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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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