Not all fathers [disconnect]. I remember my daughter’s best friend got married. She is a daughter of divorce. So, you know how when they play the wedding march, everybody turns around and looks?  Well everybody glances [at each other, thinking] what?  Lauren was coming down the aisle with her natural father on one arm and her stepfather on the other.  She had a good relationship with both, and they had a good relationship together. I thought that was really neat for something like that to occur.   

CW:  It sounds like there is a lot of healing there.  So how do women who suffer a father loss heal? 

HNW:  Well, one of the things you have to do is identify the losses. The book is full of suggestions -- what to do and how to make the list. You look at each loss, and when you put it down on paper in black and white, [you think], “Oh my gosh!  Good grief!  No wonder that’s going on!” So, then you take each loss, and … grieve over it, and you talk about how it impacted you. This is what you wish could have occurred, but it didn’t occur.  Then you learn to say goodbye to that part of your life.   

The other thing you have to deal with is the anger you feel toward what your father did, because sometimes people say, “Well, you just have to forgive them.” There can be no forgiveness unless you have dealt with your anger.  So, I encourage women to write basically un-mailed angry letters and then sit in a room and read it out loud with all the feeling. When you write the letter, you don’t edit it. We carry things in our minds and those images, those thoughts, just run around in a circular tape, and the only way to get rid of them is writing them out longhand. 

Once the anger is gone, then you need to deal with the forgiveness. Forgiveness is not the same as restoration or reconciliation because there are going to be some situations where the woman might not want any contact with her father because what he did was so bad.  One of the things that we have people do is have them write out, “I forgive you for such and such, but…” There might be 20 [objections], but once you get to the place where there are no more objections, you have moved into the process of healing. 

It’s not just *snap* do it like that, and it’s over with.  It might take you days. It might take you weeks. It might take you months. When that burden is lifted, then you are free. It doesn’t matter if the other person knows if you’ve forgiven them or not. We are able to do that because of what God has done for us and forgiven us as individuals.   

CW:  It’s interesting that you use letter writing in that process of grieving and forgiving.  What would you say to a man who comes across this article or your book if he has this realization that he’s been an absent father.  What steps could he take to reconcile with his daughter?