David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

A childhood belief haunts me: unless I’m perfect, I’m unloved

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You and I are held captive by unconscious beliefs we learned as children.

We all learned different things — depending on our families and how we were treated — but we all internalized ideas that became our core beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs help us to survive as children and become our defense mechanisms. They’re like silent background instructions telling us how to survive and get our needs met.

But then we grow up and keep living as though our simplistic childhood beliefs are actually true. In this way, our childhood defenses turn into adult blind spots that can make us miserable — and we don’t even know we’re doing it.

I’ve recently learned something interesting. If I know enough about your personality, I can go a long way toward determining which false beliefs you learned about yourself. Our secrets aren’t as hidden as we think they are.

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Need for love drives behaviors; for me, old needs make me eat

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I am not hungry right now. But I desperately want to eat.

I’m a rational man and I understand this pattern. I understand a good bit about human psychology and much more about my own psychology. I’m not stupid. So I know what’s going on.

For hours now, though, I’ve been fighting the compulsion to eat. There’s nothing in particular I want. It could be a hamburger. It could be some chicken. A hunk of cheese would be fine. Maybe some fries or pizza. It doesn’t matter what it is.

I’m not the least bit hungry. I’m certain of that. But there’s a gnawing emptiness inside that something in my gut interprets as a craving to be filled. The rational part of me knows food wouldn’t make any difference, but some irrational part of my brain thinks food would make this emptiness go away.

That child-like core doesn’t listen when I whisper, “No, you’re not hungry. You just need to be loved.”

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Material things can be replaced, but loved ones worth far more

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Troy Hardy stood amid the wreckage of his lakefront home in Smith’s Station, Ala., Monday afternoon. The house where he had lived with his wife, Susie, for 17 years was in ruins. A tornado had come through 24 hours before — while he, his grandson and his wife were home — and destroyed everything.

When he realized a tornado was bearing down on them, he started screaming his wife’s name, but the tornado was so loud he knew she couldn’t hear him. He told a Washington Post reporter that he found Susie in their bedroom. She had put their 4-year-old grandson onto the bed and gotten on top of him to protect her with her body.

Hardy grabbed another mattress and pulled it over the three of them — and then he covered them with his own body to protect them as much as possible. And then they waited in terror as the tornado destroyed the home around them.

“It’s hard to explain, or even really talk about,” he told the Post. “It was everything we had. But all of it is replaceable. My wife, my grandson, they’re not replaceable. Nothing matters more than life.”

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