Kerry Katona: How Her Absent Father Led Her To A Sad, Tragic Personal Life In Her 20’s & 30’s – And How She Came Out On The Other Side In Her 40’s

Perhaps the most recent gut-wrenching thing I listened to was an interview with Kerry Katona, former member of British girl group, Atomic Kitten, on Paul C. Brunson’s We Need To Talk podcast. We heavily discussed his interview with another former girl group member Perrie Edwards, in the previous post, which you can read, but only AFTER you read this one.

While she recently praised her new boyfriend, influencer Paolo Margaglione, who she met on the reality show Celebs Go Dating, on social media by writing, Happy birthday to the most amazing human I have ever met @margafitness you are just beyond the most wonderful soul I’ve ever come across. I hope you have the most amazing day my baby,’ Katona couldn’t help but reminisce on her past relationship with former Westlife member Brian McFadden.

Katona told Brunson, ‘He was so funny and he really loved me. We were so in love, Paul, (he was) so affectionate and it was great. I think he was the first proper person who genuinely cared about my well-being. Do you know what I mean? I told him what happened in my life. He said ‘I’m going to take you away from all that.’ He was my knight in shining armour.’ He rescued me, I don’t mind (talking about it), I know he doesn’t like it. And you know, that’s part of my story.’

The former couple were together for three years before marrying in 2002, though their union proved brief as they parted on not-so-friendly terms in 2004 after Katona learned that McFadden had been unfaithful to her, but they’ve since appeared to have put their differences to one side as they recently came together to mark their daughter Molly’s 24th birthday just recently.

Katona subsequently married twice more – to cab driver Mark Croft between 2007 and 2011, then rugby league star George Kay from 2014 to 2017. She shares five children from her three marriages. She was also previously engaged to her ex-fiancé Ryan Mahoney, but they’ve broke up after six years of dating. McFadden moved with his life following his divorce from Katona. He was previously married to Vogue Williams between 2012 and 2017. He married Danielle Parkinson earlier this year, and they have a child together, born in 2021. He was also previously engaged to singer and former The Voice Australia coach, Delta Goodrem, between 2004 and 2011.

It’s pretty fair to say that Katona’s life had been anything but easy. She’d opened up to Brunson about the difficulties she endured in her younger years, particularly the one aspect that made her relationship with her mother so difficult – not ever allowing to meet her biological father, who she met only once when she was six weeks old. Her mother then told her that she was the result of an affair. Despite not knowing her father’s whereabouts, Katona eventually located him, only to discover it was too late. By the time she connected with her half-siblings, her biological father, Ronnie Armstrong, had passed away a decade earlier. Nevertheless, she happily developed a relationship with her half-siblings.

Hearing Katona speak so candidly of her past and her childhood really made me understand her life choices in her adult years. I couldn’t resonate with her as I myself had a present father in my life; but nevertheless, I felt like I could somewhat make sense of her life choices. A father’s absence can significantly affect adult women, often leading to low self-esteem, difficulty trusting others, and challenges in romantic relationships due to a desire to fill an emotional void, sometimes leading to unhealthy relationship patterns. This can manifest as seeking constant reassurance, struggling with boundaries, or even looking for a father figure in a partner. Psychologically, fatherlessness can be linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and a greater likelihood of engaging in risky behaviors. To break it down more thoroughly:

Mental and Emotional Well-being

• Low Self-Esteem: A lack of a father’s constant presence and affirmation can result in feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, and a diminished sense of worth. 

• Mental Health Issues: Studies show a correlation between father absence and increased levels of depression and anxiety in adulthood, with effects being particularly strong for those experiencing absence in early childhood. 

Relationships and Trust

• Trust and Abandonment Issues: Without the early foundation of a reliable father figure, some women may struggle to trust others, which can make it difficult to build meaningful relationships with friends, partners, or colleagues. 

• Seeking a Father Figure: There can be a tendency to seek out a father figure in romantic partners, leading to emotionally needy or unhealthy dynamics within relationships. 

• Fear of Rejection: A deep-seated fear of abandonment and rejection can develop, influencing relationship decisions and making it harder to set healthy boundaries. 

Behavioral and Developmental Impacts

• Relationship Patterns: Women may fall into destructive relationship patterns, such as constantly giving to keep a partner happy, or they might be attracted to men who reinforce the “father fantasy” from their childhood. 

• Risk-Taking Behaviors: A father’s absence has been linked to an increased likelihood of engaging in risky behaviors, including early sexual activity, substance abuse, and other forms of risky behavior. 

• Educational and Financial Impacts: Some women may struggle with academic achievement and face greater challenges in achieving financial independence and stability in adulthood. 

Addressing the Impact

• Self-Awareness: Understanding these patterns is the first step toward empowering oneself to break free from them. 

• Building Self-Worth: Proactively working to build self-worth and self-esteem can help fill the emotional void and reduce reliance on external validation. 

• Seeking Support: Therapy and support groups can provide a safe space to process past experiences, build coping mechanisms, and learn to form healthy, fulfilling relationships. 

Even though I can understand Katona’s actions and life choices in her adult years, I can’t say I agree with them. That said, McFadden was absolutely not right to cheat on her either. Somehow, though, I can’t say understand why as well. Generally speaking, men cheat for various reasons, including lack of emotional connection, relationship dissatisfaction, a desire for novelty or validation, personal issues like selfishness or narcissism, and even situational factors like an opportunity. Other factors include anger, substance abuse, insecurity, and a desire to escape the relationship. 

Again, in no way am I defending McFadden. But somehow, his actions became more and more understandable as we’d gotten to know Katona’s past. It seemed as though, even judging from her interview with Brunson, that she looked for someone to ‘save’ her; to fix her. But in a healthy relationship, there’s no such doing. Not for a man, and not for a woman. In more recent news, former The Vampire Diaries actress Nina Dobrev broke her engagement to former snowboarder Shaun White after 6 years together. Not much is known about the breakup itself and the reason behind it, but Dobrev did post a TikTok video about it not being her job to fix a man just 5 days before news broke of their breakup.

Nevertheless, despite the breakup, it seems like Dobrev is living her best life. Just days ago she was seen posing for photos with Zac Efron, Chace Crawford and his girlfriend Kelsey Merritt, as well as Miles Teller and Keleigh Sperry. I personally absolutely love this for her. I just wish Katona could’ve had the same energy when she broke things off with McFadden and thereafter. Yes, it must’ve been so much harder for Katona considering she had two children to think about unlike Dobrev who has no children with White. And yet, it wouldn’t have been impossible.

But this particular blog post isn’t necessarily about how to move on from a relationship. Instead, it’s about making a mistake of thinking that a partner is there for you to fix your problems or to make them go away, which was the one great mistake Katona made in her life; within her marriage to McFadden and thereafter. It seemed like all she wanted to do in her life was – her main priority – was to be a wife and a mother. Nothing else seemed to matter. In fact, she quit Atomic Kitten at the height of the group’s success due to her first pregnancy. She was then replaced by Jenny Frost. There have also been long-standing rumour that Katona and the rest of the women in the band don’t get along. Though Katona reunited with her two former bandmates between 2012 and 2017, Natasha Hamilton and Liz McClarnon have been open that they’d be open to reunite again as a band with Frost – not Katona.

Katona, on her part, wrote on her new! magazine, ‘When something like this happens it brings home how I feel about my relationship with the Atomic Kitten girls. It’s really sad that we don’t talk. I’ve reached out to them so many times. Life is too short. I remember some of the fights we had in Atomic Kitten back in the day. Once, Liz punched me from behind after we had a little row. I was furious and got my own back. I made her get changed in the toilets at SMTV Live, then I stamped on her feet while we were up on stage singing Whole Again.’ She then addressed the elephant in the room, on the speculations that she’d left the band. She never did, but rather was never asked back. She wrote OK!, ‘I was never asked to be part of it – I don’t know why! I get the feeling they don’t like me.’

Back in May of this year, it was reported that Katona was feeling lonely again and was eager to have another baby. Remember, she already has 5 of them – Molly Marie, 24, and Lilly-Sue, 22, with first husband Brian McFadden, Heidi, 18, and Max, 16, with Mark Croft, and daughter DJ, 10, with the late George Kay. She started feeling that way after her split from Ryan Mahoney in November 2024. She said, ‘I am feeling really broody – I want to have another baby. I’m just lonely at the moment. I’m single and all of my kids are growing up – DJ starts high school this year and she’ll be the last one to fly the nest. When I’m at home, my son Max is always in his room and my girls are all growing up. Sperm donor? Why not! Or maybe I’d just find a younger man with strong swimmers.’

Two years prior, Katona considered getting her eggs frozen to potentially have a baby with her ex-fiancé. Following the split, she revealed in her OK! column that she was still reeling from the split and was headed off to Thailand. She wrote at the time, ‘I’m heading to Thailand again later this week which I’m really looking forward to, I can’t wait to relax and to find some zen. I’m really going to be focusing on wellness out there and I want to go on a spiritual journey. I’ve found it really tough the last few weeks since the kids went back to school and college after half-term, I’m still feeling lonely. I think it’s just tough getting into a routine on your own after being in a relationship for so long, I’m a very loving person so I do find it difficult to adjust. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be with Ryan and would never take him back, but it’s just difficult learning to un-love someone and be on your own.’

As I mentioned previously, following her marriage to McFadden, Katona was married to George Kay and had a daughter with him too. Their marriage, as Katona herself candidly spoke of on the We Need To Talk podcast, was filled with much abuse and turmoil. During her interview with Brunson, she compared the way Kay treated her to being groomed. Following the first time he’d gotten physical with her, in which she’d been forced by him to sleep at her hotel’s bathroom, Katona had to perform Whole Again in front of a live audience. She cried, but she just told others that she was just emotional. She was too embarrassed to say otherwise. He’d sat on her, and treated her children, particularly her son, like absolute trash. Kay died of an accidental overdose in 2019.

So it’s safe to say that Katona has been unlucky in love in her personal life. All she wanted was to love and be loved in return. All she wanted was to be a wife and a mother. She did all that – multiple times – but she just couldn’t find the right one; she couldn’t find ‘The One’, so to speak. And maybe McFadden was the right for her, but he came at the wrong time. After all, there’s such a thing as someone being with the right person at the wrong time, and I think that was exactly the case between the two of them.

Of course, I wasn’t a third person in their relationship. I actually wasn’t a third person in any of Katona’s relationships, and thank f*cking goodness for it. I have my own relationship and family to share my life with. That said, in my own relationship, I have been dealt with my partner’s own parental neglect and the consequences that came along with it. It’s a lot of pressure; a lot of responsibility; and a lot of stress. No matter how hard it got, it was all worth it – at least for me. I never gave up on him; nor did I ever intend to.

What I can tell you is that being in a relationship with someone who experienced parental neglect requires patience, open communication, and a willingness to understand their potentially insecure attachment style. They may struggle with trust, emotional expression, or exhibit extremes of neediness or detachment. Supporting their healing through consistent presence and creating a safe space, rather than trying to “fix” them, is vital. Consider couples therapy or individual counseling to help both of you navigate these challenges and build healthier patterns. To break things down more thoroughly:

Common Challenges

• Insecure Attachment Styles: Neglect often leads to insecure attachment, which can manifest as avoidance of intimacy or excessive neediness in relationships. 

• Difficulty with Trust: Past experiences can make it hard to trust others, even when there is no reason to suspect betrayal. 

• Emotional Numbing or Detachment: They might have trouble accessing or expressing their feelings, or feel “cut off” from their emotions. 

• Fear of Abandonment: A constant worry about being left can arise from a lack of consistent care in childhood. 

• Reactive Communication: They might have a communication style that is more defensive, passive, or emotionally reactive. 

• Survival Mode Behaviors: Persistent feelings of being in “survival mode” can lead to impulsivity, irritability, or self-sabotage. 

How to Be Supportive

• Be Present and Consistent: Simply knowing you are reliably there for them can be a powerful source of support. 

• Encourage Open Communication: Create a safe space where your partner can express their fears and needs without blame. For example, they might say, “I’m finding it hard to open up, but I want to try with you”. 

• Practice Patience and Self-Compassion: Recognize that healing takes time and be kind to your partner, and yourself, during this process. 

• Avoid Trying to “Fix” Them: Your role is to be a supportive partner, not their therapist or savior. 

• Understand Their Struggles: Recognize that their behaviors and reactions often stem from deep-seated pain, not a deliberate attempt to harm the relationship. 

When to Seek Professional Help

• Couples Therapy: A therapist can help both of you understand the impact of neglect, learn to communicate effectively, and develop new, healthy patterns of interaction. 

• Individual Therapy: Your partner may benefit from individual therapy to address the roots of their childhood trauma and develop coping mechanisms. 

In my own relationship, I never aimed to try to ‘fix’ or ‘save’ my husband. There’s no such thing, especially if you want to have a healthy relationship where there’s no co-dependency. It was always my husband’s job to make the best out of his life and the situation that he’d been handed. It was my job to help him and support him through his trauma, but never to do the job for him.

My husband had always understood the assignment, and that was why I never gave up on him. He understood that I wasn’t there to ‘fix’ or ‘save’ him from himself and the situation he was under. It was his own doing. He did an endless amount of work on himself to better himself; for us, as well as for our son. But most importantly, for himself. His situation was different than that of Katona, in that his father was in his life, but wasn’t much, if at all, of a positive presence in his life. His father was a controlling, manipulative, and a very unkind human being. That’s just a nicer way of putting it. My husband says it would’ve been better for him not to have him in his life at all than to have the father that he got.

Understandably so, my husband had suffered a great deal of pain and trauma at the hands of his father – both at home and in the outside world. As Katona continuously stated that she didn’t know why her former Atomic Kitten bandmates didn’t like her, but I can most certainly see the bigger picture of the situation. Katona had probably been too blindsided to even acknowledge and be able to admit to herself that there was an issue between herself and the women she spent most of time with. That was a big issue that I saw in my husband. He’d spend time with people that didn’t even obviously like him to begin with, and he’d call them all his closest friends. That’s the thing when a person is neglected by their parents. They try so hard to be liked that they fail to understand the signs that they’re not.

But my husband not being liked didn’t make him a bad person. Others fail to see the best parts of him. Mostly, it’s because they tend to focus more on the flawed side of who he is as a person. My husband is the kindest, most empathetic, most caring, most generous, most loving person I’ve ever gotten to know. I just wish more people saw in him what I see in him every single day of our life together. I, however, understand why they don’t. That said, I understand Katona’s own struggles in her life; both in her friendships and in her personal life.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Katona is a good human being who is deserving of the best in her life. It seems to me that she’s finally getting to that place where she knows what she wants and she knows how to get there. Not many people seem to agree with her new relationship, and many seem to have unsolicited opinions about it. This, however, doesn’t matter. What matters is that Katona is in a good place – physically, mentally and emotionally; and that nothing will ever break her. To end this blog post, I’d like to include some important Kerry Katona quotes; ones that truly describe the essence of her struggles.

• I spent a lot of money on friends, bought them clothes, holidays, everything. It was stupid but I like people to like me. I’m a pleaser and money pleases everybody, so I was like, ‘Hey, have some money.’ And then the money’s gone.

• One of the reasons I’ve been so open and honest, is because I don’t want anyone from my past to have anything on me any more.

• People are quick to slag off women – especially mothers – if they go off the rails, yet if it’s a man in showbiz, he’s right back in the saddle.

• For years I would say it was Brian’s fault for leaving me, my mums’ fault, my accountants’ fault for taking all my money, but at some point, you have to own it. You have to move on and accept it and share your story and help others.

• It’s not like when I was 15 I was like, ‘When I grow up I’m going to get married four times and have five children with different surnames and three different dads – I can’t wait.’

• To understand my life you need to understand my mum’s life, as she had no one really.

• It was really complicated, I used to think ‘who is my dad?’ My downfall has been not having the that father figure and attachment in my life.

• I’m thinking about what I want and it has nothing to do with a man, it’s liberating and feels exciting.

The End