The Father Wound: When Your Truth Threatens Their Story
And How Claiming Your Neurodivergent Identity Challenges Decades of Family Denial
Have you ever looked at your father and seen the shadow of every emotionally unavailable man you've ever chosen?
Not the tender moments. The devastating ones. The silence that felt like abandonment. The rage that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. The way he could diagnose strangers with masterful precision, but couldn't see the neurodivergent girl sitting right in front of him, drowning in fear of punishment and rejection.
Until one day, you find yourself holding a late diagnosis like a mirror, reflecting back a lifetime of misunderstanding while he continues to deny there was ever any problem to begin with.
This is the story of how becoming a mother forced me to confront the father who could only love me when I was broken, and how claiming my neurodivergent truth shattered the family mythology we'd all silently agreed to protect.
Part 1: The Cardiologist Who Couldn't Heal my Broken Heart
My father was the epitome of intellectual brilliance. Eidetic memory. Always top of his class. Three medical degrees. The kind of physician other doctors consulted when not even they could figure out what was wrong with their patients.
At home, he was someone else entirely. Either completely checked out or furiously raging at my mother and I. There was no middle ground, no space for the complex emotional needs of a child who would later understand she wasn’t born to fit the norm.
He could spot a rare disease in a simple phone call across the country, yet couldn't for the life of him recognize the sensory overwhelm that sent me into complete shutdown. He could perform complex vascular interventions with unshakeable steadiness, but couldn't hold space for a daughter whose brain worked differently than his rigid expectations deemed “real”. If you asked him when he first noticed my eating disorder, he’d say with conviction there never was one.
The cruel irony? The only time I seemed to exist in his world was when I was physically ill. Mystery illness, fever, flu, bronchitis - those signals he could brilliantly read. But the invisible struggles, the emotional dysregulation, the way I seemed to absorb everyone else's pain like a sponge? That wasn't real suffering in his world.
I learned early that pain and struggle were the only paths to his attention. That being well meant being invisible, and being broken meant being seen - if only as a patient requiring an intervention rather than a child deserving of love.
He was also the cardiologist who couldn't heal his daughter's broken heart.
Part 2: The Architecture of Emotional Distance
Physical presence doesn't equal emotional availability - a lesson I learned early in the space between my father's towering figure and his distant heart.
He was there at every Sunday family gathering, every summer vacation, every major milestone. But somehow, he was also completely absent from my inner world, unable - or perhaps unwilling - to see the complexity of who I was beneath the performance I'd learned to put on for approval.
A good child is a quiet child. Silent, invisible and low-maintenance. - At least in my father’s parenting philosophy.
Looking back now, I can see the signs of his own undiagnosed autism. The black-and-white thinking. The utter inability to read and respond to emotional cues. The way he'd shut down completely when faced with anything remotely different from his narrow understanding of how people “should” behave around each other. His social anxiety was off the charts - so much so in fact that if you were to compare us both, you’d think of me as a social butterfly (which, I promise you, couldn’t be further from the truth).
But his autism was masked by medical authority and societal expectations of masculine stoicism. Mine was simply shoved under the rug under the guise of ableist conformity.
After my parents divorced when I was 13, my mother chose wealth and freedom over protecting her child. Instead, she gladly left me with a man whose impulse control issues and relationship with alcohol had been family skeletons for as long as I could remember.
And me? I stayed with him not because it was safe, but because I'd been trained to believe that love required sacrifice, that being needed meant being valued - even if that value only showed up when I was quietly falling apart.
Part 3: The Mirror That Reflected His Face
I was born in the late 80s, when the communistic regime still cast its shadow over Bulgaria. In that world, children were not much more than property without inner lives, meant to be molded (and scolded) rather than understood and accommodated.
"Children don't have their own experiences and opinions, they must be led." - A mantra my father chants to this day.
More than it was his parenting philosophy, it was the systematic erasure of my developing sense of self. Until I was 16 and "of age to be taken seriously," my own perception of reality simply didn't matter. My struggles were dismissed. My neurodivergent traits were subject to discipline and restriction.
And the worst part? Our physical resemblance. Every time I caught my reflection in a mirror or surface, I’d see his face staring back at me. Silent. Bitter. Judging. For years, I hated myself for carrying his features, for being a walking reminder of the very man who'd failed to see me, protect me, or model what healthy masculinity could look like for a girl in her most formative years.
That visual similarity felt like a curse, a daily reminder that I was somehow contaminated by his inability to accept me as I was rather than as he needed me to be (or not to).
Part 4: The Trail of Broken Relationships
When you learn early that love comes with conditions, that attention requires crisis, that being seen means being sick, you carry that rupture into every relationship that follows.
I spent decades choosing emotionally unavailable men, unconsciously recreating the only dynamic I'd ever had been modeled. The push and pull. The intermittent reinforcement. The way they'd feed on my wounds but disappear when I was thriving.
Each broken relationship was an echo of that first wound - the father who could tend to physical injuries but had no idea how to nurture emotional well-being. Who seemed to summon my suffering to feel needed, my brokenness to feel more whole.
At 18, I left for college and essentially disappeared from his life for 13 years. No calls, no visits, almost zero contact. It was the only way I knew how to protect myself from the ongoing damage of trying to be seen by someone who was fundamentally unable (or unwilling?) to at least try.
Part 5: When Your Truth Threatens Their Entire Reality
My late diagnosis changed nothing and everything all at once. Not only did it shift the perspective of my understanding of who I thought I was, but how I was able to finally peel off the last deceptive layers of our entire family history.
But when I tried to share this revelation with him, something fascinating and heartbreaking happened. The man who'd built his entire identity on medical expertise couldn't accept for the life of him that he'd missed something so fundamental about his own daughter.
My truth threatened the story he'd been telling himself all along - that he was a decent father, that my struggles were non-existent, that his parenting had been just instead of harmful.
I even had the audacity of suggesting that - he himself was very likely undiagnosed autistic. Where I expected backlash, I was met with silence. Accepting my neurodivergent reality - and his own - would mean acknowledging the failure of a lifetime in denial. It would mean questioning not only his parenting, but his entire sense of identity and the proud medical genius who could see and diagnose what others missed.
Part 6: A Prison of Their Own Making
This is what I've come to understand: my father’s denial of my reality was never about me. It was - and is - about protecting himself from a reckoning he's not emotionally equipped to see through.
Every time he dismisses a diagnosis he didn’t arrive at himself, it’s building another wall between us. And the saddest part? He’d rather keep up the illusion of protecting the family story, maintaining his authority, clinging to pride than admit to the part that he played in it.
What he's doing is imprisoning himself in an increasingly unsustainable version of reality where his own truth and his daughter's seemingly can't coexist because it would shatter his entire sense of being.
The real tragedy is that his denial doesn't only hurt - it diminishes his own capacity for growth, connection, and authentic relationships with others. He's chosen the comfort of his delusions over the possibility of real connection with the grown woman his daughter has become.
Part 7: Breaking the Contract
Some days, I seem to have made peace with the fact that he will never be able to see me. After all, I can't force him to acknowledge my reality or take responsibility for the ways his limitations shaped my entire childhood. I can't “fix” what broke under the weight of his unacknowledged disorder, or teach him the emotional intelligence he never developed himself.
But what I can do is break the contract that insisted I shrink myself to fit his narrow understanding of who I am supposed to be. I can stop performing to avoid triggering his discomfort. I can model for my own children what it looks like to honor your truth - even when the people who are supposed to love you most stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it.
The father wound doesn't heal through his recognition - it heals through my refusal to pass it down.
And while my father may choose to remain trapped in his version of reality, I don't have to join him there.
His denial has become his prison, but it doesn't have to remain mine.
Gentle reminder: The Purple Spectrum is educational, not medical advice, diagnosis, or individualized treatment. Reading this doesn't create a clinician-patient relationship. Bodies vary—reference ranges, medication responses, and supplement safety are individual. Please discuss all labs, medications, hormones (including HRT/MHT), and supplements with a qualified clinician who knows your history, especially during major transitions like puberty, pregnancy, postpartum, and perimenopause. If symptoms are severe, worsening, or you're in crisis, seek urgent or emergency care in your region.