The 3 Signs a Father Wound Is Holding You Back (and What to Do About It) | Terri Cole

0:00So you know that person who wins at everything? From the outside, it kind of looks like they have it all. But for a lot of them, what's driving it is not a wish, but a wound, and a very specific one that nobody talks about. My guest is psychotherapist Terri Cole. She spent nearly 30 years in practice, gathered over 650 women to research what she's come to call the father wound, and taught about it in more than 120 countries, and she's lived it. She was the fourth daughter of a father that she barely spoke 50 words to, and she clawed her way up the Hollywood ladder until one question from her own therapist stopped her cold.

0:37Could you consider that you might have been running away from something? Terry calls it an invisible wound because the symptoms, they look like virtues. Over this conversation, she walks us through the whole arc. First, the telltale signs, including three that most of us would put on a resume, to be honest. Then she talks about why the wound stays even if your dad got sober or apologized or even passed away. And then the sneaky ways that it shows up in love, in work, in the relationships, and the story of how Terry, she thought she cracked the code on dating warm, affectionate European men. Her therapist had a one-sentence reply that changed everything.

1:19And finally, we talk about where to actually start healing. But there's a question underneath all of it. The one that Terry says, high achievers ask her more than any other. If I heal this, do I lose the edge, the drive that got me here? Her answer is not what you'd expect. And it's at the very end of our conversation. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll dive right in after this short break.

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4:49It seems like everything they do, they're out there in the world. You see them all over the place. Everything they touch wins. Everything they do, they do at the highest possible level. They are not the achiever, They're not the overachiever. They are the super achiever. They were achievement, you know, like maximizers. And we assume that they've done everything, that they have everything, that they must be on top of the world. And maybe for some, there's some story in there that is that, like that's some version of true for that. For a whole bunch of other people, maybe more than less, there's a very different script running.

5:33tease this out for me and also you know this it speaks to this thing that you really been focusing on that we're going to dive deep into the father wound take me there well i think that over achieving right super achieving a lot of times societally that looks like amazing good for you you obviously have it together and i can tell you from my therapy practice of the last almost 30 years and my own personal experience is that that's not necessarily true which is why having a father wound i refer to it as an invisible wound often because there's not a lot of telltale signs necessarily because for me i was always very ambitious i was always very successful whatever i chose to do so i was in entertainment before i became a psychotherapist and it was like you know I was sort of leaping my way up the Hollywood ladder intentionally.

6:28And I remember my therapist at the time, she was asking me about my ambition because I was also clearly burning myself out for sure. And I was like, no, it's just my nature is what I was saying. I've always been like this. Yeah, because you don't know anything different. Correct. Right. And I didn't know what was driving my behavior though. I just knew that was my behavior. that not winning, that not completing, that not doing the thing was never an option for whatever reason. And she said to me, can you make the distinction? Do you think you were in entertainment running towards something? Or is it possible?

7:09Could you consider that you might have been running away from something? And that hit me in the chest. I was like, oh my God. And that was the beginning of really having a realization that working myself to death was not necessarily the flex that I thought it was and that I wasn't necessarily being driven by my joy of making supermodels richer. Right? Like it wasn't necessarily that. It was this fear of failing. And in my situation with my father, achievement was the only love language. right there was only the only attention really that i got from my father was doing well in school so i always did right and then doing something because i felt like he wanted a son and i was his fourth daughter so i definitely had a chip on my shoulder feeling like i was born the wrong gender but fuck that i'm going to be more successful than any stupid son he could have had and he will he will be forced to recognize and acknowledge and I was hoping to celebrate me.

8:19I'm guessing this is your version of this story of this experience like you just said yeah practiced as a therapist for more than three decades I have to imagine you have seen so many different versions of this same story play out in so many different people so many different times with no awareness that this is what's actually happening. So there's so many experiences. Sometimes you just have a dad who was completely unaffectionate, right? Sort of going through the motions. A father like mine who was there, quote unquote, but was absolutely not there, where I was absolutely afraid of him. How many daughters grew up?

9:03And then what does that do to your relationship with authority? And what does that do to your relationship with romantic relationships, friendships, um familial relationships what is your place in the family system all of these things coalesce and come together and they create your own experience but jonathan i wrote this book because i was seeing it over and over but nobody was talking about it and then i went to do some research and there was no secular texts on this there's father wound stuff with a lot of religious undertones, which I'm not anti-God. It's just not my thing, right? My stuff is science-based.

9:41It's psychological. So I was like, wow, I ended up gathering 650 women who were self-identified as having father wounds three years before I wrote the book, two years before I think. I'd already created a course because I was like, I have to go into the trenches, even though I'd seen it in my therapy practice for decades. I was like, now let's get granular. Yeah. Let's find out what are the pain points that these women are self-identifying that they think is connected to their relationship or lack thereof with their fathers. I would love to tease out some of what you saw in specifics with different people so that we can see, because I think my sense is from you, from the book, from your work, that it may not be the easiest thing for you, especially the one who's on the other side of it, to say like, yeah, this is actually it.

10:35this happened to me. You know, and I look at, you know, you mentioned negligence, but like what about the level below negligence where somebody's just kind of like disaffected as a dad? You know, they kind of just weren't really paying attention also. They just weren't all that involved. Yes. There's so many gradations, I guess we would say, of this experience. And keep in mind, Jonathan, even if you had a pretty present father, all of us were raised in a patriarchy so we still have internalized these limiting beliefs about the value of women and what we can do what we should do whether we can or cannot age what can happen with our bodies i mean look at the beauty industry right so i think that the most important thing i always say this to people because a lot of times people want to go like i want to figure out conclusively do i have the diagnosis of a father wound first of all it's not a diagnosis.

11:32Secondly, what I care about is what are your pain points? Where do you suffer? Because those are the things that I see are the same. So perfectionism, over-functioning, over-giving, high-functioning codependency, which is something that, again, I literally made it up because I saw it so much, but there was no name for it. Nobody was talking about what modern codependency looks like. These are two major symptoms of having an unhealed fatherhood. So it's almost like I waited to write this book until now. You know, I really had to relive it all and reface it all and just have my own deep understanding of what happened in my own life because of having a fatherhood, which I'm so clear about now, but it, you know, it took me a couple of years of being willing to go back into that unconscious, I call it the basement of your mind, where you're like, ugh, who wants to remember all this stuff?

12:31But you do, because that is the only path to healing. So you started to list out some of the tells. Are there more? So over-functioning, hyper-independence. That's interesting. Because that would be seen, so much of these, especially that in particular, would be seen as a virtue. Of course. Right? So this is why it's an invisible injury. It's an invisible wound that millions and millions of women have across the globe. I've taught this My Father Wound course in 128 countries or something. It's the same everywhere. So we have hyper-independence. Why is that? Because we don't trust other people.

13:11We don't trust that they want to do it. Because at its core, having a father wound is a worthiness wound. Deconstruct that for me. Meaning we, if the person who was supposed to protect you, the person who was supposed to be thoroughly delighted by you, was completely uninterested in you or worse, what do you think that does to your sense of self-worth, your value? Well, you're positive. You're not inherently valuable for sure. So how do you create that value? You perform. You become of service. You are a good girl. You get good grades. You take care of an alcoholic parent, let's just say. You make sure that their drink never gets emptied if you have an alcoholic father.

14:00Nobody needs to teach kids, right? These are adaptive functioning. Nobody sends you an inter-office memo of how to survive your childhood, right? Your little brain just figures it out. But what happens is, and I talk about this extensively in the book, is that these are adaptive experiences that probably really these behaviors really saved us from a certain level of pain or danger that then become maladaptive in adulthood. And we're not aware that the war is not still on because it feels like it is. So the last symptom I want to talk about is hypervigilance, where there's literally no rest. Yeah, you're just like constantly scanning the environment all the time.

14:46Like from the moment you open your eyes, and probably even like in your sleep, you're probably not sleeping properly. Every environment. For me, except environments with women. So there's something about co-wounding, which I write about in the book, where if you look at attachment theory, there's a lot of problems with attachment theory, but I do think there's enough value that I included it in the book. But the conventional wisdom was that you have one attachment style, like one predominant style, let's say. That was based on your primary caregiver. I believe you have more than one. I believe that you have, there's co-wounding that happens.

15:30If you have a father wound, the co-wounding is what did the mother or the mother figure do? Or not do, I'm guessing. Correct. Right. So personally, my father was very unavailable to us, not there, and we were all afraid of him. So that's what I could say about him. I didn't know anything about him. I think by the time my parents got divorced when I was 13, I think I told you this in another show. I think we maybe said 50 words to each other. I think that's about right. My mother, instead of the co-wounding can happen where you either it mitigates, buffers, or exacerbates. so how you're the other parent how they respond to what's happening with what the father is doing impacts you too my mother mitigated my father wound my father was over there but my mother was like you are so special you are so important listened cared spent time did it just poured into me still does.

16:31She's 89 and perfectly fine and still thinks I'm literally the greatest thing that ever happened on planet earth. You know, that makes a difference though. But how it played out in my life is that I have incredible female friendships. I have the same friends I've had since second grade, since literally Nixon was an office people. And I understood women. Women were people you could trust. They would comfort you. They were trustworthy. Men were people never to be trusted. They were not safe people. And that's how I went into every romantic relationship was that you, buddy, are someone that I will manage and manipulate and you will literally never actually know me.

17:15So that was my experience in love. I was like, you know, it was never really satisfying because I was never, I never relaxed. I never was with anyone who I emotionally trusted until I did this fatherhood work. As you're describing that also, I'm wondering, living that from the inside out, and I can ask you directly because you've lived it and you've also sat with so many people who process this with you. The way you describe it now, well, that sounds clearly maladaptive. You're putting up a wall. You're creating a facade for somebody to know, knowing that the real you is always behind that. Yes.

17:53And probably also like the whole time you're wondering like, why am I not feeling the way I want to feel? Correct. But when you're in it, when you're like literally in that moment, do you know that you're doing this? Or are you thinking, I'm taking care of myself. I'm doing what's safe for me. I'm doing what's good for me. And I'm okay. I think that for me personally, I was young. And even though I'd had therapy, I was acting out what I hadn't resolved. So I was acting out this unresolved father wound in my relationships by staying hypervigilant and self-protecting, by not letting anyone do anything for me.

18:40Like being in a relationship with – even if they wanted to, I'd be like, yeah, I got it. I'm good. No thanks. because I didn't want to owe anybody, and they weren't safe people to trust. I don't think until you've had a lot of therapy, you have decades of therapy, you realize, oh, I should look for patterns. Decades of therapy tells you, oh, there's usually a parallel process going on, meaning this thing that I'm experiencing, but there's a psychological thing that's happening too. What is it when you have a transference to someone? you have two things happening at once the interaction right and what is a transference when you're in real time interacting with someone but your behavior is being provoked or driven by an unresolved injury from the past so i had a i had a boss in my internship in grad school keep in mind that means i'm already in my early 30s and i have he was like the first celebrity therapist really he was a an addiction guy for this is when everyone was doing cocaine so he had a book out about when willpower is not enough.

19:46His name is Dr. Washington. And I was interning there and he was this 6 '2", good looking, dimple, deep voice, you know, definitely like, you know, golfing on the weekends, martini swigging, Brooks Brothers suit wearing, Wall Street Journal reading guy. And I can hate him. Now I'm complaining to my therapist and now she's trying to get some data about like, what could I possibly in the three weeks I've been at this internship, what could Why could I feel this hot about this guy? It makes no sense. I said, he's so mean. He's so judgmental. He's so rejecting, like all this stuff. And then she has me describe him one more time.

20:25I describe him and she says, Terry, who exactly does Dr. Washington remind you of? And I'm like, oh my God, this is so ridiculous that I didn't see it myself, my father. And she's like, do you understand why it matters that you know you're having an amplified response? Because that's what it is, right? I'm having an amplified response. This guy barely did anything. And I was like, oh, he's targeting me. She's like, because every time you see him, you turn into your 10-year-old self. How's he ever going to know how smart you are? How are you ever going to get a job at this place when you get out of school if every time you're around him, you turn into an 8-year-old?

21:03That's what happens when you have a transference. It's so real, though, that I had already had a lot of therapy at that point in my life. I was in school to become a therapist. And I didn't see it. That's how real it is.

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24:18Embrace your salty side. Go to cachava.com and use the code goodlife for 15 % off your order. That's cachava, K-A-C-H-A-V-A,.com, code goodlife. You're not like I'm choosing to react this way. It's literally kind of wired into you. Like this is just my physiology. My nervous system is saying this is like do this, you know, and then the language follows it and the actions follow it. But you're not saying, oh, I'm choosing to react this way. Correct, which is why healing these original injuries that we have is the only thing that creates the liberation to choose. Yeah. Right? Because what are we doing?

24:59If you can't not do it, it's not a choice. It's a compulsion. And it's a fear-driven compulsion. It's a nervous system reaction. That's what's happening. Your body is like, oh, my God, we're in danger. So in the book itself, I do a lot of nervous system work. We call them body breaks, where I'm giving people these exercises is that you could do regularly to pay attention to your nervous system. Understand what is activating you. And one of the first things that we do in the book, and when I walk people through this process, is understanding your downloaded father wound blueprint. Because there's no one-size-fits-all.

25:43Like you said, there's so many different varieties of what people could have experienced. and all of my work is very customizable to the person, right? I'm not the guru, but I'm a damn good GPS to get people to their answers that they need to be liberated from these limitations because that's what it is. These are relational reactions, basically, but what they create is this weird glass ceiling of our own making in our relationships, in our careers. even if you're very successful, the glass ceiling is you're not enjoying it. You're exhausted. Say that again, because I think that's really important.

26:24Even if you're really successful, that glass ceiling of your own making is that you're not enjoying it. It's another box to check. It's another obligation. You can't let other people down. It's all of this hypervigilance. And there will be a point, and we see this in midlife, especially with women, perimenopause, menopause, where you really are like, wow, I have no fucks to give at all. But you can't keep doing what you've been able to do. Because I did it for a very long time at full speed. But there comes a point for me, I was diagnosed with cancer in my early 30s. That was sort of a tipping point of like, the universe is sort of tapping you a little, like, hey, you might want to slow down.

27:11Like, hey, is this really what you want to be doing? you have to pay attention and I'm so grateful I don't care what the intervention is if it's going to get you to pivot in the way that you need to because you deserve to have a life of choice yeah do you feel like a common reaction is if you start to feel like I'm doing all the things and maybe I'm getting all the accolades and I'm achieving all the things I want to do and I'm still feeling hollow I'm still not feeling the way I want to feel that a common reaction is, I'm just not waiting enough. How does somebody actually, when they keep getting the thing and they keep feeling hollow inside, how does somebody wake up without being brought to their knees or does something generally happen that does that?

28:00I hope they listen to your podcast, they feel identified with the wound and they realize it doesn't have to be you. and for some people it does so i don't know if i would have changed right i i don't know what what needed to happen in my life that's that was a pivotal moment for me to change and to really look at what wasn't working in my life if you're doing something and you keep moving the goalpost yourself to like when this happens i'll feel this way the answer is you won't because this healing is an inside job and what you're focusing on is outside validation and there's nothing wrong with wanting all the money in the world and wanting all the pretty good for you great but they're different things yeah not as a proxy for the thing that you're really missing correct yeah because literally the call is coming from in that within the house it has to be you and you have to have enough regard for yourself to realize or believe that there's a better way and that you deserve softness and expansion and relaxation and joy and love.

29:10It goes back to worthiness. It sure does. It's like you've got to believe you're worthy of that. You do. You mentioned something earlier which caught me also that I want to just drop back into for a moment, which is if the father dies, you mentioned that as potentially a source of wounding. I wonder if you've had conversations with people or maybe this is your experience at some point where thought is, okay, so someone's dad has passed. And well, shouldn't that just resolve this? That force that was causing this wound is no longer with us. Shouldn't everything just resolve itself? Is that ever part of the conversation here?

29:54Oh, it is, but it's a myth. Yeah. Because here's what happens. What happens more likely is like a lot of times people will come into therapy or come into my mastermind or wherever and say, this was 30 years ago. Hello, I should be over it by now. And I'm like, that's not the way mental health healing works. Time does not heal this wound. We just adapt around it. so my point is and they'll also say i have a great relationship with my father now and i go great you don't need your father's permission his participation you don't need anything from your father to heal this wound this is just for you you've probably spent your life considering him and other people but maybe just for this moment just for this book just think about you just keep your eyes on your own paper what do you need but who we're checking in with is the child within each of us.

30:50Because you know who doesn't care that your father got sober at 50? The five-year-old who found him sitting in the car that was still running at three in the morning. Got it. Right? That's who we check in on. And you can tell because what is unresolved will continue showing up in your life. It'll keep being played out in one way or another in your lack of satisfaction. I think a good place to start if people are like, hmm, I wonder, you know, where am I in this mix, is do a resentment inventory. Where are you holding on to resentment and for whom and why? And it's got to be tough inventory for a lot of people.

31:31I mean, to do honestly. Yes. It's painful because it feels almost like we're blaming other people. But what you're really doing is you're looking at how you're living relationally. Or if you're holding on to a bunch of resentment, there are other things that you can do. You can change that relationship. You can put a limit in place. You can make a different decision. But it's important that you prioritize, right? Because here's the thing, Jonathan, at the end of the day, what you think how you feel and what you want matters and it needs to matter to you more than what anyone else wants thinks or feels and it doesn't mean we don't compromise and it doesn't mean listen if you have family obviously you know you're going if you're married for a long time as we both are you know you're going to but that's the bar that i want women in particular who are reading this book, to when you're done, you're able to live your life from the place that how I feel, what I think, and what I want matters most to me.

32:43Most. Because you need to know what that is to build the life that you want. And of course, we compromise all the time. But for a lot of women, they don't know those things. It's not true for them because they need to make sure that it's by committee that everyone agrees that you're approving that their their father is still approving of them or it's like what do we want rather than that like it's okay to actually just ask what do i want yes yeah and this is so patriarchal to jonathan of how women were just supposed to be you know giving the shirt off our back to everyone and that's super feminine and that's very very um aspirational and the thing is it's not and i think that we're waking up and And this is the time, in a way, for this book because of what's happening societally.

33:32There's no time to waste. We all need to be in our healthiest. We've got to be fully there. We've got to not be giving all this power away. Because think about it this way. One of the things that I see the most is that when you have a father who didn't protect you, because when we think about what do we expect from fathers, it's different than what we expect from mothers. Like this is a different conversation. And one is that fathers teach you how to protect yourself, how to change a tire if you lose, you know, how to not go into sketchy areas. And they, the way they treat you tells you that you are someone who's worth protecting.

34:12If you have a father who is not interested in that, like my father, didn't know where I was when I was a sophomore in high school on a Tuesday night at 2 in the morning. I was hanging out with the football team. Okay. What you learn is you're potentially not someone who's worth protecting and you actually don't know how to protect yourself. So I ended up in relationships with people who were not trustworthy, but I never even prioritized protecting myself because I didn't even think it was on the docket. I thought, it was me being of service. How can I make your life easier? This is my value, is doing something for you.

34:55I want you to be happy. I want you to be pleased. It's all external. It's all external. There was no internal, even though my mother loved me the way that she did. So again, that really played out in my romantic relationships, and that's where I did the most work. If you're living with this, how does stillness, how does silence sit with you? Not well. At least it didn't for me. I would imagine for almost anyone. It kind of couldn't. Nope. Because there's too much that we're not thinking about. There's too much that we're avoiding. There's too many things to anticipate. We have all this anticipatory anxiety.

35:40that we need to make sure this is the hypervigilance about what's going to go right. It's all going to go right. I'm going to make sure that there's not a problem with these people and that this is okay and that I get this done. And there's so much pleasing and there's so much fear of letting other people down. And it's what we're doing that makes us valuable. That sitting in stillness is, for me, was, I remember my therapist giving me an assignment that one night a week, is when I was living on West 68th Street. One night a week, you just stay home and do nothing. And for like three weeks, I didn't do it, which is very unlike me because I'm a girl who likes to ask.

36:20I'm very coachable. And she was like, why is it so hard? I'm like, I don't know. What am I going to think about? She was like, that's what we're going to find out. I was like, oh my God. And of course, eventually, I did it. And then obviously years later, got into having a very dedicated meditation practice that I've had now for over 20 years, but that was the scariest thing, was being alone with my thoughts. And when you're so externally focused, you need so much mirroring back. You need all of that approval. I need you to be looking at me and telling me I'm okay. So I couldn't then in my life, I was in my 20s, I couldn't do that for myself.

37:02That all makes so much sense. I want to drop a little bit into some of the things that we can do if we feel this is part of ourselves. But there's a question I need to ask you before we get there. Sure. Which is, and this is not a, well, what about guys type of thing. It's actually just a curiosity.

37:21Can sons experience father wounds also? Of course. But they're so different. Yeah. Now, the way, the damage may be very similar, But how it plays out is so different because societal expectation of fathers and sons is one thing still. And societal expectations for fathers and daughters is a different thing. So your father is likely, if you're a boy, it certainly it was for people who are probably in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, teaching you to be very independent. Maybe teaching you to fight. teaching you about women. Like, it's different. And it's not encouraged societally. This patriarchal, insane society that we're living in right now, with this toxic masculinity, the red pill, all that crap, is not encouraging men to have emotional IQ, right?

38:26Now, that doesn't mean that there are not tons of modern dads out there doing an incredible job fathering sons. But the reason I wrote this book through the lens of the female experience is because that is what I'm actually an expert in. You know, we're being very binary here also, but like there's a spectrum now. Yes. You can have a same-sex loving couple and still have someone who's more in the role of what would traditionally be considered father stuff and one more in the role of traditionally considered mother stuff. So again, you're right. It's, we're talking binary, but it isn't in certainly not in the way of gender.

39:04Let's talk about a little bit about if you're joining us, where you're kind of nodding along, you're like, huh, this is interesting. I have been out there achieving my butt off. I have been in relationships and I felt protected and safe for years, but never seen and own and that you're kind of like checking the boxes of some of the quote symptoms that you were talking about earlier in conversation and then you're thinking yourself okay so this might actually be me what do I do about that like where where do we start we start with getting honest and I walk you through it because I will give you the incredibly thoughtful questions that you will answer getting honest about your childhood experiences right because here's the thing we cannot heal anything that we're either in denial of or anything that we're unwilling to see so the first this whole book is based on these five pillars of transformation that i created many years ago it's just the way that i teach but self-awareness is the first pillar okay so and again we have to first give ourselves permission to do the work and to realize you're not harming anyone else by doing the work.

40:15Because there really is a, there can be a loyalty and a guilt thing where people feel like my dad's great now, or he did better than his dad, or all of those things. So what I'm saying is - Like the justifications. Yes. So let's let this just be about you. And let's just take a slow and gentle path to healing, because that's what this is. I mean, the book is incredibly trauma-informed, of course. So that's the first thing is you're just gonna do the exercises in the order because this is a book you read but it's a book you do but I want you to see it as um as a journey right there's no quick fix right you you need to do the exercises you need to be willing to tell the truth to even if it's to yourself about what happened in your life and then I help you connect the dots from what happened then to how you're living now so we have different processes that we go through of going like, oh, so I continue to attract unavailable men.

41:14So the way it played out in my life romantically is I was attracted to unavailable men. Then as I started to do the work, I started attracting these men who were European. And I would say to my therapist, like, look at this, I'm kind of cracking the code because I thought it was, because they're so warm and they're so verbally the affection and all the things that my father wasn't. And she was like, Terry, they live on other continents. I was like, oh, right. She's like, babe, it's the same thing. Because how does that leave you feeling? Unavailable geographically, right. Exactly. I was like, oh, I'm still longing.

41:48She's like, correct. So it's very sneaky. You feel like you're healing, but it could be very sneaky. One by one, you will start to, we'll do relationship inventories. So you're going to go back in time. we're going to look at what you've experienced in that we do a whole family of origin massive amounts of inventory there so that's what you do is you got to be willing to take the journey and have faith that what's on the other side is so worth the effort and here's the thing babe you're going to age whether you do this work or not right 2030 is going to come whether you're still putting up with shit from your boss or not whether you're still in a relationship where you don't feel seen known heard or not like there's there's no time like the present and it's going to keep marching along whether you do it or not so i invite you if this speaks to you to see this wow if i've been looking for a sign let this podcast be a sign that you can change what's not working in your life.

43:03I have helped tens of thousands of people do it in my career, so I know for sure it works. Sometimes you just need a guide. You just need someone to be like, okay, now we're going to do this. This is next. You don't have to figure that out, but you have to be willing to be coached. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall, that cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

43:50Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end-of-year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Good Life Project is sponsored by Vindid. So here's a question that I have been sitting with. How many things in your closet were bought for, let's say, a version of you who never quite showed up?

44:32Maybe it's the tailored jacket for the dinners you were going to go to or someday pieces with the tag still on them. They're lovely clothes. They're just not yours anymore. That's where Vindid comes in. So Vindid is a secondhand marketplace app where everyday people sell the clothes that they're not wearing to people who actually will. Listing on Vinted is quick and simple. You take a few photos, write a short description, and you're done. Once something sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. There are also no seller fees on Vinted. So whatever your piece sells for, you keep.

45:03What I love about that is how it turns letting go into something that actually feels good. You get more room, a little extra money, and maybe a closet that reflects who you are right now. So see what's hiding in your closet. You might be surprised how much you can earn with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees so you keep everything you earn. Good Life Project is sponsored by Bombas. So my wife, Stephanie, has been one of the great gift givers in our family. And her secret is that the best gifts often aren't the flashy ones. They're the ones that people reach for on any given day without even thinking about it.

45:38That's why so much of my list ends up at Bombas. Fuzzy Sunday slippers for the friend who lives in sweatpants from November to March. Merino wool and cashmere blend socks for anyone who runs cold. That would be me, by the way. Ski and running socks for the ones who refuse to slow down. Also me, by the way. And water-resistant suede booties. So cushy. My executive producer, Lindsay, actually more or less lives in hers. And here's what else makes it a good life kind of gift. For every item you purchase, Bombas donates an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity. One purchased, one donated.

46:12Over 200 million donations and counting. So every gift you give is really two. So head over to bombas.com slash good life and use the code good life for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B O M B A S.com slash good life code good life at checkout. So if we start from that place, um, and really inventory and then start to, and, and then the journey is going to be very individualized, like similar tools and frameworks, but it's got to be expressed and done in the way that is you and fits you in your life. There is a broader concept that I'm curious about. And you speak to this, to certain extent.

46:48I think it's really interesting. If you've been around the world, there's really parent-child dynamics for any amount of time. At some point, you probably heard some version of the phrase reparenting. You didn't get what you needed from your parents. So I got to reparent now. What you're talking about here is not reparenting. Correct. Tease out why it's not. I call it self-parenting. And I know other people do too. I didn't conceptualize that. But because it's more accurate, right? Reparenting makes it seem like you were parented a time before. And for many people with father wounds, they weren't.

47:25Right? So it just feels like a misnomer. It just doesn't feel like it's accurate to me. I'm very into accuracy with language. What it looks like, though, is you really do learn to treat yourself like a beloved child. You learn self-consideration in a real way. And I walk you through different exercises that we do where you're talking to yourself like, is this what's in your best interest to stay at work again and not and eat, you know, a sandwich at your desk instead of going home and having a proper meal? Is this in your best interest? Would you want your daughter doing this? You wouldn't. So we start to really pour that self-consideration.

48:12And I don't call it self-love, you know, Jonathan, because I feel like self-love is so distorted out there in like these interweb streets where it's this amorphous language that no one even knows what it means. Self-consideration is solid. You know what that means. I like that word, actually. Me too. It feels steady, like grounded. Yes, and it's actionable. We understand what it means. If you're tired, make sure you're sleeping seven to eight hours a night. It's not in your best interest if you are having this energy leak of Netflix till two in the morning. And we have to understand if you're driven to do that, because I talk all about shadow addictions in the book as well, if you're driven to do that, these are numbing behaviors that we're numbing something for a reason.

49:00And there's ways to self-soothe that are not the same as self-numbing. They're different things. Give me an example of the difference there. Yeah, self-soothing is allowing yourself to not go to a party you don't want to go to, to snuggle up on your couch, to watch a movie that you know the ending, nothing that's going to traumatize you, eat comfort food, and go to bed early. That's self-soothing. Self-numbing is chomping on two gummies and having three glasses of wine to eliminate those same feelings you don't want to feel. So it's like one is creating the feeling that's nourishing and the other is just stopping the feeling.

49:40Correct. But it doesn't stop the feeling. It just stops it temporarily, as we know. It's like a short-term solution for a long-term problem. Yeah. Somebody's nodding along and somebody's really hijieving who's like got all the accolades and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel all this. but if I say yes to this work, does that mean everything I have worked so hard to achieve in my life is then going to either stop or go away? Such a good question because I cannot tell you how many times I've been asked this question. It's like this fear. No, it does not mean that that everything you know how to do, all of your incredible adaptive skills that these experiences have given you, don't go away.

50:32You're an expert at them. What changes is how you treat yourself and your body. What changes is what drives you. Instead of being driven by fear, fear of losing, fear of lacking, fear of not being, like you said, I should be too ahead. You're driven by what lights me up? What fills my heart? What is my dharma? What is my purpose in life? And these are expansive and sort of aspirational questions. It's a luxury to ask ourselves those questions, right? Because there's a lot of people who could never live a life where they can do that. But when you have unhealed wounds and your little kid is kind of still driving because that's what is happening you're not being driven by joy you're being driven by fear of losing what you've built fear of not being on top fear of not having the right amount of money and you've got to see the magic that happens when you are aligned because there's a misalignment when that's what's driving our behavior yeah it's not the same as like my purpose in life is to help as many people as possible, lessen their own suffering and elevate their own joy, right?

51:53That's been my purpose since the beginning of my time as a therapist 30 years ago. That's my purpose in life. The joy that I get from helping people, that's what keeps me going, right? It's not, listen, we both do podcasts for years and years and years i've got a huge youtube channel all of that is free why because that is my purpose in life and i make money too of course but i'm not driven by lack or fear i'm driven by my desire to help in a real way and not so that i'm okay through different things yeah and it probably takes a minute to really own what is driving you underneath all of the achievement, all of the accolades, all of the whatever it is you're counting.

52:47Yeah. And is it giving you, at the end of the day, is it giving you the feeling you want to have? My core desired feeling is freedom. So I had to heal these wounds because I was being controlled by the unhealedness. Another topic I think would be interesting to people that I think people don't think about if you want to hit it is having an unhealed father wound and sex. Let's go there. Sex, sensuality, all of that, because it creates such a relational problem. It's such a dysfunctional relational pattern that gets created when you are unhealed. how you relate to sex so many women and this is again from my 650 women group who self-reported i mean it was heartbreaking it was like how not present they are that it's all management so much of it has to do with less sex is better as long as my partner is satisfied i'm happy that they still desire me that was another comment um so many women faking orgasms if their partner even cares if they have one which many of them they've they trained their partner that it's not about them they just want to get through it so there's actually a whole chapter chapter nine in the book is all about sensuality sexuality self-sexuality joy and and senses and being present because so much of having an unhealed wound, you're not present, right?

54:26You're anticipating, you're planning, you're plotting, you're making sure you're controlling. There's so much high functioning codependency that goes along with this. There's so much illusion of controlling. You're attempting to control, but I mean, there's only so much you can control. So that's a whole new area for women in particular, healing this wound is sort of going back to the basics of even knowing what you want or like sexually when you've almost never considered it because you're always seeing yourself through the eyes of the person you're having sex with do they feel satisfied did they think this was good great so then this was good it makes so much sense it's like all these are the different manifestations, right?

55:16Correct. Um, and it all comes back to the same thing. You know, it is, there's a wall that goes up. Um, we think that it's keeping us okay, but in fact, it's stopping us from being okay. And it's so isolating because what will happen, and I've seen this in my therapy practice so many times where women later in life who've lived this, and they're high achievers. So no one is any of the wiser except them. It's like, wow, look at everything. Look at what you've done. Everything you've ever wanted you have. Yes, you have money. Your kids all went to Ivy League schools. You're on the board of this and that.

55:58You go to SoulCycle. You do whatever it is you're doing. They're coming into my office and saying, so I did all the things. Is this how I'm supposed to feel? Like, actually, is this all there is? I'm just curious. And they're like, why do I feel so empty? Well, if you built a life, checking boxes that someone else constructed and saying yes when you want to say no and not having self-consideration, you're with a bunch of people who also don't consider you because you've taught them not to. And it's really dehumanizing and can be very depressing to feel like I did all the right things. I did all the things that society told me if I did them, I would get the rewards.

56:40but society didn't anticipate the psychological aspect of having unhealed wounds while you're doing those things you got to go back and do the work at the end of the day or else it's going to follow you for life and it's never too late is the best news yeah as much as it might feel like overwhelming and of course there's a period of mourning yeah that we have to go through of like wow i went through i had these relationships i wasn't myself or what i tolerated yeah it's like the decades that I've lost. Yes. Yeah. And we do. We go through the mourning process. You have to mourn the father you wished you had, and you also have to mourn what you've lost because of being a father wounded and walking around in life.

57:20But once we go through that process, then there's all this space to create and embrace what you want to live now, how you want to feel now, how you want to be in a relationship now. like it doesn't matter how long you've done this you can decide today i don't want to do this the way that i've been doing it anymore i'm willing to do the work i want something different i do want to be considered and known i do want to be seen i do have something to say and i want to say it right it's never too late which is the most hopeful aspect of this book i think i love that And I feel like that's a great place for us to come full circle also.

58:02I have asked you this question, but I feel like we do this every five years or so. So I'm going to ask it again because people change, times change. In this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To have healthy relationships, to me, is the number one most important thing, to have a good life. And that includes a relationship with yourself. Thank you. Thanks for having me, friend. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. One thing that really caught me hours later, actually, is how many of the qualities that we hand out as compliments showed up on Terry's list of symptoms, hyper-independence, over-functioning, accomplishment and achievement, never needing a thing from anyone.

58:53Those get called strengths at work, but maybe there's something else going on. Three other things that I'm really thinking about here. First, she calls this a worthiness wound, not necessarily just a father problem. That relocates the whole thing. It stops from being a story about him and becomes a question about what you believe you're owed. Second, self-parenting, which she's careful to distinguish from reparenting because reparenting assumes that you got parented the first time. What it looks like in practice is self-consideration, not self-love, which she thinks has been kind of emptied out.

59:27self-consideration, which you can actually measure against a decision. And third, the resentment inventory. Where are you holding resentment? Towards whom and why? It's kind of the starting line and it's uncomfortable because it feels like blame when it's really just data. So here's maybe one thing to actually think about doing this week. Sit down with a piece of paper and start thinking about that resentment inventory. Names and why and nothing else. Do not try and fix anything, do not forgive anyone, just get it out of your head and onto the page and notice which name you did not want to write down.

1:00:04And that becomes a starting point for so much of what she's talking about here. And hey, before you leave, do me a quick personal favor. Share this one conversation with just one person that you know that has maybe built a life that looks amazing from the outside, but you know there's something else going on. And if you have a couple of extra seconds, go ahead and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us get discovered and brings more people into conversations like these. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Troy Young and Alejandro Ramirez.

1:00:40Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

1:00:57Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet Wealth Partners. Are you on track for financial independence? If you're on track the same way you're getting back to the gym, as in maybe next year, then this one's for you. NerdWallet Wealth Partners offers free tools for high earners who'd like an actual answer instead of a vibe. Like their calculator that estimates if you're on track for financial independence. Plug in a few numbers to see how your savings path may support your goals. Think of it as a fitness test that you can take sitting down or their wealth building checklist for high earners. It's a step-by-step guide for prioritizing your dollars once you're making six figures.

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