The Fatherless Therapist

The Fatherless Therapist I help girlies untangle their identity at every life stage. All things abandonment, identity & ADHD👩‍💻
Nice to meet you 🤝
📧 info@melissanoyce.com

Many women who come to me have spent most of their lives believing they were the problem.Too sensitive.Too emotional.Too...
20/03/2026

Many women who come to me have spent most of their lives believing they were the problem.

Too sensitive.
Too emotional.
Too difficult.

But when we slow down and look at the bigger picture, something else becomes clear.

Many of them were daughters who grew up with emotional inconsistency. Fathers who were present one minute and distant the next.

So they adapted.

They became easy to love.
Low maintenance.
The strong one.
The understanding one.

What they didn’t realise is that those adaptations often follow them into adulthood, into their relationships, self-esteem, and sense of belonging.

My work is about helping you understand those patterns, not blame yourself for them.

If this resonates, you’re probably my kind of client.

Nice to meet you 🤝

I’m not one to step on trends or give my opinion on viral topics. But this one was hard to let go…. Watching the Louis T...
17/03/2026

I’m not one to step on trends or give my opinion on viral topics. But this one was hard to let go….

Watching the Louis Theroux manosphere documentary stirred up a lot for me. Both as a therapist and as a fatherless daughter.

I want to be really clear:

I don’t support the attitudes or behaviours being promoted in those spaces, and I absolutely do not support violence against women.

As a mum to a daughter, it genuinely scares me thinking about what she could be exposed to.

But two things can be true at once.

We can challenge harmful behaviour and be curious about what sits underneath it.

In my work, I see how father absence impacts children in different ways.

Girls often internalise the rejection: developing self-doubt and low self-worth. Where as boys typically externalise it, through anger, control, and dominance.

Different expressions of the same wound.

When that pain is ignored, minimised, or dismissed as “daddy issues”, it doesn’t go away.

It gets redirected.

If we want to move forward, the conversation has to go deeper than the behaviour.

It has to include the impact of absence, and the lack of accountability that often comes with it.

The slides speak for themselves, but ultimately estrangement is often spoken about as something you *do* to your parents...
05/02/2026

The slides speak for themselves, but ultimately estrangement is often spoken about as something you *do* to your parents.

But I know, from personal experience, that far less attention is given to parents who emotionally or physically withdrawn from their children, sometimes long before adulthood.

Conversations around estrangement need more nuance. And adult children deserve to be part of that conversation too.

Some of us were never shown how to sit with uncomfortable feelings. They weren’t welcomed. They weren’t held.They were s...
01/02/2026

Some of us were never shown how to sit with uncomfortable feelings. They weren’t welcomed. They weren’t held.

They were something to move past quickly, or manage alone.

So now, when emotions rise, the body reacts fast.

We distract.
We intellectualise.
We stay busy.

Not because we’re avoiding, but because once upon a time, feeling was anything but safe.

Learning to stay with discomfort isn’t about forcing yourself to feel more. It’s about slowly building the safety that was missing back then.

Nothing is wrong with you for finding this hard.

Your nervous system learned exactly what it needed to survive 🤍

30/01/2026

This really doesn’t need a caption, that statement alone is enough 🫥

This one is pretty unique I know, but this s**t really does run quite deeply….. Trying to live up to beauty standards ca...
29/01/2026

This one is pretty unique I know, but this s**t really does run quite deeply…..

Trying to live up to beauty standards can feel exhausting. No matter what you change, it never quite feels like enough.

And that’s because these standards were never designed to be reached, because the goalpost keeps moving.

For many, the ache underneath isn’t about appearance at all. It’s about belonging. Being chosen. Feeling worthy of taking up space.

There’s no shame in how you learned to seek that nor is there any shame on wanting to even seek those out within the beauty world. Having an awareness that you were responding to something deeper that went unmet.

Healing doesn’t begin by changing how you look,
it begins when you start questioning why you ever believed you had to.

You were never meant to earn your worth 🤍

There are some losses that don’t come with funerals.No cards.No rituals.No moment where the world pauses and says, this ...
23/01/2026

There are some losses that don’t come with funerals.
No cards.
No rituals.
No moment where the world pauses and says, this matters.

Disenfranchised grief is often carried quietly, especially when the person is still alive, but the relationship you needed never was.

It can hold anger alongside sadness. Relief alongside longing. And that complexity can make people feel ashamed for grieving at all.

But grief doesn’t only belong to death. It belongs to absence, too.

If this resonated, you’re not “overreacting” or being ridiculous.

You’re responding to a loss that never had permission to be named 🤍

For anyone who resonates with the “dead mum club”, I highly recommend following . I’m admiring you from a distance 🫶

Sometimes the questions we ask as adults aren’t really about the present at all. They can be echoes from earlier parts o...
22/01/2026

Sometimes the questions we ask as adults aren’t really about the present at all.

They can be echoes from earlier parts of us that didn’t get enough reassurance, enough consistency, or enough space to be held.

If you grew up learning to self-soothe too early,
to stay strong, to not need too much, then it makes sense that certain fears still linger.

16/01/2026

You don’t walk into these conversations angry, you walk in hopeful.

Hopeful that this might be the moment they finally hear you.

At some point there will be a moment where everything shifts, it’s important you pay attention to that.

There’s a reason traditional therapy approaches don’t always land for fatherless daughters.This work requires depth. Rel...
15/01/2026

There’s a reason traditional therapy approaches don’t always land for fatherless daughters.

This work requires depth. Relational safety.

And a therapist who understands the stigma, shame, and self-blame that comes with absence.

I won’t convince you your pain wasn’t that bad.
I’ll help you make sense of what shaped you, in a way that doesn’t abandon you again.

** I’m not saying CBT doesn’t have its place or doesn’t work, because it absolutely does, for some. Love you CBT therapists 🫶

14/01/2026

It was never about you 🫶

10/01/2026

Would you consider this life changing?

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