David McElroy

The woman was tall and strikingly beautiful. There was something about her that made her stand out in a loud restaurant that was packed almost shoulder to shoulder late Friday night. Then she turned her face toward me.

I gasped, at least inwardly. Was that her? It was her, but it couldn’t be. The restaurant was so loud and packed that nobody could have heard me, but I felt my lips move involuntarily.

“Are you proud of me?” I whispered.

For a brief moment, our eyes met. She was beautiful. She had a powerful presence. But it wasn’t her.

She was leaving through one door and I was heading out the door on the other side of the place. Then she was gone and I was in my car. I put the key into the ignition, but I didn’t start the car. I just sat there thinking about what had just happened.

I had thought for a moment that she was someone who I once loved. I was mistaken, but just thinking it was her made me realize — because of the question I blurted out — that I still want her to be proud of me. Even after all these years.

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The advice is almost always well-meaning, but it’s completely clueless.

“Come on,” the advice goes. “That happened a long time ago. He didn’t really mean to hurt you. They did the best they could. You just need to let it go. It’s time to get over it.”

I know what it feels like to think this about someone, because I’ve done it, too. I remember a conversation I had years ago in which a friend and I mocked someone who couldn’t “get over it” and move on after childhood abuse. That was before I understood my own childhood trauma, so I eventually felt guilty about having said such things about someone else.

But I get it. When you watch someone else go through the agony of long-term pain and anger from emotional abuse, it’s baffling if you don’t have a frame of reference. The person who’s suffered abuse can come across as crazy — at least it can look that way to someone who’s not hurting.

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I consciously realized last night that I use manufactured praise to save myself from my fear of being bad and inadequate. If I can manipulate people into praising me, that gives me temporary relief from my fear of not being good enough.

That’s a pretty brutal realization. I think I already knew it, but I hadn’t quite put it into words like that. Not consciously. But as soon as I did, I recognized the pattern that I learned from my father.

A narcissist desperately seeks what is called “narcissistic supply” — and my father taught me to do something that was pretty much identical to what he did.

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 reaching others with the videos.) Or you can watch the most recent video below.

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