David McElroy

I am painfully aware of what was done to me as a child. I still need to talk about it and be sure I understand it. But I’ve reached the point that I am no longer remaining a victim. When I was a child, my father took power away from me completely and he held onto that power after I became an adult. He kept reinforcing the ways in which he was the one with power and I was the one who was under his thumb. Even though he’s dead, it would be easy to keep living that way — to keep living as though I had no power and I had no ability to get past what he did to me.

But that isn’t what I want. That isn’t what I need. I am slowly taking back the power that I had given up to him. I’m taking back the control that I allowed him to keep over me far into my adult life. I can be who I really am. I can take back the power over my own life. And in doing these things, I can finally stop victimizing myself. I can slowly stop being anybody’s victim, but only because I’ve healed enough that I’m ready to do that.

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 you can watch the most recent video below.

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I lost the wise old man of my household when Thomas died early Wednesday afternoon. I can’t be sure of how old he was when he came to live with me in 2011, but he was around 17 years old by the time of his death.

Thomas spent most of his life as a very unfriendly cat who didn’t even trust the man who fed him every day for years. That distrust was a reflection of his feral life on the street before he came to me. But the last nine months of his life were almost miraculous.

Since December 2022, Thomas changed a lot. For the first time in his life, he learned to play normal chase games with another cat. He finally would allow me to pick him up without clawing like a wildcat who thought his life was in danger. He even learned to voluntarily spend time with me — and he even learned to relax and purr when I rubbed him.

All these changes happened because Alex came to live with us in December.

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When a narcissist wants to keep getting his way in the lives of his victims, he or she often manipulates other people to pressure you to give them what they want. Those people are called “flying monkeys.”

Flying monkeys are often busybodies who are eager to pass judgments about things they don’t understand. They typically believe whatever the manipulative narcissist has told them — and they see themselves as agents of good who are out to help the poor, innocent narcissist.

Sometimes they’re trying to force you to come back to people who are abusive and dangerous to you. Other times, they can actually be trying to hurt you, because they can be trying to help the narcissist get revenge against the terrible people who have hurt him or her so much.

And flying monkeys tend to feel very self-righteous about what they’re doing, because the narcissist has them convinced that he or she is the victim. In the mind of the flying monkey, the narcissist is the victim and you are the one who is completely in the wrong.

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 you can watch this video below.

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