Did you have a father?

Hello people. I want to know if there is a relation between having no father and dealing with addiction. I am just guessing that it is easier to avoid addiction (and to reboot) if the user had the presence of a father, since discipline is associated with the father figure in many cultures.

If this forum already have this poll or if you have a link to a specific study, please, show me and I will remove this poll if necessary.

Thanks for your time.

* Note that this poll does not cover if people had a good father. There are many aspects of paternity to consider and this "pseudo-research" is superficial. I will appreciate to know more details in your comments.

Still I believe that man can do everything. Hope you can as well. All the best!

I have a terrible father. He despises me. I said once I would kill him and he replied "you're all talk". My mom left this him for the way he treated me and my siblings, suddenly he behaved well and wasn't that monster, but as soon as they got together again, he slowed down the yelling and the abuse, but he's still a moron.

He never taught me anything good, whatever I dream he think it's not worth. I work as IT technician, once he had to drive me to my course and he was like:

- What is it that you study? Computers?

- Yes.

- But you use the computers, what do you do with them?

- We open it, study the pieces inside and try to fix them.

- Well, you can study that, but it's useless. Study it all you want, but it'll never be useful in your life.

Out of the blue. Pissing on my dreams. Turns out it took me 10 years but now I am an IT professional and my job is better than anything the old man ever had.

The best masculine figure in my childhood was always my grandpa. But he died when I was 8. I'll  never forget him, and I try to be like grandpa as much as I can.

My father is still around.  He's more like a brother now than a father.  He was rather passive through my time growing up.  My mother was very controlling, and he coped by just taking a back seat and not arguing. 

She was a good mother in many ways, but had many bad, bad habits.  Usually if she offered affection it was more seeking it, and never had it to offer when we, as children, needed it.  She had a way of resenting us growing up (Jordan Peterson talks about this in a video, I wish I had the link), as though the adolescent us was destroying the child us and we were cheating her out of her maternity.  She had a way of assuring us we weren't good enough or that we were failures, to the point of being very upset with our teachers who encouraged us.  I'm not talking about tamping down huge, strange ambitions, but rather pedantic things like going to college or having relationships. 

It is interesting, safa61947, that you talk about your grandfather.  For me, I have incredibly fond memories of my grandmother who was temperamentally very different from my mother. 

An artifact of all of this is an incredibly low self esteem and a basic assumption that anything I do will end in failure.  It often takes me a long, long time to talk myself into doing something that, in reality, I am perfectly capable of doing.  This has been a big part of my battle with addiction.  Right now I don't have many relationships, but a main goal in my life right now is to find relationships that will help me unlearn all of those things.

Definitely had a difficult time with my father growing up. There could be something to this theory.

My father died when I was five years old, the fifth of six children. I'm now 60. A few years ago my older sister said "Daddy died and none of us ever got over it." I had never thought of it like that, but I realized, "holy shit, she's right."