When you tell me the father isn’t involved with the baby, I need to pump the brakes and ask you something first. Are you the father who’s checking out? Are you the mother watching this train wreck happen? Or are you that baby, now grown up, trying to make sense of what happened?
Because the answer I give you changes completely depending on which chair you’re sitting in.
Here’s what I know from 16 years of sitting across from people wrestling with this exact pain. When a father isn’t present, either physically gone or emotionally checked out, that absence becomes like a phantom limb. The child’s nervous system builds an entire filing system around it.
And that filing system doesn’t stay in childhood. It travels with them into every relationship they’ll ever have, whispering the same brutal question: “Am I worth showing up for?”
I know this personally, not just clinically. My own father battled alcohol, in and out of our lives like a revolving door. My mother kept handwritten notes documenting it all. “Dad visiting drunk. Pete drinking. Received ECT. Admitted to hospital.”
What I learned later, after years in my own therapy chair, is that those early experiences of a father who was physically there but emotionally absent become the template. They become the story your body tells you about your own worthiness.
If you’re the father reading this, thinking about stepping back or already gone, I need you to understand something. Your absence isn’t neutral. It’s not just nothing happening. It’s something very specific happening. Your child’s brain is writing a story about themselves based on whether you show up.
If you’re the mother watching this unfold, the helplessness can be crushing. You can’t make him care. You can’t force him to be present. But you can help your child make sense of what’s happening in age-appropriate ways that don’t make it about their worth.
And if you’re the grown child looking back, wondering why relationships feel so hard, why you keep picking people who leave or why you leave first to avoid the pain, this might be your starting point.
The good news? This is healable. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. But healing doesn’t come from understanding why he wasn’t there. It comes from finding the hurt that’s living underneath the absence and giving it what it needed then.
That work looks like going into the pain, not around it. It looks like grieving what never was while building something new from where you are now.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Co-Parenting After Divorce: What to Expect from Counseling
