David McElroy

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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About 15 years ago — around the time when I was learning about how my father’s narcissism had affected me — I started experiencing sudden and unexplained rage. I eventually figured out that this was the anger I had been repressing for all those years when being angry with him was dangerous to me.

But I’m still trying to learn to accept my own anger — and how to deal with other people’s anger without having to walk on eggshells.

This is the next in a series of videos dealing with issues that come up for me to think about ask I write a book about my childhood experience of growing up with a narcissistic father. You can visit that YouTube page 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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As I started coming to terms with the damage that my father’s narcissism had done to me, I also had to ask myself disturbing questions.

Had I become something like him? Had growing up with him taught me to be a narcissist? Was I going to become the abuser he had become?

Many people who are raised by narcissists turn into narcissistic abusers, too. I had to re-evaluate myself — my inner shame and some of my outer behaviors — in light of what I learned about him. These were not pleasant questions to ask myself.

This is the first installment of the thoughts I’m having as I finally write my book about having been raised by a narcissist. The YouTube site is here. (Please subscribe if you’d like to keep up with this project.) Or you can watch the embedded video below.

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