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

The most accomplished women in Terri Cole’s therapy practice kept describing the same private emptiness, and almost none of them could name where it came from. After nearly thirty years and a research group of 650 women, she has an answer that has very little to do with what you would expect. It’s about something called The Father Wound.

Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss and Too Much, whose new book Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power is the first secular, science-grounded treatment of a subject she found almost nobody was writing about. She coined the term because she kept seeing it in her office with no name attached to it. For anyone in their forties or fifties who has done the work, checked the boxes, and still feels like something underneath is running the show, this conversation names the thing.

What you’ll explore in this conversation:

The question Terri’s own therapist asked about her ambition that reframed twenty years of striving in a single sentence Why the traits most likely to get you promoted are often the exact adaptations that keep you from enjoying any of it The two behaviors that look identical on a Tuesday night on the couch and do opposite things to your nervous system What Terri means when she says you need nothing from your father to heal this, including his apology, his participation, or his being alive The fear that stops high achievers from starting this work, and her direct answer to whether healing costs you what you built

If you have built a life that looks right from the outside and quietly wondered why it does not feel like yours, this is the conversation about what is actually underneath that.

You can find Terri at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So 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. Could 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 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. And 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:53] Let’s tee this up in, in maybe an interesting way. Um, so you can. This is kind of a person, right? It 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 the not, not the achiever, not the overachiever. They are the super achiever. They’re they’re their achievement, you know, like maximizers. Mhm. Um, and we assume that they, they’ve done everything that they have, everything that they must be on top of the world. And maybe for some, there’s, there’s some story in there that, 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. Um, tease this out for me and also note this, it speaks to this thing that you’ve really been focusing on that we’re going to dive deep into the father wound. Take me there.

Terri Cole: [00:02:56] Well, I think that’s overachieving. Right. Superachieving 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 over 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. And 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, I’ve just, it’s just my nature is what I was saying. I’ve, I’ve always been like this.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:54] Yeah. Just because you don’t know anything different.

Terri Cole: [00:03:56] correct.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:57] Right.

Terri Cole: [00:03:58] And I didn’t know what was driving my behavior, though. I just knew that was my behavior that 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 you were in entertainment running towards something. Mhm. Or is it possible? Could you consider that you might have been running away from something? Mhm. 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, celebrate me.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:32] I’m guessing this is your version of this story, of this experience, like you just said. Yeah. Practice as a therapist for more than three decades. Um, 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.

Terri Cole: [00:05:58] 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? And 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 stuff with a lot of religious undertones, which I’m not anti-God. It’s just not my thing. Right? I’m my my stuff is science based. It’s psychological. It’s 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 had 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?

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:28] I would, 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, um, from you, from the book, from your work, that it’s, it may not be the easiest thing for you, especially the, the one who’s on the other side of it to say like, yeah, this is actually it, this happened to me, you know, you know, and I look at, you know, you mentioned negligence, as mentioned, but like, what about the level below negligence or somebody just kind of like disaffected as a dad? Mhm. You know, they kind of just weren’t, weren’t really paying attention. Also. They just weren’t all that involved.

Terri Cole: [00:08:04] Yes. There’s, there’s so, so much, so many gradations, I guess we would say of this experience. And keep in mind, Jonathan, even if you had a pretty present father.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:15] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:08:16] All of us were raised in a patriarchy. Mhm. 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? Yeah. First of all, it’s not a diagnosis. Right. Secondly, what I care about is what are your pain points? Where do you suffer? Right? Because those are the things that I see are the same. So perfectionism overfunctioning over giving high functioning codependency, which is something that, again, I literally made it, 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 father wound. 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 father, 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, oh, who wants to remember all this stuff? But you do, because that is the only path to healing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:48] So you started to list out some of the tales. Are there more?

Terri Cole: [00:09:52] So. Overfunctioning. Yeah. Um. Hyper independence.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:56] Oh, that’s interesting because that would be seen so much of these especially that in particular would be seen as a virtue. Of course.

Terri Cole: [00:10:03] Right. So this is why it’s an invisible injury, right. It’s an invisible wound that millions and millions of women have across the globe. Right. I’ve talked this my father, of course, in 128 countries or something. It’s the same everywhere. So we have, um, hyper independence. Why is that? Because we don’t trust other people. We don’t trust that that they want to do it because at its core, having a father wound is a worthiness wound.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:33] Deconstruct that for me.

Terri Cole: [00:10:35] 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, you. Nobody needs to teach kids, right? These are adaptive functioning. Like nobody sends you an interoffice memo of how to survive your childhood, right? You’re just 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, right? That then become maladaptive in adulthood. And we’re not aware that like the war is not still on because it feels like it is. So the the last symptom I want to talk about is hypervigilance. Mhm. Where there’s literally no no rest.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:55] Yeah. You’re just like constantly scanning the environment all the like from the moment you open your eyes above your bed at night and probably even like in your sleep, you’re probably not sleeping properly.

Terri Cole: [00:12:04] Every environment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:06] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:12:06] Right. For me, except environments with women. Right. So there’s something about coding, which I write about in the book where if you look at, um, attachment theory, right. Yeah. 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 of the saying that was based on your primary caregiver.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:35] Mhm.

Terri Cole: [00:12:37] I believe you have more than one. I believe that you have there’s co wounding that happens if you have a father wound. The co wounding is what did the mother or the mother figure do.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:48] Or not do? I’m guessing correct. Right.

Terri Cole: [00:12:50] So personally, my father was very unavailable to us not there. And we were all afraid of him. So that’s what we could 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 your the other parent, how they respond to what’s happening with what the father is doing impacts you to 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 didn’t just poured into me. Still does. She was 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. Okay? I have the same friends I’ve had since second grade, since literally Nixon was in office people. And I understood women, I 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. So that was my experience in love. I was like, you know, it was never really satisfying.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:32] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:14:32] Because I was never I never relaxed, I never was with anyone who I emotionally trusted until I did this. Father won’t work.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:42] As you’re describing that also like 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 like process this with you. Um, the way you describe it now, well, that sounds clearly maladaptive. You know, like you’re, 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. And 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, this is I’m taking care of myself. I’m doing what what’s safe for me? I’m doing what’s good for me and I’m okay.

Terri Cole: [00:15:27] I think that for me personally, I was young and even though I’d had therapy, I was I was acting out what I hadn’t resolved.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:38] Okay.

Terri Cole: [00:15:38] So I was acting out this unresolved father wound in my relationships by staying hypervigilant and self protecting by, um, not letting anyone know. By not letting anyone do anything for me. Right? Like being in a relationship with even if they wanted to, I’d be like, yeah, I got it. I’m good. No thanks. You know, 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. Right. 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, right? What is it? When you have a transference to someone, you have two things happening at once. The interaction. Right. And what is the 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. This is when everyone was doing cocaine. So he had a book out about when willpower is not enough. His name is Doctor Washton, and I was interning there and he was this six two good looking dimple, deep voice, you know, definitely like, you know, golfing on the weekends, martini swigging Brooks Brothers suit wearing, uh, Wall Street Journal reading guy and I and hated him.

Terri Cole: [00:17:18] And I’m complaining to my therapist and now she’s trying to get some data about like, what? What could I possibly, in the three weeks I’ve been at this internship, what could how why could I feel this hot about this guy? Makes no sense, I said, he’s such a 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. I describe him and she says, Terry, Who exactly does Doctor 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 ten year old self. Mhm. How is 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 eight year old. That’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, right? And I didn’t see it. That’s how real it is.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:29] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You’re not like I’m choosing to react this way. It’s literally I’m kind of wired into you like, this is just what 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.

Terri Cole: [00:18:50] Like, correct. Which is why healing these original injuries that we have is the only thing that creates the liberation to choose.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:01] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:19:01] Right. Because what are we doing if you can’t not do it? It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion. And it’s a fear driven compulsion. It’s 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 brakes, where I’m giving people these exercises that you can 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, you know, I walk people through this process is understanding your downloaded father wound blueprint, right? Because there’s no one size fits all. Like 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, 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, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:24] Say that again, because I think that’s really important.

Terri Cole: [00:20:27] Even 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. Um, 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. Yeah. 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, uh, the universe is sort of tapping you a little like, hey, you might want to slow down. Like, hey, is this really what you want to be doing? You have to pay attention.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:19] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:21:19] 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:29] Yeah. Do you feel like, like, like a common reaction is if you start to feel like I’m doing all the things. Um, and, 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 winning enough. Um, 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 that does that?

Terri Cole: [00:22:04] I 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 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 good for you. Great. But there are different things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:49] Yeah. Not as a proxy for the thing that you’re really missing. Correct. Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:22:52] Because literally, the call is coming from 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 and worthiness.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:14] It sure does. It’s like, you 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 it for a moment, which is if the father dies. Mhm. Um, 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, where you know, the thought is, okay, so, um, someone’s dad has passed and well, that should, shouldn’t that just resolve this? And like that force that was like causing this wound is no longer with us. Shouldn’t everything just resolve itself? That is that every part of the conversation here.

Terri Cole: [00:23:57] Oh it is, but it’s a myth. Yeah. Right. Because here’s what happens. What happens more, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:13] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:24:13] 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. Because 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? Mhm. Where are you holding on to? Resentment and for whom and why.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:32] And that’s got to be tough inventory for a lot of people to do.

Terri Cole: [00:25:36] Honestly, yes, it’s painful because it’s 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 to 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 most. 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 they’re their father is still approving of them.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:06] 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.

Terri Cole: [00:27:13] 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 this is the time, in a way, for this book because of what’s happening societally. Like there’s no time to waste, right? 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 you 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 how to not go into sketchy areas. And they, the way they treat you tells you that you are someone who’s worth protecting. If you have a father who is not interested in that. And like my father didn’t know where I was when I was a sophomore in high school. On a Tuesday night at two in the morning, I was hanging out with the football team. Um, 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, right, my, it was me being of service. How can I make your life easier? This is my value is doing something for you. Yeah. I want you to be happy. I want you to be pleased.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:01] It’s all external.

Terri Cole: [00:29:02] 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:15] If you’re living with this, um. How does stillness, how does silence sit with you?

Terri Cole: [00:29:26] Not. Well, at least it didn’t for me. I mean, I.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:30] Was, I would imagine for almost anyone like it kind of couldn’t.

Terri Cole: [00:29:33] No, 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, right? We have all this anticipatory anxiety that we, 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 then I get this done. And there’s so much pleasing and there’s so much fear of letting other people down that 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. It’s 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 him. Very coachable. And she was like, why is it so hard? I’m like, I don’t know. What am I? What am I going to think about? She’s like, that’s what we’re going to find out. I was like, oh my God. And of course.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:36] You know.

Terri Cole: [00:30:37] I.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:37] Didn’t. Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:30:38] And then obviously years later got into having a very dedicated meditation practice that I’ve had now for over 20 years. But, you know, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:06] That 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 there’s a question I need to ask you before we get there, which is and this is not a well, what about guys type of thing? It’s actually just a curiosity. Um, Can sons experience father wounds also?

Terri Cole: [00:31:29] Of course. But they’re so different.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:32] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:31:33] Now, the way the 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 were 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 and all that crap is not encouraging men to have emotional IQ right now. 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:45] You know, we’re being very binary here also. But like there’s a spectrum now.

Terri Cole: [00:32:51] 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 the traditionally considered mother stuff. So again, you’re right, it’s we’re talking binary, but it isn’t, and certainly not in the way of gender.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:08] Let’s talk about a little bit about if you’re joining us or you’re kind of nodding along, you’re like, huh, this is interesting. I have been out there achieving my butt off. Um, I have been in relationships and I felt protected and safe for years but never seen known, 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?

Terri Cole: [00:33:39] 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. Because, because 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:28] Like the justifications. Yes.

Terri Cole: [00:34:30] 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 going to do the exercises in the order because this is the 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 need to do the exercises. You need to be willing to tell the truth, 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. So the way it played out in my life romantically is I was attracted to unavailable men. Then as I was 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 affectionate. 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?

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:49] Right.

Terri Cole: [00:35:49] Exactly. I was like, oh, I’m still longing. She’s like, correct. So it’s very sneaky. The you feel like you’re healing, but it could be very sneaky. One by one, you will start to will do, um, relationship inventory. 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. I 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:29] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. 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 a way that is you and fits you and your life. There is a broader concept that I’m curious about, and you speak to this to a certain extent. That thing is really interesting. You know, we’ve if you’ve been around the world, those early 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. I got a reparent now. Um, what you’re talking about here is not reparenting. Correct. It’s tease out what? What why it’s not.

Terri Cole: [00:38:15] 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 right. 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 say 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. And 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?

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:32] That means I like that word, actually. It feels it feels steady. Like grounded.

Terri Cole: [00:39:36] Yes. And it’s actionable. We understand what it means. If you’re tired, make sure you’re sleeping 7 to 8 hours a night. It’s not in your best interest if you are having this, you know, energy leak of Netflix til two in the morning. And we have to understand if you’re driven to do that, because I talk all about shadow addictions and the book as well. If you’re driven to do that, these are numbing behaviors that were numbing for we were numbing something for a reason. And there’s ways to self soothe that are not the same as self numbing. They’re different.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:12] Can you just give me an example of the difference there.

Terri Cole: [00:40:15] Yes, 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:35] Mhm. Okay.

Terri Cole: [00:40:36] To eliminate those same feelings you don’t want to feel.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:39] So it’s like one is creating the feeling that’s nourishing and the other is just stopping the feeling. Correct.

Terri Cole: [00:40:46] 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:51] Yeah. Somebody is nodding along and somebody is really high achieving 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.

Terri Cole: [00:41:16] It’s 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 your, uh, everything you know how to do all of your incredible adaptive skills that these experiences have given you, don’t go away. You’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 it should be to 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. Um, 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. 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? That’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, but through different things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:38] 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, whatever it is you’re counting. Yeah. And is it giving you at the end of the day? Is it giving you the feeling you want to have?

Terri Cole: [00:43:56] My core desired feeling is freedom. So I had to heal these wounds because I was being controlled by the unhealed. 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:16] Mhm. Let’s go there.

Terri Cole: [00:44:18] Sex, sensuality, all of that because it creates such a relational problem, right? It’s such a dysfunctional relational pattern in 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’ve 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 senses and being present because so much of having an unhealed wound, you’re, you’re not present, right? You’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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:16] It makes so much sense. It’s like all these are the different manifestations, right? Correct. And it all comes back to the same thing. You know, it it is there’s a wall that goes up. Um, we think that it’s keeping us okay. Yeah. But in fact, it’s stopping us from being okay.

Terri Cole: [00:46:38] And it’s so isolating.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:40] Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:46:41] 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, um, and they’re high achievers and no one, no one is any the wiser except.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:53] Them, right? It’s like, wow, look at everything.

Terri Cole: [00:46:55] Look at what you’ve.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:56] Done, everything you’ve ever wanted. You have.

Terri Cole: [00:46:58] Yes, you’ve had money. Your kids all went to Ivy League schools. You’re, you’re on the board of this and that. You 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. But society didn’t anticipate the psychological aspect of having unhealed wounds while you’re doing those things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:52] 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.

Terri Cole: [00:47:56] Yeah, 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 that we have to go through of like, wow, I went through, I had these relationships, I wasn’t myself or what I tolerated.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:11] Yeah. It’s like the decades that I’ve lost. Yes. Yeah.

Terri Cole: [00:48:14] And we do, we go through the mourning process. You have to mourn the father you wish you had, and you also have to mourn what you’ve lost because of being a father wounded and walking around in life. But once we go through that process, then there’s all this space to create and embrace what your what you want to live now, how you want to feel now, how you want to be in 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:02] I love that, and I feel like that’s a great place for us to come full circle also. Um, I 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. And this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Terri Cole: [00:49:20] 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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:34] Thank you.

Terri Cole: [00:49:35] Sure. Thanks for having me, friend.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:37] So let’s talk about some of the big Aha’s 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. Those 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. Self-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.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:53] 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. And 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 Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Troy Young and Alejandro Ramirez. Kris 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.

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