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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Feeling abandoned by a parent often sets pattern for entire life

By David McElroy · July 26, 2020

My mother didn’t appreciate being compared to a ghost.

I was about 21 years old. I had sent a letter to my estranged mother, maybe the first letter I had ever written to her. I didn’t really know what I was trying to accomplish.

I was living in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where I was a student at the University of Alabama. I was troubled and unhappy, but I felt confused about the reasons. I had gone to a psychiatrist for help. He said there was nothing wrong with me but suggested a therapist to help me talk things through.

For a couple of months, I had interesting conversations with a therapist. He had me take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is a common psychological instrument for discovering hidden psychological problems. The results showed that I was perfectly normal.

He eventually told me he enjoyed our sessions, because he said I was a pleasure to talk with each week, but that he had no idea how he could help me. So I gave up on therapy.

In desperation, I wrote a long letter to my mother.

I don’t remember what the letter said. I think I got her mailing address from the Birmingham phone book, which seems strange in this day when we no longer use phone books. I put the letter into the mail and I waited.

I have no idea what I wanted, much less what I expected.

I don’t remember much about what Mother said in her response, which arrived by mail quickly. In my letter, I had told her she seemed like a ghost who couldn’t possibly be real. She was someone who had once been alive, but had long since died.

I understand now that this was my way of saying, “You abandoned me and I’m still hurting,” but without making it a direct accusation. Maybe she understood that by reading between the lines. Maybe that’s why she objected to it. Maybe it seemed too much like an accusation to her.

If you had asked me at the time, I wouldn’t have expressed any angst about feeling abandoned. I was another seven or eight years from starting to understand how angry I was with my father, but I thought my feelings about my mother were all under control. I thought she was just someone from my past — someone who had left us when we needed her, but nobody I still had strong emotions about.

It took many years to discover this, but my confused feelings about my mother — the feelings of abandonment and the unconscious lingering desire to win her love back — set the pattern for most of my romantic relationships. At least so far.

I’m thinking about this tonight because of the news from a friend on Friday night that her father had died. He hasn’t been part of her life for many years, and she calls him the first man to abandon her.

I’ve known her for about six years. There was a time when we were close enough that I heard what was going on in her love life. I was always shocked that this beautiful and brilliant young woman always seemed to have her heart set on a man who had loved her but then left her with no real explanation. Even after this person would mistreat her and abandon her, something in her still desperately wanted him back.

I suspected she was locked into her own version of the same awful pattern that has happened in my life. She somehow manages to fall in love with men who will abandon her — just as her father did.

Since my mother is dead — and I hadn’t had any relationship with her for about 20 years before that — I’ll never have a chance to find closure with her. I tried. She tried. It just didn’t work. I think that’s why every time I fall in love now, I seem to fall for someone who will withdraw her love — someone who will leave me feeling just as abandoned and unworthy of love as my mother did.

I’m still trying to resolve this horrible crisis that has been with me since childhood. It’s not that I’m looking for a mother, of course, but rather that I’m looking for someone wonderful who will not disappoint me.

Deep down, I’m unconsciously trying to get an amazing woman to fall in love with me and to say, “Yes, David, you’re really worthy of being loved. You can finally stop being afraid of being abandoned. That’s over now.”

I can’t explain how this works, of course. How would I (or my friend) choose to fall for people who will abandon us? How would we even know? I can’t say for sure, but I have a feeling that we see something in another soul that seems emotionally damaged in a way that feels familiar to something we’ve experienced. Something in us senses that this is another test.

It’s someone who will abandon us — or else it’s the person who will finally pass the test and show us we’re worthy of love. And if that person doesn’t choose us, we find ourselves holding on and praying for change, partly because we believe we’ve chosen someone of great worth and partly because we’re unconsciously desperate for this person to finally help us end the old pattern.

I would be happy to fall in love with someone amazing who actually wants me. I haven’t experienced that for a long time. I desperately miss that feeling of being loved and wanted — of being chosen. Of being special to someone. That feeling of someone believing in me.

But for now, I seem locked into an awful pattern of needing to be loved — just as I needed when I was blindly bouncing between therapists in college — but only by the one person in the world who seems to hold the key to changing everything.

I finally understand what I’m doing, but I’m trapped — waiting to make loving contact with someone who has become a ghost. Again.

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For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to Sam. In 2009, I took in a young feral cat who I named for the early American revolutionary Samuel Adams. He was one of the most confident — downright arrogant, in fact — cats I’ve ever been around. He had an amazing personality and I immediately loved him. He was no more than 8 or 9 months old when he suddenly died for reasons that my vet couldn’t explain. Even though I had him only a short time, he was one of my all-time favorites. #tbt #cats #tabby #feral #birmingham #alabama
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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

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Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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