Examining your relationship with your father is essential to a healthy life.
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In her 1992 book, Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life, Victoria Secunda concluded that a number of men and women grow up with a "remote and aloof father." Those women who do not feel affirmed by their fathers develop a tendency, then, to respond to the men in their lives as they once responded to their elusive father: they desperately seek intimacy but are unable to believe that men can be trusted and so they remain always on guard.
Fathers, then, have a profound impact on their daughters' lives. Yet many women, because of separation or discomfort, are unable to fully explore their relationship with their fathers and spend instead much more of their time examining their mother-daughter bond. Clearly, though, to fully develop her life and her self, a daughter needs to consider her relationship with dad. Understanding how that essential bond has shaped her, she can then face the challenge of accepting her life (and her father) and get on with the general business of becoming the woman she wants to be.
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Easier said than done? Maybe. Two recent studies might help you better understand this process.
Empowerment
In a study published within the past year, researchers examined whether the quality of the father-daughter relationship is related to a daughter's stress response. Specifically, the researchers measured activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis as well as activity in the autonomic nervous system among daughters considered to be emerging adults.
Physiologists define stress as how the body reacts to a real or imagined stimulus that causes a reaction of alarm, resistance, and then exhaustion. This three-stage reaction is defined as the general adaptation syndrome (GAS). The HPA axis, a major part of the neuroendocrine system, is the mechanism for interactions among glands, hormones, and parts of the midbrain that mediate GAS, in addition to many other body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality, and energy storage and expenditure. When measuring activity in the HPA axis, then, the researchers were trying to discover the actual physical levels of stress and not just a reported level of stress, which might be either underestimated or exaggerated, depending on an individual woman.
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The researchers divided the young women participating in the study into two groups: one group of women who reported their father-daughter relationships as characterized by rejection, chaos, and coercion, and another group of young women who reported their father-daughter relationships as characterized by warmth, autonomy, support, and structure. The researchers found that the first group had lower morning cortisol levels than the second, and they were temperamentally more sensitive to emotional changes. They also discovered the young women of the second group showed lower pretask cortisol levels and relatively weak cortisol responses to a discussion of problems with a friend in comparison to the women of the first group (rejection, chaos, and coercion). Among these women, pretask cortisol levels were elevated as were their cortisol levels in response to a problem discussion with a friend. Interestingly, they were also more likely to self-disclose their psychosocial stressors.
The researchers concluded that their findings suggest father-daughter interactions potentially influence a woman's social cognition and her HPA reactivity to important stressors.
Read more at Medical Daily.