How does our relationship with our father shape us, in contrast to the mother-daughter relationship?

Your father’s character, and his relationship with you, influences your ability to love and to trust, and the growth of a healthy sexuality and body image. We’ve found that it’s fathers who can really help a girl overcome an eating disorder, even more so than her mother. The relationship with your mother affects many aspects of your character and emotional life, but the difference with your father is the impact he has on your identity, and the power he has to improve your confidence and the way you see yourself.

Does this impact on your relationships with other men?

A daughter’s first bonding with any man is with her father, and that imprints on her so strongly that any later relationships with men are filtered through that experience. We often repeat what we know rather than what we want: we need ‘familiar’, even if it’s unhealthy. We subconsciously gravitate towards a man who treats us like our father treated our mother, or us. So if your father wounded you somehow, you may gravitate towards unhealthy relationships.

How can we improve communication with our fathers?

Both daughter and father are uncomfortable with the fact that they can’t understand each other’s thought processes. We set our husbands and fathers up to fail because we want them to respond with empathy as a girlfriend or as a mother does, and they can’t. Yet we can still have a very close relationship with them. Men understand love and trust, self-respect, self-esteem and intimacy. They just express it differently.

Fathers may want to be involved in our adult lives, but come across as needy or controlling. What can we do about it?

When a woman has a family of her own, her husband and children have to come first, and that’s very painful for her father. It’s not appropriate for you to fill the role of wife or mother to him. I’m not saying that a daughter shouldn’t care for her father, but you need to decide on your own terms about how much you can let your father in. Otherwise everybody ends up miserable.

Some women have never felt close to their fathers, and eventually stop feeling the need for that closeness. Should they still try to bridge that gap, and is it possible?

Yes and yes. In your thirties and forties, you need to understand that your relationship with your father is born out of a primary need that he has to love you, and you have to love him. If a daughter is very emotionally distant from her father, the chances are there’s a history of some real hurt there.

You may think it’s no longer significant, but, deep down, you are probably very interested because the part of you that didn’t get the love, closeness, trust and encouragement from your father that you desperately needed is still there, even if you pretend otherwise. Establishing a healthy, adult relationship with your father soothes that hurt, albeit subconsciously.

How can we do this?

The most important thing is for you to relate to your father as one adult to another. If you can objectively look at your father as a man who, for some reason, didn’t have the ability to love you or to communicate well, and approach him as an adult, you can embrace him better. You need to be able to acknowledge your pain, rather than bury it, but also to stop expecting your father to heal those hurts.

What if our fathers are unreceptive to our overtures?

That’s very difficult. There are some men who, because of their own life experiences, have shut down. If you reach out to your father and he doesn’t respond, try to think, ‘This isn’t about me, this is my father’s stuff.’ A 15-year-old girl can’t do that. Even an 18-year-old girl can’t do that. But an adult daughter can.

There is a point when you have to say, ‘There’s nothing more I can do.’ It’s a painful reality for some women that their father is truly incapable of having a relationship. In such a case, you have to face that and grieve it as a significant loss.

But I hope women can see that if they didn’t have a great relationship with their father, it doesn’t mean their life is ruined. The truth is, all fathers disappoint their daughters, but that’s OK. It’s about understanding what needs you had filled or didn’t have filled by your father.

You need to acknowledge what was missing, and find elements in other relationships – with your partner, your siblings, your mother, your own children – that make you feel whole. We can still live good lives, even if our father was less than perfect.