Posttraumatic Absentee Father Stress Disorder (PTAFSD)

Resurgence talks about Posttraumatic Absentee Father Stress Disorder (PTAFSD): Masculinity Gone Wild

PTAFSD is painfully revisited when the challenges of life hit the fan. Men can’t handle it. They can’t make decisions or commitments. They don’t know how to love women, they are seniors in high school with no idea what to do next or why; or many join the military hoping that their drill sergeant will answer their questions. Distressing longings pervert reality in dreams, fantasies, and memories. Video games, sports, music, material success, and sexual perversion become the only safe havens.

PTAFSD men intentionally and/or inadvertently avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations that expose deficiencies left by their trauma. These men avoid activities, places, people, opportunities, challenges, and fears that arouse recollections of being improperly fathered. Some men are even pathetically in denial that they are limping. The result: men are posers, they hide, avoid risk, prefer the “indirect approach", won’t lead, won’t take responsibility for their actions, they only choose easy battles.

Some PTAFSD men embrace apathy and fall victim to hopelessness about the future and have marked reduced interest in things God intends to bring men life: having a vocation, fighting sin and evil, caring for creation, living for others, marriage, raising lots of children, exercising leadership, and self-control.

Men suffering from PTAFSD are left to the world of women. Unfortunately, no woman can teach a man how to be a man. In God’s design, masculinity is bestowed from one man to another. Guys with PTAFSD get over-mothered by women who go to their sons for the emotional intimacy needed from husbands. Their sons grow up too fast. Mom keeps him too close, too long, and he becomes a “mama’s boy" destined to look to women for validation. The world of women is his home. He becomes the “nice guy" who cowers to her every wish and desire, and can’t challenge women to become more Godly. Many men, resenting over-mothering, become womanizers: they constantly need as many women as possible to get validation."