David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

narcissistic personality disorder

If you grow accustomed to abuse, you eventually accept it as normal

By ·

Have you ever noticed a friend being abused — by a romantic partner or a dysfunctional parent — and gently suggested that maybe something is wrong in the person’s life?

I’ve learned from experience that few people are going to defend an abuser as much as his worst victim will. How could a victim defend his or her abuser? What could make someone so blind as to do this? What would make someone willing to deny what others can easily see?

I can understand how this happens, because I once played the role of the victim defending his abuser. It wasn’t that I was lying to anybody. I had just grown up with abuse and that was all I’d known. I was terrified of my father — and I knew he made me angry all the time — but I also believed he was the best father in the world.

How is it possible for me to have known all I knew about him, yet still put him on a pedestal? I don’t want to talk about this, but I need to.

Keep Reading

Related Posts

Now that his threat is truly gone,
I realize my father hated himself

By ·

Until today, I didn’t really comprehend that my father hated himself.

Now that I realize it, his self-hatred seems obvious. Of course he hated himself. I should have figured that out a long time ago — but I was too busy trying to protect myself from him to notice.

For the last decade, I’ve been studying narcissistic personality disorder, because I was desperate to understand how my father had affected me — and how I could protect myself. Over and over, I’ve read that narcissists hate themselves at their core, but that had never quite made sense to me.

My father didn’t act as though he hated himself. He often said — especially since I cut off contact with him — that he “knew” I hated him. When he first accused me — years ago — of hating him, I tried to correct him, but it was difficult to explain that I didn’t hate him but I also didn’t love him anymore. So I didn’t pursue it.

I heard something on a podcast this week which mentioned how narcissists project their feelings about themselves onto other people. The therapist use hate as an example. She said a narcissist might accuse you of hating him — only because he really hates himself.

Keep Reading

Related Posts

On Father’s Day, I can finally afford
to view my father’s good side again

By ·

This is the first time in many years when I haven’t felt a horrible sense of dread about Father’s Day.

My father expected to be honored and acknowledged on Father’s Day, but I quit doing that a long time ago, because I decided I couldn’t continue to be that dishonest. Instead, the day became an annual reminder of the tension between the praise he wanted and the reality of what I needed to say to him.

When I kept trying to get him to talk with me about the past — and how he treated me in that present — he used to get angry and say, “Nobody gives me any credit for all the things I did for you children.”

That wasn’t true, but when you need to get someone to look at the abuse he’s inflicted on you (and continues to inflict), you’re in no mood to recount anything good about him. Now that he’s dead — and no longer stalking me online and showing up at my door unannounced — I can finally allow myself to look at his positive side once again.

Keep Reading

Related Posts