David McElroy

When shame comes over me, I often don’t recognize it. Not at first, anyway.

I often find myself feeling angry and hurt over some small thing. Someone might have insulted me. Someone might have simply disagreed with me. A person might have been rude or belittled me in some way. Maybe some tiny way.

And something in me feels ready to explode. I’m furious. I’m hurt. I feel the need to strike out and hurt whoever is hurting me. I just want the hurting and humiliation to go away. And that’s about the time — if I’m lucky — that I’ll realize I’m dealing with shame.

Someone has pushed one of my buttons. Maybe it was an intentional slight. Maybe not. Either way, I feel shame. Before long, the shame has morphed into a passive form of self-directed aggression. I’m not good enough. I’ll never be loved or understood.

Then my harsh and brutal superego — the imagined channeling of my childhood father’s voice — tells me to stop whining. To stop feeling anything.

“Just get over it,” the voice screams.

And then I hate myself for having needs. I hate myself for hurting. I hate myself for feeling anything. As I simmer in this toxic stew of shame and hurt, I realize I’m not as close as I’d thought to the emotional health which I’ve been seeking for decades.

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Why is America ruled by evil men and women? You don’t want to hear this, but it’s almost certainly your fault.

Almost everybody has been brainwashed to choose “the lesser of two evils.” You’ve been brainwashed to hate one side or the other of the mainstream, so much that “your side” seems almost sane and saintly by comparison.

So most of you hate one group of politicians or another. The makeup of the groups changes over time. Some people used to hate Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan more than anybody else. Then they hated George W. Bush. Most recently, they’ve learned to hate Donald Trump with every fiber of their beings.

For another group, it was once George McGovern, then Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi soon followed. Today, it’s Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who they hate with passion.

If you’re pushed into a corner, many of you might admit that the candidate you enthusiastically support is a terrible person in some respect or another, but you’re adamant that you must support your “lesser evil” — because a different brand of evil would rule us if you didn’t worship the evil you choose to support.

And this mass social brainwashing results in the vast majority of people knowing their rulers are evil, even the ones they support — but unwilling to step away from this system — because “the other evil would be so much worse.”

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I’ve had several conflicts lately with a woman I have to deal with at work. I could explain each of the conflicts — and I could tell you why she’s the problem, not me. But what if I’m wrong?

Someone else I work with talked with the woman to see what was going on between us. It’s a business relationship we would all like to save if we can. He tried to explain what he saw happening.

“You intimidate people, David,” he told me. “For a lot of the people you deal with, it’s great, because you seem dominant and forceful. You get people to do what they’ve agreed to do when they would run over other people. But your personality is so strong that some people are just intimidated.”

If I hadn’t heard different versions of this discussion for my entire life, I would have been angry. Maybe insulted. Me? Intimidating? There’s no way. I’m super nice to everybody. In fact, I’m constantly afraid of letting other people down. How could anybody be intimidated of me?

But I’ve heard it since I was young. I remember hearing it in college. Two different newspaper publishers told me — when I was working as managing editor for each of them — that I was right in pretty much everything I said or did on my job. But they said I was so intense and intimidating that people were afraid to disappoint me.

After all these years — and all of my many attempts to be kinder and gentler — I’m still having that effect. And I’m baffled about why it happens.

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