By Family plays a vital role in shaping our lives, providing a sense of belonging, support, and love. However, there are times when circumstances separate us from our loved ones, leaving behind an empty space in our hearts. Whether it’s due to distance, disagreements, or unforeseen circumstances, the absence of family can be deeply felt and profoundly impactful. In these moments, we often turn to quotes that encapsulate the complex emotions associated with missing family members. These absent family quotes have the power to evoke a range of sentiments – from longing and nostalgia to resilience and hope.
In this blog, we will explore a collection of poignant quotes that delve into the profound impact of absent family, reminding us of the enduring connections we share and the strength we find even in their absence. Let’s embark on a journey of reflection, understanding, and appreciation for the role that family plays in our lives, even when they are physically distant.
Absent Family Quotes
1. What many aren’t aware of is the fact that an inadequate or absent father created losses in your life, and any loss requires a grieving process. Expect that to occur. Welcome it, in fact, because grief is the road to recovery. It enables you to move on with your life.
H. Norman Wright
2. To appreciate the vulnerability of dependency, imagine that you are flying in a plane that has only one pilot—and you realize that the pilot is drunk. Or you’re just going under for surgery, and it dawns on you that the surgeon doesn’t know what she is doing. For the young child with an emotionally absent mother, it’s like discovering the captain of the ship is just a mannequin and not really human.
Jasmin Lee Cori
3. This is the cry of a fatherless daughter—the one with the hole in her heart, crying, wounded, searching or wandering, aching inside for an accepting touch or a word from Dad. Some fathers were physically absent. Some were present but absent emotionally.
H. Norman Wright
4. This is how the emotionally absent mother feels to a child: like someone who doesn’t really exist. It is a shock, a threat to survival, and therefore a trauma to the child’s nervous system.
Jasmin Lee Cori
5. The picture we get of mothers who are emotionally absent is one of a woman who seems not quite fully human. One man said his parents were like statues to him; they didn’t feel like real human beings. Others have spoken of not being able to find a human heart in there and feeling as if Mother was “not real.
Jasmin Lee Cori
6. The emotionally absent mother is not present to provide many of the functions of the Good Mother, but perhaps most important is that her heart is not available to the child. She doesn’t create a real bond with her child. While other types of mothers may do a poor job of providing some of the Good Mother functions such as guidance, encouragement, and protection, some do create a bond.
Jasmin Lee Cori
7. The biggest hurdle to receiving affection when you are a child of an absent parent is the issue of trust. Your mother failed to show you the affection you needed, and no matter how hard you tried to elicit affectionate responses, she let you down. So, it can be very hard to open yourself up to accepting the idea that others might care for you. After all, what if you are wrong?
J.L. Anderson
8. Society has a great deal of sympathy for children whose mothers were physically absent. When someone has lost their mother by death, divorce or separation, it is natural to assume that person will have problems as they grow into adulthood. People understand this easily and make allowances for it. It is less common for people to understand the significance of having a mother who does not provide the emotional nurture a child needs.
J.L. Anderson
9. Researchers have identified two response patterns in infants whose mothers are emotionally absent. One is to turn away from the mother, avoiding contact with her in order to maintain a more pleasant state. Not surprisingly, children with mothers who show little emotional expression more often develop a self-sufficient attachment style. The other pattern, as Stern describes, is “to make extraordinary efforts to charm his mother, to pull her along—to act as an antidepressant to her.” Hardly a job for a baby!
Jasmin Lee Cori
10. Regardless of the era, good parenting by a father has always helped make up for the holes left by an emotionally absent mother.
Jasmin Lee Cori
11. One common type of emotionally absent mother is the woman who is depressed. Depressed mothers are found to be less interactive with their children, and their babies show fewer positive feelings, become insecurely attached as toddlers, and do less well on cognitive tasks. One common type of emotionally absent mother is the woman who is depressed. Depressed mothers are found to be less interactive with their children, and their babies show fewer positive feelings, become insecurely attached as toddlers, and do less well on cognitive tasks.
Jasmin Lee Cori
12. Mirroring is rare for emotionally absent mothers, leaving children without a positive self-image or clear sense of self and, by default, feeling inadequate on a deep level. Some felt belittled and shamed, although I was trying to exclude mothers who were actively negating.
Jasmin Lee Cori
13. Just as there are many reasons behind a mother’s emotional absence, there are many reasons a mother may be physically absent. Absences that are too early or too long or too frequent will of course leave marks. A mother can’t be emotionally present if she’s not physically present at least part of the time.
Jasmin Lee Cori
14. I found these emotionally absent mothers singularly unreflective, clueless about any role they may have played in their children’s early or later problems.
Jasmin Lee Cori
15. Emotionally absent mothers often leave us feeling absent. People may feel spaced out, disconnected, and less here with this type of mother. You may have found yourself more serious and alone in the imagined scenes with her. Some find themselves angry and want to do something big to get her attention.
Jasmin Lee Cori
16. Emotionally absent mothers often expect their children to take care of them in some way.
J.L. Anderson
17. Certainly if a mother is emotionally absent, it will be impossible for her to attune to her child’s needs. I am speaking here both of a particular child’s needs and of children’s needs in general.
Jasmin Lee Cori
18. But with a neglectful parent, an emotionally flat or absent parent, there isn’t enough mirroring and support for a child’s fragile self to fully develop.
Jasmin Lee Cori
19. Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.
Geoffrey Canada
20. An emotionally absent mother does not make room in her life to spend quality time with her children. She might have ignored you altogether or only paid attention to you when she needed something from you whenever you wanted to spend time with your mother, she was unavailable. Emotionally distant mothers often go so far as to leave their children on auto-pilot to take care of their own emotional needs and deepest desires.
J.L. Anderson
21. An emotionally absent mother can’t teach a child how to love – herself/himself or others – because that is not a part of the path she has chosen. So now, it’s you who have the responsibility to teach yourself.
J.L. Anderson
22. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word absent means ‘the state of being away from a place or person … the nonexistence or lack’. Absence includes the father’s emotional absence, even if he is physically present.
Susan E. Schwartz
23. Absent mothers share at least one common fault. They do not honor childhood as a legitimate time of life.
J.L. Anderson
24. A father who is physically absent cannot provide his daughter with unconditional love and validation. Nor can he give her a sense of security and the conviction that people are dependable. A young child doesn’t understand why her father is missing. She only knows that he is gone.
Sarah Simms Rosenthal
25. The emotionally absent mother has room in her awareness only for the immediate task at hand, and those who are highly stressed may barely be doing that. She may be responsive to outer needs (to some degree) but not to inner feelings and needs.
Jasmin Lee Cori
Absent Father Quotes
26. People have a problem understanding the value of being human. It’s a universal struggle, I think. Even though I’ve highlighted the battles of the fatherless, I don’t want you to believe that because you grew up fatherless you are alone in a world of well-adjusted people; nothing like this is true. If you sit down with your friends to scratch the skin, you’ll find they have the same blood as you, the same decaying bone, the same issues, the girl issues, the athlete issues, the spoiled-brat issues, there’s a whole catalog of issues available to us.
Donald Miller
27. More than 70 percent of students who drop out of school come from fatherless homes. This statistic from the National Principals Report a while back came as no surprise. With no father to ground the home, the mother works and is exhausted and is in no way free to nurture and support.
Donald Miller
28. Women suffer from father issues, too, obviously. They may suffer more. I believe something magical happens when a father tells his daughter she is beautiful, that she is a woman, and that she has a reason to be respected and loved by a good man. If she doesn’t get this message from her dad, she will look for it from men who have less pure motives.
Donald Miller
29. We are moving the conversation out of the alleys and into public forums. Improvement has been made in the talkability of fatherhood issues. Tim Russert wrote about it from a positive perspective, writing that wonderful book about his father. And President Barack Obama talked about it from a position of strength, openly discussing his hardship as a young, fatherless man and the mentors and figures that helped him overcome.
Donald Miller
30. Will the daughter of the absent father try to resolve her unrequited love by seeking a man in her father’s image? Or will she hold herself aloof from men, making sure she is not abandoned the way her mother was?
Donald Miller
31. This is the cry of a fatherless daughter—the one with the hole in her heart, crying, wounded, searching or wandering, aching inside for an accepting touch or a word from Dad. Some fathers were physically absent. Some were present but absent emotionally.
H. Norman Wright
32. What many aren’t aware of is the fact that an inadequate or absent father created losses in your life, and any loss requires a grieving process. Expect that to occur. Welcome it, in fact, because grief is the road to recovery. It enables you to move on with your life.
H. Norman Wright
33. When as an adult, he apologizes for not being present, but makes it all about himself as he could do nothing else, he still remains absent. This leaves a daughter to deal with the residual emotions of anger and dismay, feeling betrayed and abandoned, hesitant, without sufficient care or attention.
Susan E. Schwartz
34. When absent, a father cannot reflect to a daughter a separate and individual self. Instead, he represents a locus of distress, and she searches anxiously and in vain for connection. She is disappointed in the shattering of wishes while retaining an attitude of denial concerning what has happened.
Susan E. Schwartz
35. When a father is absent, he neglects the relationship with his daughter. He becomes associated with yearning, sadness, frustrated love, anger and rage, oppression and desire. These contradictory feelings cause stress to body and soul, and from this comes the urgent need for the daughter to find herself.
Susan E. Schwartz
36. There is something absent in me, I thought. Something incomplete. Even my mother couldn’t describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.
Julie Schumacher
37. The search for the father is connected to the search for herself. It resides in the places she does not yet know. At each stage of a daughter’s development the relationship with her father affects her sense of self. She re-experiences the loss of a father, the premature separation he imposed when he was not there, and she’s left with the anguish of unmet needs.
Susan E. Schwartz
38. The father is supposed to foster emotional life and value but does not. What the daughter gets instead of love is emptiness which she can neither securely attach to nor separate from. This is often accompanied by masochistic and unloving attitudes, mostly turned onto herself. The result is confusion and denial of autonomy. She is, in effect, imprisoned with the absent father and in this place remains unconscious.
Susan E. Schwartz
39. The father is ideally an anchor, giving the daughter a foundation, a solid point of reference. Yet when absent, her experiences of self are achieved against the background of loss. This influences how she does or does not cope with the inevitable vicissitudes experienced throughout life.
Susan E. Schwartz
40. The disturbance caused by an absent father early in life can set up a daughter to hate and distance herself not only from him but also from other males and be unable to access the range of the masculine and the feminine within herself.
Susan E. Schwartz
Absent Mother Quotes
41. Certainly if a mother is emotionally absent, it will be impossible for her to attune to her child’s needs. I am speaking here both of a particular child’s needs and of children’s needs in general.
Jasmin Lee Cori
42. Emotionally absent mothers often expect their children to take care of them in some way
J.L. Anderson
43. Emotionally absent mothers often leave us feeling absent. People may feel spaced out, disconnected, and less here with this type of mother. You may have found yourself more serious and alone in the imagined scenes with her. Some find themselves angry and want to do something big to get her attention.
Jasmin Lee Cori
44. I found these emotionally absent mothers singularly unreflective, clueless about any role they may have played in their children’s early or later problems.
Jasmin Lee Cori
45. Just as there are many reasons behind a mother’s emotional absence, there are many reasons a mother may be physically absent. Absences that are too early or too long or too frequent will of course leave marks. A mother can’t be emotionally present if she’s not physically present at least part of the time.
Jasmin Lee Cori
46. Mirroring is rare for emotionally absent mothers, leaving children without a positive self-image or clear sense of self and, by default, feeling inadequate on a deep level. Some felt belittled and shamed, although I was trying to exclude mothers who were actively negating.
Jasmin Lee Cori
47. Regardless of the era, good parenting by a father has always helped make up for the holes left by an emotionally absent mother.
Jasmin Lee Cori
48. Researchers have identified two response patterns in infants whose mothers are emotionally absent. One is to turn away from the mother, avoiding contact with her in order to maintain a more pleasant state. Not surprisingly, children with mothers who show little emotional expression more often develop a self-sufficient attachment style. The other pattern, as Stern describes, is “to make extraordinary efforts to charm his mother, to pull her along—to act as an antidepressant to her.” Hardly a job for a baby!
Jasmin Lee Cori
49. Society has a great deal of sympathy for children whose mothers were physically absent. When someone has lost their mother by death, divorce or separation, it is natural to assume that person will have problems as they grow into adulthood. People understand this easily and make allowances for it. It is less common for people to understand the significance of having a mother who does not provide the emotional nurture a child needs.
J.L. Anderson
50. The biggest hurdle to receiving affection when you are a child of an absent parent is the issue of trust. Your mother failed to show you the affection you needed, and no matter how hard you tried to elicit affectionate responses, she let you down. So, it can be very hard to open yourself up to accepting the idea that others might care for you. After all, what if you are wrong?
J.L. Anderson
51. The emotionally absent mother has room in her awareness only for the immediate task at hand, and those who are highly stressed may barely be doing that. She may be responsive to outer needs (to some degree) but not to inner feelings and needs.
Jasmin Lee Cori
52. The emotionally absent mother is not present to provide many of the functions of the Good Mother, but perhaps most important is that her heart is not available to the child. She doesn’t create a real bond with her child. While other types of mothers may do a poor job of providing some of the Good Mother functions such as guidance, encouragement, and protection, some do create a bond.
Jasmin Lee Cori
53. The picture we get of mothers who are emotionally absent is one of a woman who seems not quite fully human. One man said his parents were like statues to him; they didn’t feel like real human beings. Others have spoken of not being able to find a human heart in there and feeling as if Mother was “not real.
Jasmin Lee Cori
54. This is how the emotionally absent mother feels to a child: like someone who doesn’t really exist. It is a shock, a threat to survival, and therefore a trauma to the child’s nervous system.
Jasmin Lee Cori
To appreciate the vulnerability of dependency, imagine that you are flying in a plane that has only one pilot—and you realize that the pilot is drunk. Or you’re just going under for surgery, and it dawns on you that the surgeon doesn’t know what she is doing. For the young child with an emotionally absent mother, it’s like discovering the captain of the ship is just a mannequin and not really human.
Jasmin Lee Cori
As we come to the end of our exploration of absent family quotes, we are reminded of the profound impact that the absence of loved ones can have on our lives. These quotes have served as a poignant reminder of the void left behind when family members are physically distant or unavailable. Yet, amidst the longing and nostalgia, we have also discovered a resounding message of resilience and hope.
The quotes have illuminated the enduring connections we share with our absent family members and the strength we find in those bonds. They have reminded us that distance does not diminish the love we feel for our family, but rather intensifies it, making us appreciate their presence even more. While the absence of family can be challenging, it also serves as a testament to the depth of our relationships and our ability to endure and cherish those connections, no matter the circumstances.
These quotes have provided solace, inspiration, and a profound understanding of the importance of family in our lives. As we navigate the journey of life, let us hold onto these words of wisdom, finding comfort and strength in the knowledge that our family’s love transcends any physical distance.
