Before you can rescue other folks, you have to learn to save yourself

By David McElroy · May 26, 2015

I used to want to be placed onto a pedestal as a hero.

That might not be too surprising. After all, our culture is filled with tales of grandiose heroism that invite people — especially young men — to insert themselves into the stories as the hero. So what’s the big deal that I used to have a burning desire to be a hero?

It’s hard to explain and the full story isn’t pleasant. In fact, there are parts of the story I’m not yet ready to tell publicly. The time will come when I’ll talk about the ways that my life has been affected by the influence of narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. Expect a book when the time is right. Until then, here’s what I’m ready to say.

After I moved recently, I started unpacking boxes and going through papers that hadn’t been touched in decades — some since my teen-age years. The things I found were fascinating and they forced me to see early evidence of emotional problems that I eventually had to deal with in counseling.

One of the most fascinating troves of notes and papers consisted of things I wrote over a three-year period starting when I was 13 years old. They dealt with my first serious crush on a girl.

One of the things I’d forgotten was that I’d written a number of stories about that girl and me. I’m not sure what the typical 13- or 14-year-old boy writes about the girl he is smitten by, but my stories were the stuff of grandiose fantasy. They were all set in a future time when I was capable of saving the world — and the girl — in one way or another.

There was a science fiction tale that started with the future version of this girl sad because I was presumed dead. The spaceship I commanded was missing and presumed destroyed. Sometime while we had been gone from the planet, something terrible had happened on Earth and an evil, tyrannical government had taken over the world. The story ends with me making a dramatic return to Earth with my ship. I somehow took over all the radio transmissions on the planet and announced that we had returned to save them. (Exactly how I was going to accomplish that is unclear.)

The girl swooned. I was obviously wonderful and heroic. I was here to save her.

In another story, I was a U.S. senator who was running for president of the United States. I don’t remember what I did to save the world in that story. Maybe just getting elected president — which I was clearly about to do — was enough to impress the girl and make her love and adore me.

I could go on — because there were others — but just these examples are embarrassing enough.

I had a serious need for others to see me as a hero who was there to rescue them. I clearly believed that becoming a conquering hero would be enough to get someone to love me. It didn’t occur to me that someone might love me because of who and what I was. I thought I needed to earn love by rescuing people — and especially this girl.

I carried this desire for attention with me for years, to one extent or another. I kept believing that by amassing a collection of accomplishments, I would be loved, understood and valued. I thought this in big ways and small ways.

For instance, here’s one of the tiny ways that is burned into my memory. At the end of my sophomore year of high school, the newspaper sponsor called me to her room one afternoon and asked if I would like to join the school newspaper staff the following year. I had never had the slightest interest in journalism, but I remember standing in front of Montae Cain’s desk that day and thinking, “Why not? It’s another picture in the yearbook.”

I struggled in life over the years to figure out what I wanted to do. I was fortunate enough to have the ability to do whatever interested me, but I developed an unconscious pattern of choosing whatever I thought would be most impressive to others. I completely lost touch with what I wanted or enjoyed. I honestly didn’t know what I liked or what was natural to me. I wanted people to be impressed and I wanted them to see me as someone with the ability to rescue them and the rest of the world.

I craved adulation, admiration, approval, attention, applause — all in place of real love and understanding.

My ex-wife had an insight years ago that now fits into the things I eventually figured out about myself. We talked frequently about what I should do with my life. It frustrated me that I didn’t know what I really enjoyed doing. I only knew what I enjoyed having done — and what I enjoyed receiving praise for.

In one of our discussions about the subject, my ex-wife remarked that whatever I did in the future, it would always have to be something that took the “applause factor” into account. That phrase immediately made sense to me. I needed applause. I needed people to see what I was doing. I needed them to put me on a pedestal as special. And I needed to be able to believe my grandiose fantasies of being special — because that would somehow earn other people’s love.

I needed to be able to save people. Then they would love me and approve of me. If I got enough of this applause, maybe the gnawing craving for more approval would finally go away. I was terrified of being placed on a pedestal — of the need to live up to that impossible position — but I needed it, too. And I hated needing it.

Is it any wonder that I gravitated over the years to worlds full of people trying to save others? I almost went into the ministry. I spent years working in politics. And I spent many more years working in media. All of those fields are full of narcissists who are seeking to save the world by creating grandiose fantasies about themselves, so those worlds felt familiar to me.

I wanted to save the world. I really did. I thought I was somehow special enough to do it. But I didn’t start finding myself — and becoming capable of more love and empathy — until I learned to change my way of thinking.

Today, I don’t have any desire to save or fix the world. I can barely even change myself. I’d like to change a little corner of the world for myself and for my future family — to make it a safe and free place where we can live in peace — but I’ve given up the delusion that others are going to listen to me (or should listen to me) and suddenly find salvation in my amazing leadership.

Ironically, I’m better equipped to rescue others — in the emotional or psychological sense — than I was when I was so eager to win their approval. I don’t believe I can “fix” anybody, but I’m finally detached enough to safely nudge other people in the right directions at times, partly by using my own mistakes as examples of things not to do.

I still need love and understanding. I have a strong need to be valued by someone who I respect. But I don’t want to be president to do it. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t want to build a big company that would bore me to run. I don’t need to be on a pedestal above others and receive their worship.

I just want someone who I value to know who I am and to choose me — because of who I am and who we are together, not for what I’ve done or for what others praise me for.

I’ve had to let go of a lot of dysfunctional beliefs and dysfunctional needs in myself. I will probably always carry some of the craving with me, because very old programming tapes are hard to kill. I’ve been working and reading and studying about this for the last decade. The changes I’ve had to make have been scary, but I’m slowly becoming who I need to be.

Like a recovering alcoholic who will always deal with bouts of craving for his drug, I will always deal with bouts of craving for what is sometimes called “narcissistic supply.” But I don’t have to allow it to turn me into a narcissist.

This feels like an incomplete and stream-of-consciousness piece that never quite makes the point I want to make. That frustrates me. So I’ll just say this.

I don’t like some of the ways in which I was psychologically shaped. I don’t like some of the things that were created in me as a result. But with the help of a very good psychologist, I figured out what I was on the way to becoming. I changed a lot of things about myself — and I still have more that I want to change.

I no longer want to rescue anybody, at least not as a way to gain approval. I no longer believe I’m special and destined for greatness. I’m finally happy with the reality of being who I am.

I just want a woman who happens to love and understand what I happen to be — and that might be the toughest part of all. Only time will tell.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts