04/04/2026
'Love is something you reach for and never get' and you go through this again and again. How childhood attachment trauma shapes the attachment style, well explained.
The second question in Rose Brik's poem is the most memorable line. "Didn't your father already teach you that?" Because she's asking why you keep going back, again and again, when you already know how it ends. And that's the question many women would rather not think about for too long. Brik is a contemporary poet writing about intergenerational trauma, and about the parts of our parents we carry without choosing to, and this poem from "My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage" goes straight to one of the hardest versions of that inheritance. The pattern you can see clearly and still can't stop repeating.
Most women who've been through this will recognise the scene. You're crying, you're asking for something that shouldn't be hard to give, you're not asking for the moon, you're just asking to be held or heard or left alone with whatever you're feeling. And he pulls away and goes cold or he physically leaves the room, and there's that horrible moment where you realise you're not even surprised because you’ve done this before. Maybe with this man, maybe with the one before him and maybe even with several before that. The details change but the shape stays the same.
The psychologist John Bowlby spent his career studying how children attach to caregivers, and one of the things his research showed is that we don't just learn what love looks like in childhood, we learn what it feels like. A girl whose father was emotionally absent, or who left, or who was there in body but never quite present, learns that love is something you reach for and don't get. And the trouble is that when she grows up, love that's freely given can feel wrong to her. It feels unfamiliar and like something must be missing. The man who stays, who comes toward her when she's upset, who doesn't make her work for his attention, can seem boring to her, or suspicious, or somehow not quite real. The one who pulls away, the one she has to chase, the one who leaves her wanting, that one feels like love. Because that's what love felt like when she was small and learning what love was.
Brik's poem catches something about this that most discussions of "daddy issues" miss entirely. The phrase has become a way of dismissing women, a punchline, as though the wound of an absent father is something embarrassing she should have gotten over by now. But what the poem asks is sharper than that. It asks why she keeps needing to learn it again. And the answer, the one the poem points to, is that she doesn't need to learn it because she already knows. She knew before she started crying and probably knew when she chose him. Somewhere inside her she recognised him as the kind of man who would leave, and that recognition felt like desire.
The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk wrote about how the body stores trauma, how we carry wounds in our nervous systems long after the original event, and how we often find ourselves recreating the situations that hurt us in an unconscious attempt to finally master them. It sounds counterintuitive, that a woman would seek out what damaged her, but anyone who's watched herself choose the same wrong person for the third or fourth time knows the feeling. There's a pull toward the familiar wound and part of you thinks this time you'll get it right, this time he'll stay, this time you'll be enough. And part of you, maybe the wiser part, knows you picked him precisely because he won't.
And what do we do with that? Brik's ends with a question she can't answer, or won't because the hardest thing about this pattern is that you can see it clearly, identify and explain exactly where it came from, and you still can't stop. The women reading this who recognise themselves in it, who've been to therapy, who've read the books, who understand their attachment style and can trace it back to their fathers, they know that understanding doesn't touch the instinct. You can know exactly what you're doing and do it anyway.
I don't know if there's a way out of this that doesn't involve sitting with the knowledge that you've been choosing it. Brik's poem forces you to look at that without flinching, and the looking doesn't fix anything, but it's something. Maybe it's the beginning of something. Or maybe it's just the recognition, finally, that you've been asking the wrong question all along. You've been asking why do they leave. When the real question, the one your father taught you and you've been answering ever since, is why do you stay long enough to let them.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
