parents

How do we start over and give ourselves parenting we needed?

By David McElroy · September 18, 2019

As I looked down the long aisles of the grocery store, I felt a sense of exhilaration which I hadn’t expected.

For the first time in my life, I could buy any food I wanted. My father would never know. He would never be able to lecture me about it.

I felt giddy. I felt like a rebel. It was an emotional high that felt like dangerous freedom.

I had just moved to Tuscaloosa to start college at the University of Alabama. I was living completely on my own for the first time in my life. I didn’t realize exactly how controlled I had felt until the moment when there were suddenly no controls on me.

For many years, I associated parenting with oppressive control, because that’s the parenting I experienced. (My mother wasn’t around, so all my parenting was from my father.) I was trained to be an obedient robot. I eventually came to understand that wasn’t the healthy way to raise children, but it’s taken me longer to start understanding some of the things that are missing in me because of the unhealthy parenting I received.

At long last, I’ve realized I still need some parenting — and the only thing I can count on is “reparenting” myself.

Keep Reading

I wasn’t allowed to express need, so I’ve spent life traveling alone

By David McElroy · June 30, 2019

It took me years to realize my own negative emotions terrify me.

For a long time, I took pride in always having my feelings under control. Even when other people hurt me or treated me badly, I didn’t lash out at them. I didn’t show anger. No matter what the circumstances were — or what someone had done to me — I was almost always cool, calm and in complete control of my feelings.

I finally understand why I did that — and I understand why I feel like a caged animal when I experience negative emotions. I understand now why I want to repress what I’m feeling and get away from whoever has made me feel the emotions I fear. I get it now.

In Alice Miller’s influential book about parental child abuse, “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” she imagines a hurting adult child asking his or her parent a difficult question. The book was recommended to me years ago, but I just got around to reading it this weekend. As I read this question, I felt sick at my stomach — because I already knew the answer for my life.

Keep Reading

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

By David McElroy · December 28, 2018

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