In this episode of "Finding the Guardian of Your Soul," Lisa reflects on her personal journey of finding love after a difficult relationship with her father. She shares her struggles and the impact her father had on her romantic relationships and how she was able to overcome these challenges to ultimately find love and healing. Through her candid and introspective storytelling, Lisa encourages listeners to recognize the power they have to heal their past wounds and pursue a loving, fulfilling relationship. Tune in as Lisa delves into her personal experiences and offers insights on how to move past the pain of the past to find the guardian of your soul. Continue On Your Journey: Lisa Shield | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Book a Call With Lisa Email the podcast at: podcast@lisashield.com
What You'll Hear In This Episode:
- Impact of Lisa’s father's absence and behavior on personal relationships
- Her realization about the impact of blaming parents for relationship struggles
- Deciding to transform and not be defined by the past
- Transitioning from blaming to taking responsibility for one’s own happiness
- Lisa’s experience of rejection and fear originating from the father-daughter relationship
- Her decision to seek and attract qualities in a partner that were lacking in the father
- Meeting the right partner after personal growth and emotional healing
- Letting go of past baggage and emotional wounds from previous relationships
Key quotes:
"I’d meet somebody and tell them my story. Then I meet someone else, and I tell them my story. Eventually, I started to see how inane and boring it is to keep retelling your story as if that's who you are." — Lisa Shield
“It hit me that carrying all of this blame and this old story that it was my father's fault that I couldn't have a healthy relationship with a man was getting in my way." — Lisa Shield
"I decided that if I couldn't heal my relationship with my own father, that I could still heal my relationships with men." — Lisa Shield
"I went on 96 1st dates. The 96th date was my husband Benjamin. The whole time I was putting myself out there, as I was sitting across from a man on a date, I often felt like being rejected by my father all over again. Those fears would come up, and I would have to deal with them. I would sit with my feelings, I would love myself, and I would talk myself off the ledge." — Lisa Shield
"Instead of using my relationship with my father as an excuse for why I couldn't have the kind of relationship I wanted, I used it as the reason why I had to go out and find the kind of guy I wanted…I knew I had the power to walk forward, to acknowledge that my relationship with my father was never going to be what I wanted, but that I could get out there and do the work and face my fears and learn how to separate the good men from the not so good men and find a Guardian of My Soul." — Lisa Shield
"I had to learn how to love myself. No matter what was going on around me, no matter whether a guy wrote back to me or asked me on a second date or not, I knew that I had to keep moving forward, healing my heart, and loving myself." — Lisa Shield
Continue On Your Journey:
Lisa Shield | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Book a Call With Lisa
Email the podcast at: podcast@lisashield.com
Lisa Shield [00:00:03]:
Hello, everybody. I'm Lisa shield. And this is finding the guardian of your soul. It's great to be here. Today I am going to talk about Finding Love after a Difficult father. This topic came up. I was talking to my podcast coordinator, and we were both talking about our our relationships with our fathers and how that has impacted us. And as we were thinking about what the topic would be today, she said, I think there's a lot there for you to talk about.
Lisa Shield [00:00:39]:
So this is going to be a rather personal discussion about how my relationship with my father actually compelled me to find the guardian of my soul. So when I was young, my father and my mother divorced when I was, I believe, ten years old. He left when I was eight, and then their divorce was finalized when I was ten. And I don't remember much about my dad when I was very young. The only thing I remember was always wanting him to play with me and him being too tired or brushing me off somehow. But I never really connected much with him. He was this bigger than life figure. My dad was actually an incredibly handsome man.
Lisa Shield [00:01:39]:
Like, movie star handsome. He was over 6ft tall, and he was really built. And, yeah, he was handsome. In fact, my nickname for him was Las Vegas Gare. He was Gary. And I called him Las Vegas Gare because he used to be like the missing Rat Packer. He would get his fingernails buffed, and he would brag that he had all of his suits made hand tailored by a man named Nick Pasco. He loved dressing beautifully, and, yeah, he was quite a guy.
Lisa Shield [00:02:20]:
And my parents were a striking couple, but he cheated on my mother. And later I learned that my dad was an alcoholic and he went to rehab. And so my father and I never had a good relationship. There was a point where I sent him a letter, now that I know about men, this letter was a very bad idea. What I was hoping was I would pour my heart out to him and tell him all the things that the ways that I felt that he had hurt me. And I was hoping that it would open up a discussion and the two of us would be able to talk about some of these things. I think I wrote him this letter when I was in my 20s, maybe even a little bit older than that, probably in my 30s, because he was married to his second wife by then. And I wrote him this letter, and it was pages and pages of just all the ways he had disappointed me and let me down as a father and hadn't been there for me in great detail.
Lisa Shield [00:03:41]:
And knowing what I know about men now, that letter would have been incredibly shaming for him. And instead of us talking and it bringing us closer together because my father was quite defensive and narcissistic. It actually pushed him further away. I don't think we ever would have had a good relationship. He was definitely an alcoholic. He cheated on my mom. He cheated on his second wife. He cheated on his third wife.
Lisa Shield [00:04:17]:
I don't know if he cheated on his third wife. Actually, I know he cheated on his second wife with his third wife. So there you go. And then she left him. So I just didn't respect my father. I also did feel deeply disappointed in him as a man. He was not a good example for me. And what I hear from so many women, they will say, Well, I had a terrible example.
Lisa Shield [00:04:52]:
I never had a good relationship with my father. He never really showed me what a man is like. And so now I struggle to have relationships with men because I never had a good relationship with my own father. I think it's very easy to go back and blame our parents for why we're not being successful in our lives and say, well, they didn't model a good relationship, so here I am. I didn't have good role models, and so I'm failing at this too. And it's very easy to look at them and blame them. And for a long time, I did that with my dad. In fact, I think this is so funny.
Lisa Shield [00:05:40]:
I went to Landmark Forum. Probably a lot of, you know, Landmark Forum. It's a huge personal growth workshop that is all over the world. It's been around for a long time. It started out as est, and then it became the Landmark Forum. So I did the first two landmark forum courses. And in one of those courses and I may be getting this wrong because it was a long time ago I did an exercise where we had to write down our story like the story of our lives. If we were going to tell somebody the story of our life, we wrote it down.
Lisa Shield [00:06:25]:
And then we paired up with somebody at the workshop and I happened to pair up with this Spanish guy named Carlos who I just thought was adorable, and I kind of had a crush on him. And we have to sit there and tell our story over and over and over again until we get it right. And getting it means that you get how ridiculous it is to keep telling the story that you just keep telling the same story over and over again until you realize, oh, my gosh, this is what I do. I meet somebody and I tell them my story. Then I meet someone else and I tell them my story. And you start to see how inane and boring this is to keep retelling your story as if that's who you are. And so here I am. I'm sitting across from Carlos, this handsome Spanish guy who I really am kind of wanting to like me and I'm telling him over and over again about how my father never loved me, and that's why I've never really had a good relationship with a man.
Lisa Shield [00:07:40]:
And finally, as I'm sitting there telling and retelling this story, I stopped and I thought, oh, my God, I want this man to like me and find me attractive, and what I'm doing is the most unattractive thing I could possibly do. I'm telling him all the reasons why he should run and have nothing to do with me, because I'm still angry at my father, and I'm going to meet a guy and carry that into my romantic relationship, and he's going to pay the price for my relationship with my dad. What guy in his right mind would want to do that? And it hit me that this was getting in my way, carrying all of this blame and this old story that it was my father's fault that I couldn't have a healthy relationship with a man. So that was a bit of an awakening for me. And it also helped me see that just because I didn't get the father I might have wanted and I had not had a healthy relationship, really, with any man, I was not comfortable with men. I didn't know what men wanted from me. I had experienced so much rejection from my own father. And to be honest, I absolutely love and adore his third wife.
Lisa Shield [00:09:16]:
She turned out to be this absolutely wonderful woman. But at the time, I was very angry because she was ten years younger than me. And I was so hurt that my father actually fell in love with and married a woman ten years younger than I was, and he couldn't even have a relationship with his own daughter, but he was marrying a woman who was young enough to be his daughter. So I was really hurt about that, and I carried those wounds, and I carried those stories for a long time, but then I realized I may never be able to heal the relationship with my father. And it was really challenging for me. I have to admit. I wish I could have overcome certain things in relation to my father and me. I see other people who other women who are more forgiving and are able to move forward.
Lisa Shield [00:10:23]:
My father never he was such a hardcore narcissist, and it was very difficult for me to connect with him at all because it was really all about him all the time. And anybody who's dealt with a narcissist knows that everything goes back to them. There's no room for you in that equation if you have a really hardcore narcissist in your life. They're manipulative, they lie, they make everything about them. And I didn't have respect for my father. I really lacked respect for him. And I understand why he was the way he was. I have compassion for how he got there, but I don't respect who he became and for me, respect is one of my core values.
Lisa Shield [00:11:27]:
I really wanted to be with a man who I respected in every sense of the word. And I didn't have those feelings for my own father, I just had pity. Instead of making that my story, I decided that if I couldn't heal my relationship with my own father, that I could still heal my relationships with men. And what I could do was go out and date and find the kind of man that I had always wanted my father to be. A man of integrity, a man of humility, a man who walked his talk, who had an open heart, who could see me as a woman, because I never felt seen as a woman by my father. In fact, when my dad went to rehab for the second time, I didn't want to go. Part of the rehab is that the family comes at the end of the two months or something for the last week, and they have something called Family Week, which is not fun by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn't want to go. And I went because I'm part of the family, and I knew my brother and my half sister and my aunt were going, and I felt an obligation to go as much for them as for my dad.
Lisa Shield [00:13:11]:
And so I went. And at the end of this whole process that you go through with the addict, there's a sort of confrontation where the person confronts the addict and says, look, these are all the ways that I feel I was hurt in this relationship with you. And so I told my father how I felt he had hurt me. And one of the things I said to him was, I said, in all these many years and I was probably about 46, no, probably even maybe older than that, I might have been in my 50s, because I'm 62 now. So I was probably in my 50s when this all occurred. And I said to my father, I told him the ways that he hadn't shown up for me as a father, the ways I had needed him, that he wasn't there for me. And I even said to him, I said, dad, I know that you went through AA and all, and that part of going through a twelve step program is writing an amends letter to the people that you have hurt. And I said, I never got my amends letter.
Lisa Shield [00:14:33]:
I said, You've never made amends to me. And in front of other families and the therapist, my father looked at me and said, well, I don't think I have anything to make amends for. And the therapist was appalled and said, gary, your daughter just told you all the things that she feels you need to make amends for. And my father again came back belligerently and said, well, I don't think I need to make amends. And I looked at him and I said, well, then we're done here. There's nothing more for me to say. I told you how I felt, and you don't feel that you have anything to make amends for. So I guess we're done.
Lisa Shield [00:15:27]:
And my dad, one of the things I had said to him in all of that was, dad, in all these years, you've never once told me I was beautiful. And I said, I'm your daughter, and every daughter needs to hear that from her father. And after I said, we're done, he then said to me that I told me I was beautiful, which was not the right thing to say at that time. So that was my dad, right? That was my dad. That was my relationship with my dad. And I could have carried that on throughout my life. And I know I was already with Benjamin, my husband, by then. We were already married for a number of years when that all occurred.
Lisa Shield [00:16:25]:
But after the landmark forum and getting clearer that this was a story that I was holding about my father, and that even if it was true, it was true for me that we didn't have a great relationship. But I decided that I wanted to change this going forward, that I was not going to let that stop me from finding true love with a real man, a man who was everything that I felt my father wasn't. And so I set out to date. I went on 96 1st dates, and the 96th date was my husband Benjamin. And during all of that time, all of those dates, putting myself out there very often, sitting across from a man on a date often felt like being rejected by my father all over again. Those fears would come up and I would have to deal with them. I would sit with my feelings, I would love myself, I would talk myself off the ledge. I learned in that process to give myself the love and the encouragement that I needed to give myself that nobody could do for it was something nobody could do for me.
Lisa Shield [00:18:05]:
And remind myself over and over and over again that not all men are like my father and there are wonderful men out there, and that I could become the kind of woman who was capable of finding and attracting a wonderful man. And the most beautiful part about that process was that I knew in my heart of hearts that finding that man and healing would heal my heart. And for many, many years, when Benjamin and I first met, I would look at him and I would just look in his eyes. I was and am so, so proud of our relationship. And I'm so proud of him to be his wife. It's one of the things the greatest accomplishments of my life is finding Benjamin and becoming his wife. And I remember when I met him, and for many years, I just would look at him and I would look in his eyes and I would say to myself, lisa, this is a reflection of how far you've come. How much work you've done and how much you've healed and grown in this work and in this process to be able to be with a man like Benjamin.
Lisa Shield [00:19:42]:
And instead of using my relationship with my father as an excuse for why I couldn't have the kind of relationship I wanted, I used it as the reason why I had to go out and find this. Because I wasn't going to let that be my legacy. I wasn't going to let my relationship with my father define me. And because I knew I had it within me. I knew I had the power to walk forward, to acknowledge that my relationship with my father was never going to be what I wanted, but that I could get out. There and do the work and face my fears and learn how to separate the good men from the not so good men and find a guardian of my soul. That was one of the most important factors that drove me forward and kept me going until I got this solved. So you do not have to be defined by your past.
Lisa Shield [00:20:53]:
You do not have to be defined by the father or the mother or the relationship that you were given. You can learn how to heal your heart and move forward and know that who they are does not have to be. You don't have to relive your parents relationship or your relationship with your parents. You have the power to change this. And for me, the dating process and being able to go out on as many dates as necessary in order to keep gaining the confidence I needed. And I knew, by the way, when I first started dating and I set out on this journey, I wasn't naive. I knew I wasn't ready to meet a man like Benjamin. I knew I had work to do on myself.
Lisa Shield [00:21:52]:
I had to get through my fears. I had to find my own self confidence. I had to learn how to love myself. No matter what was going on around me, no matter whether a guy wrote back to me or asked me on a second date or not, I knew that I had to keep moving forward and healing my heart. So that when I did meet a man like Benjamin, I would be ready. So if you want to learn more about the work we do, I teach a twelve week course called Emotionally Naked Dating. And we teach you how to work through your issues from the past, your relationships with your parents, to let go of that baggage from ex lovers, ex husbands, ex boyfriends, so that you can move forward and heal your heart and find the guardian of your soul. Please go to lisashield.com.
Lisa Shield [00:22:53]:
Click the button. All over my website, there is a link to a free 45 minutes presentation. There is also if I can give you this, if you want to just go ahead and book a breakthrough call with a member of my team, you can go to lisashield. comReserve and that will take you directly to our booking link. We do prefer that you watch the 45 minutes presentation first because it will give you a much deeper understanding of what we do. There's so much more to our process and we really want you to come on that breakthrough call knowing what we can offer you. Please send us your ideas for future podcasts to podcast@lisashield.com. And finally, on Sundays, I do a second broadcast with my husband called Getting Inside the Right Male Mind.
Lisa Shield [00:23:59]:
So you can also find that and come back and see us again. I wish you all the best in love and in life, and please know that you really can have it all. Bye bye. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.