Disrespect and rudeness--really?

What is does it mean, to be rude? The Google search function turns up “…offensively impolite or bad-mannered…” but that is rather subjective—who determines when impoliteness or bad manners becomes offensive? Obviously the person who is perceived as being rude doesn’t think he’s being rude at all, while others—whose minds he cannot read—perceive differently. The Cambridge Dictionary¹ defines rude as “…not polite; offensive or embarrassing…” Again, subjective: that which I find offensive you might find hilarious.

Years ago there was a standard of behaviour to which the majority of people agreed constituted basic manners. Things like saying “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.” Saying you are sorry for causing someone else inconvenience or hurt. Children asking to be excused from the table. Not interrupting others while they are speaking. Waiting your turn for something. Calling before going to someone’s home. Respecting the privacy of others. Respecting other people’s wishes with respect to their own persons and property. Being a “good sport” when losing and gracious when winning. These and many other small courtesies were handed down to each succeeding generation as the lubricant that oiled the wheels of society. Without small, simple courtesies practiced by the majority of us, regardless of class, society broke down into a chaos of ruthless competition. The definition of rude was not subjective or ruled by the perception of either the recipient or perpetrator, the definition of rude was codified—it was anything that violated the basic code of manners that permeated the society.

Narcissists understand the codes and narcissistic parents use them to their advantage. In a society that largely ignores the traditional courtesies, narcissistic parents are in their element: they can teach their children the kinds of behaviours and responses they want, call them “manners” or “courtesy” and shape their children the way they see fit.

When I was growing up we were taught basic manners first in the family and next in primary (elementary) school: teachers would require us to say “please” and “thank you,” wait in a queue or raise our hands for our turn at something, to share with others. Girls got a more expanded version of it in the higher grades during compulsory Home Economics courses. We had books and newspaper columns by well-known etiquette mavens, books that might show up in a young adolescent girl’s birthday or holiday swag. And we learned from TV shows like Leave it to Beaver in which the young Beav and his adolescent brother Wally were counselled on manners by their mother, who was backed by their father. But we also understood that there were different rules for adults, rules that forbade us to do things until we were “old enough,” among them smoking, drinking, driving cars and—my eagerly anticipated favourite—moving away from home.

It was this “rules are different for grownups” that gave people like my mother their power. They could demand adherence to the rules of etiquette from children without reciprocating because their rules were different from ours—“Do as I say, not as I do” was a common refrain around our house. Of course, I knew adults who were courteous, even to kids, but I understood this was not required of adults, that courtesy was a one-way street where children and adults intersected.

Another thing my mother inculcated into me—and which was largely supported by society in general—was the notion that children owed respect to adults…all adults…no matter what. So an adult could berate you loudly and rudely in public and you couldn’t say anything “disrespectful” in return without risking getting into trouble over it. So if some grouchy old neighbour threw handfuls of garden manure at you as you walked by their garden, bellowing at you not to trample their flowers, you were allowed to say “I didn’t walk through your flower beds,” but if Grouchy insisted it was you, you were disrespectful to “talk back” and insist on your innocence—because at this point you were supposed to take it to your parents and let them handle it. If you had clones of Ward and June Cleaver for parents, this worked. But if you had the narcissistic Wicked Witch of the West or Captain Bligh for parents, this didn’t go so well. Instead of being able to go to your parent for support and defence, you had to keep quiet…and you learned that people older than you could get away with shit you couldn’t.

Most people grow up understanding they are supposed to respect their elders and give them deference. Unfortunately, if your parent was narcissistic, there was an added dimension to this. At the age of individuation, at the age where normal families begin loosening the reins of control over their kids, helping them to learn to handle independence and to start thinking of themselves as adults, narcissistic parents tighten the screws. Even if they ostensibly give you the freedom to come and go like your friends do, sign for your driving license, etc., they do not stop thinking of you as a child. They believe they are doing you a favour by allowing you to participate with your peers—and they see no value in helping you to become emotionally independent.

When these children become adults, their lives and choices are often ruled by those narcissistic parents. The parents have taken up residence in their heads and those parents remain in control. I had a friend who, in her 30s, was lamenting her single state. I offered to introduce her to a couple of guys I knew, engineers who made a good living and would, in my opinion, make good husbands and providers. She declined because her parents wouldn’t approve of these guys because they were ethnically different from her. She, personally, didn’t care but she couldn’t go against her parents’ biases. Another woman I used to work with had a hard core controlling mother who demanded that my co-worker pay her rent and utilities. This left my co-worker, who was a clerical worker like me and a single mother, scrabbling for pennies at the end of every month. When I asked her why she did this she said “Because she’s my mother.” I knew nothing of narcissists in those days but I suggested that she tell her mother she needs to pay her own way and my co-worker blanched. The very thought of standing up to her mother literally made her feel faint. She was in her early 40s.

We get taught that inside the family circle, our parents not only hold the power, they hold it until they die—sometimes even after they die, depending on their will. We are not supposed to contradict those parents or even think differently from them. As children that is naughty and we court punishment; as adults were are deemed disrespectful, insubordinate and rude. Due to the conditioning of our childhood, we fear being found wanting by our parents. Even when we know we are too old to be spanked or grounded, the visceral fear is still there. Depending on the kind of parent we had, that fear may be mixed with guilt and shame. But any way you slice it, doing—even thinking—anything that our parents would disapprove of brings us anxiety and even fear.

So what happens when we grow up and put enough distance between us and our Ns that we begin to have contrary thoughts? What happens when you develop the nerve to disagree with your mother face-to-face and not back down, or find the courage to tell her she’s wrong or to call her on her bullshit? Well, depending on the type of NM you have, you can get tears, push-back, or outrage—but in every case your NM is going to perceive you as both rude and disrespectful. Narcissists rewrite definitions of words and phrases to be more self-serving. My NexH, for example, when accused of never compromising, indignantly informed me that he compromised all the time. When asked for a definition of compromise he came up with this: he gets what he wants and I get everything that is left. Narcissists not only rewrite history, they rewrite the damned dictionary.

As children we don’t know any better and we accept those definitions. So when you are actually individuating and becoming independent, your NParent redefines it as rebellion. When you tell you NM that she can’t give your child cookies twenty minutes before dinner, she calls you disrespectful. When she invades your private space and you ask her to leave, she sees this as you being rude. And so do you! Even if you have reached the point where your intellect recognizes that you are not being rude or disrespectful, you can still feel like you are!

Believe it or not, there is no rule in the books of etiquette and tomes of manners that says it is rude or disrespectful to disagree with your parents. There is no prohibition against upsetting your mother or disagreeing with your father. There are rules against such things as browbeating others with your point of view, showing up at a person’s place of work or residence uninvited, and demeaning others both publicly and privately. There are even polite ways to deal with people who persist in these behaviours and, simply stated, it is to ignore their presence as if they are not there. It is called “The Cut” and old fashioned guides to etiquette delved deeply into the various kinds of cuts and when and how to employ them. It is an old, tried-and-true, absolutely correct method of dealing with people who persist in imposing their bad manners on you: you simply do not engage them in any fashion, up to and including shutting the door in their faces if they appear at your door uninvited and having them escorted away by security or the police if they refuse to take the hint and decamp.

Narcissists instil that sense of being rude or disrespectful in us as children for a reason: it allows them to control us. When we are little, we are shamed and even punished for a behaviour our parent identifies as rude or disrespectful. We learn from them what it means and we believe them. We internalize it and it becomes part of our core beliefs. Once we have it internalized, they no longer need to threaten or imply punishment because we do it ourselves: we shrink away from assertive and autonomous behaviours because we now believe such behaviour is rude or disrespectful. We also believe it is a one-way street, that they can be rude and disrespectful to us, it is within their purview as our parents, but we cannot reciprocate because that is unacceptable.

We will remain their emotional zombies for as long as we permit ourselves to buy into those self-serving definitions that underpin our inappropriate feelings of guilt and shame and wrongness. As long as we feel like we are being rude (which we react to by feeling shame) when we are doing no more than asserting our autonomy, we are still being controlled by the Ns who conditioned us to accede to their wishes in all things.

But the truth is, they are the ones who are being rude and disrespectful, not you! But until you use those feelings of shame, that fear of retribution, that anxiety that comes over you whenever you think independently, until you use those clues to lead you to the reality, to the real definitions of your behaviour, you will continue being controlled by them remotely. You have to stop in the middle of that attack of shame, and think. Yes, it is difficult. Yes, you may not realize you have to stop and think until you are in the middle of the attack, it doesn’t matter. Once you realize you are reacting, make yourself stop! Put your mind to work. Acknowledge you feel like you are being rude but are you really? Is asserting yourself rude? No, it is not. Is having an opinion or belief that differs from your parents rude? No. Is failing to or refusing to live up to their expectations rude or disrespectful? No. Is disappointing them bad? No again. None of those things that they taught you are true. They lied.

They LIED to you. They redefined all of those things to condition you so they could control you. And as long as you continue to react as programmed, they are in control, not you, no matter how far away you live, no matter how long you have been NC.

What you may not yet realize is that you are the one who has all of the power in the relationship. That’s right—you have all of the power! They have managed to con you into not seeing that and allowing them to continue controlling you as they did from childhood. But you can stop that at any time—at any time you choose.

The thing is, it is not going to be easy. You are going to have to fight yourself, your own feelings, even what you perceive to be your instincts. They aren’t your instincts, they are programmed responses that are actually overriding your instincts. It is going to take work and effort on our part. It is going to take recognizing and stopping automatic responses and substituting the appropriate responses until they become habituated. It is going to take recognizing that it is your Ns who are being rude and disrespectful to you, not the other way around, and then putting a stop to it. It is not easy…but it is well worth every iota of effort you put into it.

1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rude

Rudeness—it can be a narcissistic tool

Since the inception of this blog more than three years ago, the following warning has been posted near the comment window at the bottom of each page: “I don't publish rudeness, so please keep your comments respectful, not only to me, but to those who comment as well. We are not all at the same point in our recovery.”

Silly me, I thought that was self-explanatory, but apparently not. The purpose of the warning was, primarily, to discourage trolls: if they know up front that they won’t get published ( and every comment, without exception, is reviewed by be before publication), they may not be willing to expend the effort to write something rude and trollish that they know will never see the light of day. There are some trolls, however…narcissists, really…who apparently see this as a challenge. And I have been dealing with one (possibly two) this week.

Rudeness is a tool in the narcissist’s bag of nasty tricks. Narcissists are well aware of the rules of polite discourse and know that we all expect that from each other. Deviation from the social script is what provokes shouting matches, fist fights, and worse. People hell-bent on winning at all costs can, when their ire is provoked, say and do ugly things. And nothing is more provoking than someone being rude for no discernible reason.

Narcissists use this to their advantage. If you can be provoked to losing your cool, the narcissist “wins” the competition going on in his head. The narcissist gets to walk away feeling superior for having taken control of your emotions and maybe even your better judgment, reducing you to a reacting, acting-out puppet. Some narcissists are so skilled at this that they aren’t even conscious of it…they blithely roll along, dropping little digs and barbs and spouting little zingers and skewering people with their sharp tongues, seemingly oblivious to the death by a thousand cuts they are inflicting on the people whose psyches are pierced by their unkind words. Other narcissists are keenly aware and use rudeness to hurt, control and/or punish others.

In the brouhaha with our visiting narcissist, James, there came some comments and emails from an anonymous writer purporting to not be James in disguise, comments opining that I should 1) apologise to James; 2) listen to James and 3) come to some kind of détente with James. I had to laugh because the author of these missives, if it wasn’t James, obviously missed the meaning of that brief warning near the comment window: “I don't publish rudeness, so please keep your comments respectful, not only to me, but to those who comment as well. We are not all at the same point in our recovery.”

So what was so rude about that, you ask? Well, rudeness does not have to be couched in offensive verbiage to still be rude. Think about it this way:

Suppose you held an open house with the objective of selling your cottagey little house and a person came in and started taking issue with the décor…with your choice of furnishings, throw rugs, knick-knacks, bedding. Suppose she criticized the colour of the sofa, the towels in the bathroom, even the bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. Suppose now, that you told her that since it was your house, it was going to be decorated to your taste, but all of these things would be going with you when you moved, and she should be focussing on the house itself, not on your sofa or towels.

Suppose, then, she told me you was incorrect, that the house should be decorated to her taste because your taste was wrong. Let’s say her taste was ultra-modern and yours was shabby chic and she is insisting that you must redecorate the house to her taste, not because it would sell better that way, but because she is right and you are wrong. Because her perceptions about your decorating taste are right and mine are wrong. Suppose, too, that she refused to stop criticizing your décor style, regardless of what you say about this being your house and that her taste is not appropriate to the cottagey architecture of the house while yours is.

This behaviour is what is known as “presumptuous” and presumptuous behaviour is the epitome of rudeness. In fact, Microsoft Word’s built-in thesaurus defines “presumptuous” as: arrogant, rude, presuming, audacious, insolent, bold, rash, and disrespectful.

Suppose now that the Critic, having been unsuccessful in winning your agreement, turns hostile and begins to engage in character assassination and ad hominem attacks at which time you politely steer her to the door and out onto the sidewalk and tell her she is not welcome back in your house.

What if another person has been observing the exchange between the two of you and she decides to now grace you with her unsolicited opinion…and that opinion is that you should apologize to the Critic and “work things out” with her? Well, in my opinion, this is no less rude than the original.

Why?

The purpose of the house being open in the first place was for prospective buyers to look at the house and decide if they might want to purchase it. The original Critic was not invited as a decorator or stager or real estate agent whose opinion about the décor was solicited: she was there as a potential buyer and her concerns about the décor were unwarranted because it would all be gone when the buyer took possession of the property. The initial Critic turned a visit to a home for sale into an argument over taste in furnishings and right and wrong: she created an issue that not only did not exist, it had nothing to do with whether or not the house would be suitable for her needs (remember, the décor would be gone when she took possession of it). As the discussion escalated, the Critic became more and more demanding, from taking issue with the décor to demanding that you agree with her viewpoint on the décor. This was extremely disrespectful as it demands a complete stranger change her views to suit that of the Critic for no other reason than the Critic believes she is right.

The Observer is transparently supportive of the Critic. The reasons could be anything: she is also presumptuous, she also prefers modern furnishings, she prefers to side with the attacker rather than the defender—but her reasons are immaterial. What is material is that she has also taken a presumptuous step: her opinion is unsolicited and it supports presumptuous, rude behaviour.

Everybody has a right to disagree with what I say on this blog…but you must disagree without being disagreeable. What you don’t have a right to do is to attempt to impose your viewpoint here by trying to make me wrong thereby dictating the content of my blog. You have the freedom to disagree and to express that disagreement and, if I agree with you—if I overlooked something germane and that oversight significantly affects my conclusions, then I will acknowledge that. But the person who decides whether or not your observation is germane is me, not you. And if I disagree and I write back and explain why I disagree, pressing the issue further is rude—on your part.

If you support someone’s disagreement, that is ok, too. But supporting someone’s rudeness is not ok. This is not a public forum, this is my blog. I write it to express my observations, my viewpoint, my discoveries and epiphanies; I do not write it to provide a forum for debate. Here, you are free to read and comment—even comment your disagreement—but you are not free to attempt to control the content of this blog. If you want an interactive forum or you wish to control the content of a blog, you are free to create your own.

If you think I am being harsh or selfish here, consider that the way our narcissists beat us down and kept us in check was to cause us to think that we have to tolerate their disrespectful ways, to make us feel guilty for even wanting to stand up for ourselves. A meme I saw on FaceBook says: “I have reached a point in my life where I find it is no longer necessary to try to impress anyone. If they like me the way I am, that’s good. If they don’t, it’s their loss.” Narcissists bank on people feeling the opinions of others are more important than their own opinions of themselves and narcissist use that as a way to manipulate them. I don’t play that game anymore…any airtime a narcissist gets here will be at my choosing and because it fits into my agenda.

So, if you have a comment here or you want to send me an email, keep it civil and polite. You can disagree, but if you are disagreeable about it, then you have crossed the line into rudeness. If I disagree with your disagreement, let it go—you had your say, let that be enough. To persist in trying to make your point and change my mind is disrespectful since this is not a public forum, it is the electronic equivalent of my house. It is a peek into my brain, my processes, my conclusions. Please respect that.

You don’t have to earn ANYBODY’s respect!

Lives there a person who has never heard the phrase “You have to earn my respect!”? Do you have any idea what a load of rubbish that is? Respect is an entitlement, not something you have to earn.

I addressed this topic back in April on my general blog, A View from the Other Side, and this is what I said back then:

Do you think people should earn your respect? Really? Why?

When I was growing up, respect was not something you earned. Respect was freely given, in fact, it was considered an entitlement. It was DISrespect that had to be earned. Now, if you think I’m full of crap on this, put on your thinking cap and follow along with me.

In a circumstance in which respect is not freely accorded to others, disrespect reigns. When you respect the rights and feelings of others, you don’t do things that might infringe on those rights or impinge on their feelings: you don’t cut in front of them in line, you don’t cut them off on the highway, you don’t interrupt when they are speaking, you don’t insult their politics or religious inclinations, you don’t assault their ears with loud cell-phone conversations, or impair their breathing with your second hand smoke—and they don’t do the same to you.

Common courtesy and manners, the lubricant that oils the wheels of social interaction, are based on simple respect for the feelings and rights of others. When respect is absent, disrespect reigns…and when you behave disrespectfully, you invite others to behave towards you in the same way.

Speaking altruistically, you must give respect to get respect and a society that values pleasant social interaction must be based on the simple tenet that we must all respect each other if we are to avoid conflict and make progress.

But there is another, more practical and less esoteric reason that respect must be freely given rather than earned: the sheer impossibility of doing so.

You see, there are billions of people on this planet and even if you live an insular life in a small town, you are going to meet quite a few of them. And each person is going to be different, have different mores and beliefs and feelings…and each one will have different criteria for earning respect. Moreover, those criteria will not be tattooed on their foreheads, nor will they thoughtfully hand you a list of them…in fact, if asked, they will likely be hard pressed to even articulate what it takes for you to earn their respect. And if they really thought about it diligently, it is most likely that one of the critical criteria would be that you show respect to them.

You are no different. You have some kind of nebulous concept rattling around in the back of your brain that defines what it means to earn your respect. And you hold countless numbers of complete strangers to this amorphous, undefined criteria in order to “earn” your respect, without telling them or even being able to articulate it yourself. This is grossly unfair. It is setting a standard to which you expect others to measure up without ever telling them what the standard is. It virtually guarantees failure on the part of others and virtually guarantees you a conscience-free pass to be rude and disrespectful to the majority of people you meet! I mean, if they don’t earn your respect, why should you treat them respectfully?

This attitude is the most basic underpinning of bullying. If you don’t respect someone because you believe they have to earn your respect and you have made it impossible for them to do by creating an impossible and/or invisible set of standards, then you don’t need to respect their rights or their feelings, do you? If you further create some gates that a person must pass through in order to even try to earn your respect—like they must be straight, or Christian, or politically conservative, or a certain race or ethnicity or gender—you further create a situation that you feel absolutely justified in not respecting those who are unable to pass through those gates. If they can’t jump through the hoops and avoid the obstacles you have set up, then you feel perfectly justified in disrespecting them.

When you consider that there are potentially billions of people doing this, that if you meet 100 people in the course of a week, each one of them may be doing this to you, you may begin to see how this cannot work as a way of life. If you meet 100 people and each of them has a different criteria for having their respect earned and none of them are willing to tell you what you must do to “earn” their respect, you are basically screwed. It is a hit or miss situation where “earning” someone’s respect is accidental rather than by design or intent. It is, with rare exception, impossible.

But it goes even deeper than this. Consider for a moment: what kind of a person truly believes that his respect is so rare a commodity that others must earn it? What kind of a person has so little respect within his heart that he must dole it out only to those who are willing to abase themselves to “earn” it? If you think of yourself as a “good person,” what are you doing withholding that most basic entitlement of humans, the right to be respected simply because they exist?

That’s right—we all have basic human rights—and the right to be respected is one of them. We earn DISrespect when we have done something worthy of it, but respect is your birthright. And to expect others to earn your respect is tantamount to saying that you are entitled to withhold from them a right that came with their first breath, setting yourself as a superior being above those from whom you withhold your respect. It speaks ill of your character, and reflects badly upon your moral fibre.

Many of us have bought into the notion that respect must be earned out of ignorance and lack of critical thinking. We aren’t really bullies and we deplore the lack of common courtesy we are subjected to in daily life. Curiously, while we take the position that strangers must earn our respect, we fully expect those strangers to treat us with the respect and courtesy we have made no effort to “earn” from them. It’s a one-way street in our minds—others should treat us with respect but they must earn ours—and we don’t even realize it!

If you take the time to really think about it, you have to come to the conclusion that respect simply cannot be earned. No one person is sufficiently intuitive and simultaneously fluid of personality that they can divine and appropriately react to an infinite, and infinitely changing, set of demands. You cannot please all of the people all of the time—and when it comes to earning respect, you cannot even know what all of the people think you need to do.

If you want to be respected, there is a simple way to achieve that: respect others. Respect their feelings, their rights, their existence. Give them respect as a matter of course and only withhold it when a specific person has done a specific thing that is worthy of withdrawing it. Set the bar high—determine that taking your respect away from a person is a serious thing, not to be taken lightly or in response to something small, like disagreeing with you politically. In fact, to my way of thinking, it is only demonstrating an ingrained lack of respect for others that warrants the withdrawal of my respect.

You might consider this the next time you think another person should earn your respect rather than you giving it freely and giving him a chance to earn your disrespect instead.

Narcissists do this. They believe that their respect has to be earned and thereby create a set up to justify treating other people like crap. When you don’t respect someone, you don’t feel obligated to have a caution for their feelings or even their rights. When you believe others have to earn your respect, you have created a world in which you don’t have to respect anybody until and unless they earn it from you, as if you have the right to disrespect everyone on the planet until they bow to your expectations…a pretty narcissistic attitude, to my way of thinking.

Many years ago, when I was struggling with my NHusband’s gaslighting and manipulative ways, my therapist gave me some invaluable advice: when the words and the behaviour don’t match, believe the behaviour because it is so much easier to lie with words than with deeds. And so you look at how people treat you, how they act: people who respect you will treat you as an Equal and they won’t try to manipulate you by taking a Superior or Subordinate position with you. Anyone who assumes a Superior or Subordinate position with you is treating you without respect…and when you assume a Superior or Subordinate position, you are doing the same.

A good part of what is wrong with the world today is as a result of rampant disrespect. What is wrong with our relationships with our FOO is, at its core, a lack of respect being shown to us by them. Some women are simply incapable of loving their children—love is an emotion that we cannot will—but even those women are capable of respecting their children and their rights and their feelings. They cannot choose to love us…love operates independent of our conscious choice…but they can choose to respect us.

By their very nature, narcissists are disrespectful of others. But they are not necessarily disrespectful of everyone—my NexH and my MNM both had people they admired, people they looked up to and wanted to be like. Admittedly, all of their idols were powerful, wealthy people who, for the most part, they did not personally know, but the fact remains that they did not disrespect these people even though these people had not earned their respect through any direct or conscious means. In truth, there is nothing personal in a narcissist’s disrespect of you, at least in the beginning, because that disrespect is pretty much universal: even if the narcissist doesn’t know you, s/he disrespects you…it is the default condition of the narcissist.

A narcissist disrespects anyone and everyone he does not perceive as worthy of being his role model. That means most family members (exceptions might be made for a family member who has achieved that which the narcissist wishes to achieve: fame, wealth, power—but the narcissist could just as easily be so envious that s/he despises and disrespects him or her) and virtually everyone the narcissist knows well.

The narcissist doesn’t really know what respect is. While we know that respect is part of the Equal/Equal transaction, the Narcissist sees it as a situation in which the respected person is a Superior, not just in a transaction but in life, and the narcissist is a subordinate. Respect, to the narcissist, has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with being willingly subordinate to the idol the narcissist wishes to emulate. But there is nothing selfless in this subordination: the narcissist expects to find ways to profit by her emulation and admiration, whether it is clues as to how to be more attractive to men (my NM used to copy Marilyn Monroe, right down to the bleached hair, halter dress and fake beauty mark) or to become rich and powerful (or at least to make others think you are—my NexH went to his 20th high school reunion dressed in a 3-piece suit complete with watch chain and rented a Lincoln Continental from the airport…no mundane Chevy and sport shirt and slacks for him!).

Narcissists demand respect from others—or try to con others into thinking they should be respected—without being willing to give respect to others. They demand that we earn respect from them without telling us how to go about doing that…because they don’t know. And if you are thinking this is a set-up you are right, that is exactly what it is.

Why?

Because the narcissistic view of respect is such that, in order to “respect” you, the narcissist would have to believe you were better than s/he is…and that is never going to happen. The people the narcissist respects are people whom the narcissist not only admires and wishes to emulate but people whose feet of clay—their human failings—the narcissist has not yet found or acknowledged. And so you have an NM who raises an NDaughter or NSon who may well respect their NM, ignoring (or even admiring) her faults, doing her bidding, defending her and in doing so, defending themselves. NM may even come to admire one of her Nchildren, assuming the child achieves highly in an area NM finds worthy: Charlie’s brother became a millionaire through some pretty shifty means but their NM didn’t care about how he got his money: Alvin became a millionaire and she explained away and excused his boorishness, rudeness, and bullying behaviours with “He’s a millionaire. Millionaires are like that.” Alvin did not respect Charlie and neither did their NM, they both bullied and insulted him behind his back and, on occasion, even to his face. You don’t treat people you respect that way.

Bottom line is, narcissists cannot respect anyone they deem beneath them and narcissists deem everyone beneath them except the select few they wish to emulate. Earning respect is virtually impossible even in the best of circumstances but with a narcissist, it is quite impossible: they will never let you.

Respect is something you are entitled to, just like the air you breathe. The idea that you have to earn respect is as ludicrous as the idea that you have to earn your air, that someone has the right to withhold it from you until you figure out what you have to do to earn it…and they get to change the rules as they go along.

You don’t have to earn anybody's respect and people who withhold respect from you and expect you to jump through hoops like a trained dog to “earn” it aren’t going to give it to you, no matter how many hoops you jump through—the fact of your willingness to abase yourself in order to earn their approval and respect will, automatically, render you unworthy. And while being denied air for four minutes will kill you and being denied respect will not, respect is no less an entitlement and anyone who tells you differently has a selfishly irrational and manipulative view of the subject.

If a person doesn’t respect you, it says volumes more about her than is does about you…and none of it good.

Next: The two sides of “Attention Seeking”