David McElroy

When I was in my late 20s, I started a newspaper company and my father agreed to be my financial backer. But after we had been operating for about a year, he suddenly told me there would be no more money.

It turns out that all the money he had been giving me was stolen. He wasn’t ready to admit this at the time, though. He didn’t seem to care that it would destroy my company. He just suddenly told me there was no more money. That was my first hint that there was a big scandal brewing back in the town where I went to high school.

Even after it started, he lied to my sisters and me and claimed nothing was going on. The man I had grown up seeing as Mr. Morality turned out to be a liar, a thief — and ultimately a narcissist who humiliated all of us.

This is the next in a series of videos dealing with issues that come up for me to think about as I write a book about my childhood experience of growing up with a narcissistic father. You can visit that YouTube channel to subscribe to future videos. (Liking and subscribing help me quite a bit in helping others to see the videos.) Or can can watch this video below.

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The basic narrative of my childhood was firmly established one Sunday afternoon when I was 5 years old — when my mother tried to kill my father.

My father spent the rest of my childhood teaching me that she was crazy. I now understand that my father’s issues with Narcissistic Personality Disorder were at the root of the way he treated her and the way he treated us. I now know that he pushed her to a mental breakdown that day. I had no way to understand that at the time.

My mother saw what he was — because his dominant personality crushed her — but she didn’t have the diagnostic language to explain to anyone what he was. So nobody listened to her. Nobody believed her.

This is the next in a series of videos dealing with issues that come up for me to think about as I write a book about my childhood experience of growing up with a narcissistic father. You can visit that YouTube channel to subscribe to future videos. (Liking and subscribing help me quite a bit in helping others to see the videos.) Or can can watch this video below.

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For many years, I didn’t understand why I ate ridiculous amounts of unhealthful food when I wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t until after I started understanding the effects my father’s narcissism had on me that I finally understood that I was still trying to fill an emotional hole I had felt as a child.

When I was young, I didn’t have a mother for much of the time. It took me many years to recognize the enormous hole that was left in me by her absence. I felt lost and unloved because she wasn’t there. I felt abandoned — and I couldn’t understand that my narcissistic father is the one to drove her to a mental breakdown.

I never could be good enough for my father. I could never do enough to really get his approval. He taught me that it’s sometimes worse to have a bad parent there than to have a loving parent who was missing. His presence and emotional abuse were the most damaging of all.

This is the next in a series that shares thoughts that come to my mind as I’m writing a book called “The Truth About My Father.” If you’d like to subscribe to this new YouTube channel, click here and request notifications when I publish new videos. Or you can just watch this one below.

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