David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

narcissism

How we live our lives can allow us to redeem a dark family history

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When I was in high school, one of my friends told me her sister recognized my father at a bank the day before. Her sister was a teller at the biggest bank in town, the same one where we had our accounts. I asked my friend how in the world my sister could have recognized my father.

“She said he looks just like you,” my friend said. “So she called him over and asked him if he was David’s father. She was right.”

I never thought I looked like my father, but I seem to have been mistaken — at least according to a lot of people who have known us both. Older folks in the family told me I looked just like what my grandfather did as a young man.

I bristled at such comparisons. I didn’t want to look like anyone. I didn’t want to be compared to anyone in the family. I hadn’t realized at the time how much dysfunction there was in my extended family, but I somehow knew. I didn’t want to be like any of them. I then spent decades running away from them.

Now that they’re all gone — and I’m safe from their dysfunction — I understand the ways in which I have to embrace what they were. It’s time for me to accept what I got from them. And it’s time for me to redeem that family history — as best I can — by the choices I make.

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

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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.

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Parent has to realize a child isn’t just miniature version of himself

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There’s a point at which almost every son wants to be just like his father and almost every daughter wants to be just like her mother.

It can be cute and it can be heartwarming. It can create memorable pictures from childhood, such as this photo of me as a little boy dressing up in my father’s business clothes.

But it’s dangerous, too, because a parent with narcissistic tendencies is going to jump at this pint-sized hero worship — and create serious psychological issues for the child and the family.

Since I started studying narcissistic personality disorder 10 years ago, I’ve learned that one of the most important jobs of any parent is teaching his children that each child is an individual with separate worth and personality, not an extension of the parent who must mirror and mimic whatever the parent happens to be.

My father never learned that — and his children paid the price in the decades to come. It’s not a mistake I’ll make with my own children.

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