David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

shame

How could we take responsibility but avoid self-destructive shame?

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I knew from the beginning that it was a bad idea to date Megan. It was three years ago. I had casually known her since she was an 18-year-old working at a fast food restaurant where I used to go.

By the time she got in touch with me and wanted to talk, she was 25. We met for dinner one night and she told me she had always been interested in me. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in dating her.

Megan isn’t anyone I would have ever pursued. She’s attractive and sweet. She has a wonderful heart. But she’s not the brightest person and her interests were very different from mine, to put it as nicely as I know how. She had also grown up among uneducated country people, so her accent and grammar were like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

But I had been desperately trying to get over a woman who I couldn’t have, so I welcomed the opportunity for a distraction. I knew it was a bad idea — destined to go nowhere — but I agreed to try it.

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Even when we’re right, criticism stems from our own insecurities

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I can tell you what’s wrong with everybody I know.

Actually, I’m so good at spotting others’ flaws that I can do it in people I don’t even know. That person is a terrible driver. He’s rude. She has horrible grammar. He won’t learn from his mistakes. She’s too stupid to do her job.

I’m humiliated to admit this, partly because I’m the biggest hypocrite I know. Not all the time, but sometimes.

I catch myself viciously criticizing others for something as they drive, but I catch myself doing the same thing — and finding a quick way to justify myself — a day or two later. I tell myself somebody is a failure — or at least not achieving what he could — because he won’t live up to my idea of how he should pursue his life, but I regularly make the same mistakes and try to justify those mistakes when I do them.

My only consolation is that almost everybody I know does the same thing. I realize I’m trying to let myself off the hook by saying, “Well, everybody does it,” but it’s true. The question is why I do it — and why all of us sometimes do it.

It’s because we’re all terrified we aren’t good enough — that we’re not worthy of love.

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What if narcissistic vampire bit me but he never finished the job?

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I live at the intersection of Shame and Humiliation.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. I’ve talked over and over about the effects of growing up with a narcissistic father and an unstable mother who left us. The more I studied narcissistic personality disorder over the last decade, the more sense my childhood made — and the more I understood my father’s continuing patterns.

Until he died — almost five months ago — I was always trying to understand more about narcissism as a way to defend myself against him. That was always the context. Now that he’s gone, though, my thinking has changed in a very uncomfortable way. More than ever, I’m having to confront the question of what his abuse did to me — and how it affects the person I am today.

Imagine a vampire story in which the vampire bites his victim — starting the process of turning him into another vampire — but then something happens and the vampire is killed. The would-be victim is rescued and he goes back to the normal world. But the victim carries an unseen poison within, even though nobody can see that and he never becomes an actual vampire.

That’s where I am. There are two stages of becoming a narcissist. The first is being taught to feel deep shame and the second is learning to strike out against others as an abuser — as a defense mechanism against the shame. I escaped becoming an abuser — but I struggle with the shame.

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