969.“That was the year I completed my initial graduate training and began working as a mental health professional. 1969 was also the year our first son was born. When I held him in my arms shortly after his birth, I pledged that I would be a different kind of father than my father and would do everything possible to create a world where men fully recover and remain connected with their families throughout their lives.
Discovering and Healing the Wound of the Family Father
Although I’ve written 17 books, it took me a long time to tackle this Father’s wound. My Distant Father: Healing the Family mine was 15th Published book. The book begins with the following two epigraphs:
“A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he has not achieved.”
-Dr. James Hollis
“Children have a hole in their soul shaped like their father. And if a father is unwilling or unable to take on that role, it can leave a wound that does not heal easily.”
-Roland Warren
The first chapter began with the following memory:
I was five years old when my uncle took me to a mental hospital. I was confused and scared.
“Why do I have to go?” I asked my Uncle Harry.
She looked at me with her round face and kind eyes. “Your father needs you.”
“what’s the matter with him?” I started crying and squeezed my throat tightly to stop the tears.
He turned and looked back towards the road. In our family we did not talk about difficult issues.
It took me a long time to understand what happened to my father and to overcome the silence and denial that dominated my life for many years from the age of five.
I used to go with my uncle to meet my father every Sunday for a year. It took me most of the time to understand that he was not in a normal hospital but in a mental hospital. It took years to learn that my father had overdosed on sleeping pills. He became very depressed because he was not able to support his family by doing his favorite work.
I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to prevent it from happening to other men and their families. It’s not just men who have “a father-shaped hole in their soul.”
I knew that my mother grew up without a father in the house. Like my father’s wound, it took me years to learn about the nature of my mother’s early life. He and his younger sister were born in Toledo, Ohio. When my mother was five years old, her father died suddenly. My grandmother and her two young children were forced to live with my grandmother’s father and stepmother in Savannah, Georgia. That familial wound was denied and hidden, but it affected all aspects of my mother’s life, including her four failed marriages.
healing the wound of the father of the family
Here are some things that indicate that the family father wound is weakening your relationships:
- Your current relationship is not going well.
You may be having constant fights that never seem to resolve, or angry silences that can last for days, weeks, or months. Your relationship can be wonderful one moment and terrible the next. As the Eagles song, “Victim of Love,” says:
“You’re walking through pain and longing, looking for love.”
- Looking back at past relationships, you recognize a similar pattern.
This is not the first time that a relationship started off well but eventually turned sour. We often think that we have chosen the wrong partner, but now realize that there is something deeper, something else hidden in it.
- Reflecting on your family of origin, you feel a certain resonance.
Your parents’ relationship may not be the same as the one you experienced, but there are similarities.
- Your father was physically or emotionally absent.
You may have lost him/her through death, divorce, or failure. Their absence impacts your mother, you, and other members of your family. You begin to suspect that you’re “looking for love in all the wrong places” (the title of my second book).
- There is a craving, a hunger that you feel.
Falling in love feels like you’ve finally filled an inner void, that you’ve found that magical partner that will make everything okay, but it never works out.
I share my father and my healing journey in my book, My Distant Father: Healing the Wound of the Family Father. I have also developed an online course that anyone can take to explore your father wound, how it may be affecting your life now, and what you can do to heal it. You can learn more about the course, Here “Healing the Wound of the Family Father”.
If you would like to read more articles about life and love, please consider subscribing to my free weekly newsletter: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/
