David McElroy

The narcissists in our lives might tell us how much they love us. When they’re in the right moods, they might tell us that they want to take care of us and they might tell us how important we are to them. My father said those things at times, too. But I knew from his actions that he didn’t care. I knew he didn’t pay attention to my fears or my needs. He just wanted to feel good about himself. His own needs were all he really cared about.

For those of us who have learned to keep our needs to ourselves, it’s hard to change. It’s hard to accept that it’s OK to have needs. But I’m not sure that we can have healthy and loving relationships with others unless we learn to accept our needs and learn to accept help when it’s appropriate.

Narcissists taught us that we’re not supposed to have needs, but we have to learn to accept the truth — that it’s perfectly OK for us to have needs and that if we find the right people to be in our lives, there will be others who care about our needs and fears.

This is the next in a series of videos dealing with issues that come up for me to think about as I write a book about my childhood experience of growing up with a narcissistic father. You can visit that YouTube channel to subscribe to future videos. (Liking and subscribing help me quite a bit in helping others to see the videos.) Or you can watch the most recent video below.

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I am painfully aware of what was done to me as a child. I still need to talk about it and be sure I understand it. But I’ve reached the point that I am no longer remaining a victim. When I was a child, my father took power away from me completely and he held onto that power after I became an adult. He kept reinforcing the ways in which he was the one with power and I was the one who was under his thumb. Even though he’s dead, it would be easy to keep living that way — to keep living as though I had no power and I had no ability to get past what he did to me.

But that isn’t what I want. That isn’t what I need. I am slowly taking back the power that I had given up to him. I’m taking back the control that I allowed him to keep over me far into my adult life. I can be who I really am. I can take back the power over my own life. And in doing these things, I can finally stop victimizing myself. I can slowly stop being anybody’s victim, but only because I’ve healed enough that I’m ready to do that.

This is the next in a series of videos dealing with issues that come up for me to think about as I write a book about my childhood experience of growing up with a narcissistic father. You can visit that YouTube channel to subscribe to future videos. (Liking and subscribing help me quite a bit in helping others to see the videos.) Or you can watch the most recent video below.

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I lost the wise old man of my household when Thomas died early Wednesday afternoon. I can’t be sure of how old he was when he came to live with me in 2011, but he was around 17 years old by the time of his death.

Thomas spent most of his life as a very unfriendly cat who didn’t even trust the man who fed him every day for years. That distrust was a reflection of his feral life on the street before he came to me. But the last nine months of his life were almost miraculous.

Since December 2022, Thomas changed a lot. For the first time in his life, he learned to play normal chase games with another cat. He finally would allow me to pick him up without clawing like a wildcat who thought his life was in danger. He even learned to voluntarily spend time with me — and he even learned to relax and purr when I rubbed him.

All these changes happened because Alex came to live with us in December.

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