For many years, I didn’t understand why I ate ridiculous amounts of unhealthful food when I wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t until after I started understanding the effects my father’s narcissism had on me that I finally understood that I was still trying to fill an emotional hole I had felt as a child.
When I was young, I didn’t have a mother for much of the time. It took me many years to recognize the enormous hole that was left in me by her absence. I felt lost and unloved because she wasn’t there. I felt abandoned — and I couldn’t understand that my narcissistic father is the one to drove her to a mental breakdown.
I never could be good enough for my father. I could never do enough to really get his approval. He taught me that it’s sometimes worse to have a bad parent there than to have a loving parent who was missing. His presence and emotional abuse were the most damaging of all.
This is the next in a series that shares thoughts that come to my mind as I’m writing a book called “The Truth About My Father.” If you’d like to subscribe to this new YouTube channel, click here and request notifications when I publish new videos. Or you can just watch this one below.

We can’t really change people, even if they offer us the control
Who were you before someone told you who you were supposed to be?
Dogs, cats and children remind me of all the joy in small things
Briefly: Sufjan Stevens album always evokes old feelings about my mother
Tough problem: What does a free society do about unfit parents?
Law profs: the Constitution means whatever we say it means
‘Duck Dynasty’ just another skirmish in an increasingly stupid culture war
Not voting makes a statement: ‘You don’t have my moral consent’
Emotional wounds in me quickly spot those with similar wounds