David McElroy

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.

Keep Reading

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.

Keep Reading

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.

Keep Reading