David McElroy

I’ve spent my adult life on a long journey of recovery. It started while I was still in my late 20s when I vaguely realized something was wrong. That led to the realization that I had come from a very dysfunctional family. But I still had so many layers of dysfunction to take apart — and I had so much to learn in order to become an emotionally healthy adult.

Even now, I keep finding more habits to unlearn.

I wish I could have grown up with healthy mental habits and healthy inner beliefs about myself. I wish I could have been emotionally healthier when I was trying to build a company. I wish I could have seen the truth about myself and about the world in time to give myself more time to build on what I’ve learned.

I didn’t know those things as a child. I didn’t know them when I was 30. I didn’t even know them 10 years ago. But I know now.

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.

Keep Reading

Political loyalty appears to rot brain cells.

I’ve observed this phenomenon for years, from people of every political point of view. Once a person has decided on a position about an issue, facts no longer matter, at least for most people. They make emotional commitments to a position — for all sorts of reasons — and they keep doubling down on why they were right.

Many of Donald Trump’s opponents did this as soon as he was elected. Even before he took office, there were some people calling for him to be impeached. Before he had done anything. In the early parts of his administration, there was a massive effort to come up with some charge that was plausible enough to make it stick. The first set of impeachment charges were mostly nonsense, so Trump was not convicted and wasn’t removed from office. That was a reasonable outcome.

But the idiocy and dishonesty of the crowd against Trump had an odd effect. Otherwise-reasonable people were so incensed by the idiotic and dishonest drive to remove Trump from office that they turned into equally irrational defenders of this narcissistic liar.

It’s reasonable to believe that Donald Trump is an immoral thug who operates like a gangster — and who violates whatever laws or rules get in his way. It’s also reasonable to believe that many of his opponents are just as evil at heart — and to believe these people would do anything, fair or unfair, to destroy a man they hate.

Both things are true. An honest and reasonable person doesn’t have to choose sides. It’s reasonable to detest the leftists whose actions are taking our country closer and closer to the edge of the cliff of destruction. But it’s not reasonable to support Trump because you hate his enemies.

Donald Trump is a criminal. He’s a selfish and evil narcissist. And he deserves to be shunned by decent and principled people — even if you also hate Joe Biden and his friends.

It’s idiotic to choose sides in a war for control of a cesspool.

Keep Reading

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.

Keep Reading