You know that feeling when you’re standing at your father’s graveside, and instead of crying, you’re still waiting for him to say he’s proud of you? That was me at forty-three, watching them lower my dad into the ground, still hoping for something that was never going to come.
I spent decades chasing my father’s approval like a dog chasing its tail. Every promotion at work, every milestone with my own kids, every small victory in life, I’d find myself mentally rehearsing how I’d tell him about it. Maybe this time he’d light up. Maybe this time he’d say the words I desperately needed to hear.
The truth is, some parents simply can’t give us what we need. Not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t have it to give. It’s like asking someone who’s colorblind to describe the sunset. They might want to, they might try, but they’re working with a different set of tools than the rest of us.
The chase that never ends
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When you grow up with a difficult parent, you develop this internal scorecard. You’re constantly tallying up achievements, hoping that if you just get enough points, you’ll finally unlock that level of acceptance you’ve been craving.
I remember calling my father after I got a big promotion in my late thirties. His response? “Well, don’t let it go to your head.” That was it. No congratulations, no pride, just a warning about my potential character flaws.
The thing is, I kept calling. I kept sharing. I kept hoping. Even after dozens of these deflating conversations, some part of me believed the next one would be different. Albert Einstein supposedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that measure, I spent most of my adult life being completely insane.
What’s fascinating is how this pattern infected other parts of my life. I became the guy who worked overtime without being asked, who volunteered for every committee, who couldn’t say no to any request. I was trying to earn from the world what I couldn’t earn from my father. The approval addiction doesn’t stay contained to one relationship. It spreads like water damage through the walls of your entire life.
When understanding arrives too late
My father died when I was in my forties, and it hit me harder than I expected. Not just because I’d lost him, but because I’d lost the possibility of things ever being different. That door had closed forever, and I was left holding all these conversations we’d never have.
It wasn’t until I started therapy in my sixties (my wife’s suggestion, and honestly, I wish I’d listened to her decades earlier) that I began to understand the full picture. My therapist asked me to describe my father’s childhood, and as I talked about his own difficult upbringing, his absent father, his struggles during the Depression, something clicked.
My father wasn’t withholding love as punishment. He was giving me everything he had. It just wasn’t very much.
This understanding should have brought relief, right? Finally, after all these years, I could see it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t about my inadequacy. But instead of relief, I felt this crushing grief wash over me. Grief for the relationship we never had. Grief for all those years I spent trying to squeeze water from a stone. And maybe most painfully, grief for my father, who probably spent his whole life as emotionally malnourished as I’d felt.
The inheritance we don’t want to pass on
Here’s where it gets complicated. When you realize you’ve been shaped by this dynamic, you have to face the uncomfortable question: Have I done the same thing to my own kids?
A few years back, one of my adult sons and I were having dinner, and he said something that stopped me cold. He told me that growing up, he never felt like he could just be himself around me. He always felt like he had to be achieving something, doing something, proving something.
Sound familiar?
That conversation was one of the most painful and valuable of my life. As parents, we like to think we’re doing the opposite of what hurt us, but sometimes we’re just doing a variation on the same theme. I wasn’t emotionally unavailable like my father, but I’d created a different kind of pressure. I was so busy trying to be the encouraging father I never had that I forgot to just be present with who my kids actually were.
Breaking the cycle means facing the grief
If you’re reading this and recognizing your own patterns, know that the path forward isn’t through more understanding or analysis. I spent years understanding my father, reading psychology books, trying to think my way to healing. But healing requires something else entirely.
It requires grieving what you didn’t get. Really grieving it, not just acknowledging it intellectually. It means sitting with the sadness of that little kid inside you who tried so hard and never got what they needed. It means accepting that no amount of adult achievement will fill that childhood hole.
I’ve learned that apologizing to your adult children for specific things you got wrong opens doors that staying defensive keeps closed. It’s humbling to admit to your kids that you were operating from your own wounds, but it’s also liberating. It gives them permission to be honest about their experience, and it gives you the chance to have the real relationship that you couldn’t have when they were young.
Closing thoughts
The grief I felt when I finally understood my father hasn’t fully gone away, and maybe it never will. But it’s changed from a sharp, desperate ache to something softer, more like a tender bruise that reminds me to be gentle with myself and others.
I can’t get those years back that I spent chasing something that didn’t exist. But I can make sure the years I have left aren’t spent the same way. I can stop auditioning for approval in every interaction. I can give my children and grandchildren the acceptance I craved, freely and without conditions.
If you’re still trying to earn something from someone who can’t give it, let me save you some time: You’re already enough. You were always enough. The tragedy isn’t that you’re inadequate; it’s that the person whose approval you’re seeking can’t see what’s right in front of them.
What would your life look like if you stopped trying to prove yourself to someone who’s never going to get it?
The post I grew up with a difficult father and spent my whole adult life trying to earn something from him that he wasn’t capable of giving — and the understanding, when it finally arrived, did not bring relief, it brought grief, the specific grief of realizing that what I had been reaching for was never going to be there, and had never been there, and I had been the last to know appeared first on The TheTrendyType.
