David McElroy

I was in a small social group Friday night and noticed a beautiful woman who I didn’t know. I listened to her and found her intelligent and interesting. I was intrigued enough to ask a friend who she was.

“Oh, that’s [Woman’s Name],” my friend said. “She’s beautiful and brilliant, but she’s also mentally unstable. She’s definitely your kind of woman.”

I laughed, but I couldn’t argue with that. Brilliant, beautiful and mentally unstable seem to be my kryptonite in women.

It’s funny to joke about, but there’s some truth to it. I’ve somehow been in multiple romantic relationships over the last 20 years that could be considered deeply dysfunctional in one way or another. That didn’t mean they weren’t wonderful women. It also doesn’t mean I regret loving them.

Can I conclude from this that “women are crazy”? That’s what a lot of people see when they find themselves in such situations, but that misses the brutal truth. Yes, I’ve gone through a line of women who I believe need some psychological help.

But I’m the one who’s been the common denominator in all the relationships.

I was attracted to whatever might be crazy in them. Their crazy was attracted to something about my crazy. Even if we didn’t realize it at the time, we were attracted to people who were at our own level of psychological and emotional health. They had issues. I had issues. We needed one another because we could understand each other, even if we weren’t conscious of it at the time.

Whatever I’ve consistently attracted into my life doesn’t say anything about women in general. It says something about me. And whatever you’ve consistently attracted into your life says something about you, too.

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Why did Donald Trump steal secret documents when he left the White House? Why did he lie about it when the federal government demanded the documents back?

If you already hate Trump, you probably don’t care why. You just want him charged and convicted for something. And if you love Trump, you don’t believe he did anything wrong. Even if he violated federal law, it’s not a big deal, you think, because others have done worse.

But for reasonable people who just want to understand what happened, the question is why he took such a ridiculous risk that had no obvious benefit. What was his motive?

You are not going to understand Trump’s behavior related to the stolen documents until you see it through the lens of malignant narcissism.

Through a normal lens, everything about what he did is irrational and self-destructive. His actions just wouldn’t make sense. But through the lens of pathological narcissism, it’s typical behavior. Narcissists believe rules don’t apply to them. They pursue their own irrational urges even when doing so could destroy them, simply because they refuse to recognize limits placed on them by others.

Donald Trump is a sick man. He’s a malignant narcissist. And that has nothing to do with politics.

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I was a terribly naive child. I was out of touch with social reality.

As my family moved from city to city, I was never among the popular kids at any school. I told myself it was because I was always the new kid everywhere, but some part of me knew better. Some of my peers always had something that made others like them. I seemed to rub people the wrong way — and I never knew why.

Despite this, I expected to be a leader. I knew I was smart and I was able to do things that few of my classmates could do. I thought that would take me far in this world. My childhood goal — a very serious one — was to be elected president of the United States.

As a teen, I had leadership roles at school and at church, but it wasn’t because my peers liked me. It was simply because I knew how to get things done. And when push came to shove, I was handed power and leadership when things needed to get done. But it didn’t make me popular. And I knew that.

I’m decades beyond those confused early expectations, but a part of me has never escaped them. I thought when I became an adult, competence would matter. Nothing else. Sometimes it did, but I often still can rub people the wrong way. Even when I knew how to be popular, I didn’t want to be.

And now I realize that I’m doomed to failure in the media world if I rely on popularity that comes from social media. Whatever it is that social media wants from a man, I don’t have it. And that means I have to make some changes.

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