If your own life is all messed up, lecture others about fixing theirs

By David McElroy · February 16, 2020

I’ll be happy to tell you how to fix your life. I can easily look at your life and tell you what you’re doing wrong. It’s obvious to me. I’ll try not to be condescending when I explain it all to you, but we’ll both know I’m the superior one.

OK, not really. But I found myself thinking about some things Sunday afternoon that made it feel uncomfortably close to this arrogant and narcissistic attitude.

I saw some people in public and I started silently criticizing them to myself. I cataloged some of their flaws and errors. If I’m honest with myself — which I’d rather not be — the truth is that I was critical of them for things that aren’t problems for me. When I realized what I was doing, I recognized that arrogant old attitude once again.

“Why aren’t you people more like me?” something inside me silently sneered.

And once more, I was appalled that I was trying to feel better about myself by criticizing the flaws in others.

It’s difficult for a person who’s messed up his life in one area to learn not to be judgmental about other people who’ve messed up their lives in different ways than he or she has. I know this from experience. It embarrasses me to admit to you that this has been part of my life-long inner dialogue.

If you have an internal voice that condemns you for your own failures, that voice also condemns others — and there is a peculiar sense of relief at times in attacking others instead of yourself. I’ve experienced this terrible pattern over and over, but it makes me feel sick to realize when I‘m doing it.

Maybe you’ve done something similar. I suspect most people who do it are completely unaware they’re doing it.

I’ve mentioned to you before that I get a “thought of the day” for my Type 1 Enneagram personality. Some days, the thought will be virtually meaningless to me, but on other days, the truth of what they’re saying hits me like a ton of bricks.

Early this morning, I received this as my daily thought: “A major feature of your personality is to become convinced that you know the way everything ought to be. Notice this tendency in yourself today.”

This one stung, so my first response was to be sarcastic.

“Wait,” I thought. “Surely they don’t mean to imply that this isn’t true, do they? What if I just happen to actually know the way everything ought to be? Have they thought about that? Any other possibility would hurt too much to accept.”

So when I found myself thinking about that Sunday afternoon, it couldn’t help but come back up when I silently criticized the people I saw in public.

It’s painful to see my flaws and patterns, even though it’s the only way to have a chance to get past them. This is a flaw I didn’t even realize for a long time. It’s something I picked up from my father — for complicated psychological reasons — and I can see how I unintentionally hurt people in my life with it in the past.

You see, I feel terrible for not being perfect. This harsh inner judge is eager to tell me everything I do wrong and he’s eager to condemn me. Criticizing others — even silently — seems to be my defense mechanism. In the same way that a victim of bullying is likely to react by bullying others, I reacted to extreme criticism by becoming an extreme critic — even if I usually keep the voice inside my head.

The truth of the matter is that I have neither the time nor the energy to criticize and fix other people. There’s enough to fix about myself.

I know this very well in the adult part of my brain, but the wounded child keeps hearing the criticism — of things in my life that I have messed up — and sneering, “Oh, yeah. Well these people are terrible, too. Let me tell you what’s wrong with them.”

I can usually stop myself now, because I recognize the pattern. But if I’m not careful, it’s easy to step into that old habit — of comforting myself about my faults by viciously pointing to the flaws in others.

All I can do is to keep noticing the pattern and calling myself out on it, because I don’t want to do this to you.

Share on Social Networks

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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.

Related Posts