Narcissism’s Relationship Trap

Before I knew anything about narcissism, before I entered therapy, before I realized that nothing I could do would make my mother love me, I got married to a man who I thought was a prince among men.

I had already been in terrible relationships with abusive, selfish men and in my 27-year-old wisdom decided that any man I could live with for a year and still feel good about would be The One. I had long since given up the notion that my partner had to be handsome or buff or Mr. Personality…I had settled on sober, dependable, trustworthy, intelligent, reasonably well-educated and having a steady job that paid well as indispensable criteria, and once I found a man like that if, after a year, I had not discovered he was a wife beater or a skirt chaser or mean and punitive, he would be a viable candidate for marriage. Nobody, after all, can hide their true personality for a whole year, ya know?

Well, I was wrong…in fact, not only could he hide the reality of himself for a whole year, in later years I found a friend whose boyfriend concealed who and what he really was for four years. I probably don’t have to tell you that my marriage didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.

What brings this up today is that I realized that, after figuring out that my mother was a narcissist, I recognized that my ex-husband was one too…and this weekend I realized that my present husband shares many traits and tastes with my narcissistic ex-husband.

But this is not a bad thing. You see, during that first year, my ex (who I will call “James” here to prevent any confusion) was exactly what I was looking for: he was patient and accommodating, dependable, trustworthy, and all of those other things I was looking for in a partner. He was an engineer, so he was technically minded, he was highly intelligent, and better educated than I was. His personal interests included finance and economics and politics, and he had little quirks like keeping a logbook of all of the money he spent on fuel and maintenance of his car, recorded with the date, reason for cost, and the amount. He also regularly calculated his gas mileage from this log. He could watch TV movies back-to-back for an entire day, movies he recorded on VHS tape…and he would watch those movies with a magazine in his lap, reading articles on finance and economics while he watched TV. He liked my cooking. He was a good earner and seemed to be good with money…all things that should make a good husband.

But, interestingly enough, everything I said about James in the previous paragraph also applies to my present husband! Even that quirky little thing about recording the costs for the car…James kept a ledger book in the glove compartment, my present husband does it on his smart phone. My relationship with James lasted 13 years and my husband and I have been together for the same length of time. But with James, after a decade I was a crumbling shell of the woman I had been when we met, broken, barely functioning, suicidal. Earlier this month my husband and I celebrated our 11^th anniversary and I am looking forward to another eleven and even more.

So, what is the difference? Why would I respond to these two very similar men in such a different fashion? The answer lies not in what is similar between them, but their differences. And not superficial differences but those things that go deep into a person’s character.

One of the problems we ACoNs may face is choosing friends and partners and inadvertently choosing to bring more narcissists into our lives. Narcissists are very good at mimicking normal, they are excellent at making themselves look like the answer to your dreams…until they have you hooked. And they have an almost unerring radar for finding those of us who were raised to be a scapegoat, a provider of NSupply to narcissists near and far. They find us like wolves find wounded prey animals and then they do whatever is necessary to get us into position for the kill. And we, deprived of the most basic love and nurturing during our formative years, are suckers for people who appear to fill our shamefully neglected emotional needs.

James knew I was burned by flaky men who took advantage and then took off. They got what they wanted by pretending to give me what I needed. Raised by a narcissist mother and a largely absent father, I was hypervigilant to the moods of my narcissist and learned quickly that anticipating her needs/wants and providing them before they were demanded was the best way to stave off the explosions of wrath. My mother was extremely volatile, emotionally, and had the terrifying ability to go from sweet and smiling to a full-blown screaming rage in the blink of an eye…and back to sweetly smiling just as fast. Living with her was like living in a mine field with just a few paths of safety mapped out…and one of those paths was to give her what she wanted before she demanded it.

This, of course, set the stage for my “operating condition” for the years that followed. I managed to hook up with men who, like my mother, had volatile personalities and, to prevent explosions, I employed my hypervigilance and anticipatory ways. Whatever, whoever they wanted me to be, I would be in their presence (just like in my childhood, however, the mouse would be and do whatever she wanted when the cat was away). This pattern of behaviour, however, was not conducive to the establishment and perpetuation of a healthy long-term relationship. Once the men got what they wanted from me, they abandoned me or abused me until I left them. By age 26 I had three children and had been abandoned by my last boyfriend when our child was only a few months old.

I was never a stupid person and I tried to learn from the events in my life. What I had the most trouble with was figuring out when a person was fooling me and when he was sincere. The father of my youngest child stayed with me throughout my pregnancy, supported me and was what I considered to be kind and loving. Once the baby was born, however, he began pulling away and by the time I had recovered from my Caesarean enough to return to work, he was gone. For a long time I wondered what I might have done to drive him away, but I later learned that I was the first of three women he did this too…he even married the third one but abandoned her and their baby when the child was just a few months old. Obviously, he had an issue but just as obviously, I seemed to be incapable of determining whether or not a man had an issue that would cause him to leave me—or abuse me—before getting involved with him.

James seemed like a breath of fresh air. He was a professional man, unlike my previous lovers, well-educated, well-read, well-spoken. One of the things I remember finding wondrous about him was his patience, something my mother and previous male partners seemed to have in short supply. I remember James taking me to a pharmacy to fill a prescription and I apologized in advance for the time it was going to take, for taking up his valuable time waiting around for me. He shrugged and said “No problem…why don’t you leave the baby in the car with me while you are in there, then you won’t have to deal with him as well as everything else?” I was amazed and I remember congratulating myself for finally finding a man with some patience and sensitivity. How could I have known it was just an act?

Well, forty years later, I have the answer to that question: if he seems too good to be true, he is. Real people have flaws and they show them. Nobody is perfect…oh, he can be “perfect for you,” as my husband is for me, but that means that he has flaws that you find acceptable, even endearing…imperfections that you can live with or even enjoy. A person with no faults is either faking it to impress you or s/he is a narcissist, being what will attract you until you are hooked and s/he can abandon the disguise.

James managed to last for an entire year and, against my better judgment, I married him. I say “against my better judgment” because I let my logical mind and my need for security overrule my intuition, which had seen—and dismissed—numerous red flags during the year. I had already failed at marriage and didn’t really want to marry again, but I had made the cardinal error of letting him know too much about my inner workings…he knew just how emotionally insecure I was and how badly I wanted a house of my own so I could feel secure (somehow I had equated the two…I believed when I had my own house, I would no longer feel as if the rug was about to be yanked out from beneath me). When I balked at his blandishments about marriage and he finally took on board that I was afraid to get married again, lest I fail at it another time, he bribed me with the promise of a house of my own. And that was the tipping point.

Superficially, James and my present husband are very much alike, but when you analyse them, what shakes out is that my present husband is the genuine article…he is, in real life, what James pretended to be for the year before I married him. My criteria were fine…what I wanted in a husband was not unusual or unhealthy…for the last eleven years I have had a husband who fits that criteria very well. They even share some quirky behaviours, like the log book for the car and where James watched TV with a magazine in his lap, my present husband has his tablet and is reading on-line articles about politics, economics, and finance while watching movies he has recorded on the PVR. The difference between James and my present husband is that I gave James enough information in our early days for him to figure out what kind of man I wanted and he recreated himself to appear to be that man; my husband was himself from the beginning and over time it became obvious that he really is what James pretended to be.

For the longest time I wondered what I did to cause James to change from the loving, patient, attentive man I agreed to marry into the monster I ended up with. For more than ten years I turned myself inside out, trying to find the magic key to unlocking the door behind which was hidden the wonderful man I married. I took the blame for his change, believing it was something I did or said that caused him to turn into a cruel, manipulative, short-tempered, selfish, inhumane excuse for a human being. I believed if I could discover what it was I did or said that caused him to change, I could have the man I married back. It was not until I discovered narcissism that I began to understand that the monster was the real man, the loving partner I thought I married was the fake.

It was an epiphany and the implications were huge. It wasn’t my fault…he wasn’t a monster because of something I did or said…or didn’t do or say…he was a monster because that was the real man, the man behind the mask of kindness and patience and love. Where I was at fault was in letting him know early on what I needed or wanted in a partner so that he could create himself to be that person. In seeking to evoke his empathy with my sad tale of childhood abuse and bad luck in adult love relationships, I gave him a detailed blueprint of what he needed to pretend to be in order to win me. And, in my tales of a life of woe, I confirmed to him that I was a well-trained scapegoat, a well-skilled provider of N-supply, a person who would subordinate the very essence of herself to obtain even the merest crumbs of approval and affection. I was as irresistible to a narcissist as a wounded hare to a fox, and he was determined to not only have me, but to bind me to him through marriage so that I couldn’t just pick up and walk away when his abuse became too much.

In my epiphany, I further discovered that I was a willing accomplice in my victimization: I told him everything he needed to know to entrap me. I let him know what hurt me, I reacted to probes into my feelings so he knew what my triggers were. I ignored the red flags that popped up regularly, even when my conscious mind knew better…I ignored them because they got in the way of what I wanted. If I acknowledged them, I would have to end the relationship and start all over again with a new man and a new set of unknowns. The idea of going it alone, with no man and without wanting a man in my life, never occurred to me.

It took ten years for me to really wake up and see what had really been going on. Even then, I knew nothing about narcissism, but I knew I had married a male version of my mother and that was a bad thing. My fear of my mother coupled with her hostility and indifference to my feelings led me to contemplate suicide for the first time when I was nine, and to my first attempt when I was seventeen. James and his cruel indifference led me to the same brink. And when I finally put them together, thanks to a heavy hint from an insightful therapist, I was horrified: I had married the male counterpart to my mother and had been trying to resolve my issues with her by trying to find ways to make my marriage work. I had taken on all of the blame and responsibility for the flaws in the relationship, believing I was somehow provoking his gaslighting, triangulating, and fault-finding. And as long as I believed that, I was trapped in the web, a willing but unwitting prisoner.

My present husband, on the surface, is much like my ex. The difference is simply that James was pretending to be what I wanted in a man, my present husband actually is. And at the time I married James, I had neither the knowledge nor the self-confidence to actually see that James was pretending and because I lacked those abilities, I set up a hurdle for him to leap, reasoning that if he could succeed, then he would be a good husband. In theory there is nothing wrong with that, but in practice I made a critical error: the hurdle I created had nothing to do with reality. I could have set up “he can knit potholders” as the hurdle and gotten just as accurate a result.

We who were raised by narcissists are especially vulnerable to them…they can pick us out of a crowd like a cutting horse can cut a calf out of a herd. And we respond to them because we have been conditioned to do so…they fit seamlessly into our “comfort zone,” especially if we haven’t done any real work to redefine that comfort zone. And while we can design little rat mazes for them to run through to prove to us they aren’t going to hurt us, if our little mazes aren’t based on reality, it isn’t going to work. And even if the mazes are based on reality, if we allow ourselves to dismiss those red flags, if we explain them away, then we still end up at the end of a narcissist’s specimen pin.

Coming from a narcissistic upbringing makes us vulnerable to choosing these kinds of partners…and friends, too. We need to learn to put what we want to see in people secondary to what we really, uncomfortably, observe. When we can start acknowledging those red flags and not dismissing them, when we can put the fairy tale relationship we carry in our heads away and stop trying to fit the most recent lover or friend into the role, we begin to make progress. Key to this is to stop trying to find reasons to find a person acceptable…to give up the idea that we can or should remake a person to fit our ideals…and simply accept or reject a person based on whether or not they already fit into our own personal scheme of things.

And that brings me back to my husbands…obviously my criteria and my tastes have held constant and what I wanted was neither unreasonable nor unhealthy. My mistake was in ignoring the red flags and not allowing myself to recognize that James really didn’t fit my needs, he was just pretending to. My present husband, though, fits the criteria admirably: he is, for real, what James merely pretended to be for a year.

In retrospect, it turns out it was not all that difficult to do. If you start with a realistic and healthy set of expectations in a partner, pay attention to the red flags in the people you meet, avoid the temptation to try to change people to fit into your criteria, and have sufficient patience, your odds of successfully avoiding the relationship trap set for you by your narcissistic upbringing are excellent.

Narcissists and Hypocrisy

They go together like a horse and carriage, don’t they? Hypocrisy is just as essential to a narcissist’s functioning as a horse is to a carriage’s.

You see, it is the very essence of a narcissist to be self-serving, which makes things like truth, integrity, and reliability a bit of an anathema to them. Narcissists are all about image—substance means nothing to them—and so such virtues as truth and honesty and integrity must be sacrificed when they don’t support the image, making narcissists bred-in-the-bone hypocrites.

The Free Dictionary lists the following as definitions of “hypocrisy”: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. The practice of professing standards, beliefs, etc., contrary to one’s real character or actual behaviour, especially the pretence of virtue and piety; the condition of a person pretending to be something he is not, especially in the area of morals or religion; a false presentation of belief or feeling. Insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have. Like denial, not everyone who engages in hypocrisy is a narcissist, but all narcissists are hypocrites. It comes with the personality disorder.

Hypocrisy is really nothing more than a form of dishonesty. It is professing to be one thing—polishing the image one projects onto the world—while actually being something else. The narcissist’s whole life is a lie designed to fool “outsiders” so the narcissist can get Nsupply from them. Narcissists, for all they operate the same, are still individuals so each will have his own particular form of Nsupply to seek. For some it is the adulation of others, for some it is pity and sympathy, for others it is fear and power. Some may seek fame or fortune, others may shun notoriety and seek what they believe to be expressions of respect from others but they are all doing exactly the same thing in the same way with the same goal: doing anything they can that works to feed the hungry beast within.

The narcissist carries fire in one hand and water in the other. In other words, he is…duplicitous, engages in double-dealing, is two-faced, speaks with forked tongue…the expression indicates that a person is prepared to act in totally contradictory ways to achieve his purpose. Narcissists are not stupid, however, but they are arrogant. So while there is no act of treachery too great for a narcissist to commit to get what he wants, he can be restrained by fear of consequences, assuming his arrogance doesn’t convince him he won’t get caught.

In the classic poem, Dante’s Inferno, hypocrites reside in the 8th circle of Hell…listlessly walking along wearing gilded lead cloaks, which represent the falsity behind the surface appearance of their actions – falsity that weighs them down and makes spiritual progress impossible for them. And so it is with hypocrites: invested in their own lies, chained to the necessity to keep up the front, ensnared by their own illusions, hypocrites are nothing but pathetic liars, trapped in a web of their own making, unable to grow emotionally or spiritually. They are forever stuck where they are, having to invent more and more lies, create more and more illusions, fool more and more people, just to keep from sliding backwards into their real selves.


You know people like this—we all do. Some of us had mothers like this, women who gave the world their sweetest faces and mouthed the words expected of them while showing their true, ugly colours at home. We’ve had bosses and co-workers, religious and political leaders, siblings and friends, who showed one face to the public and another in private. There was recently a scandal about a televangelist, Creflo Dollar, a man who preaches brotherly love over the airwaves and who was arrested for choking his teen aged daughter. Additionally, Rev. Dollar preaches a “prosperity Gospel,” holding himself up as an example of his message that God wants us all to be prosperous, despite the fact that the god he professes to represent said, in Matthew 19:22 that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

My NM was a master hypocrite. One of the best examples I can relate was told to me by my step-mother, a woman who first met me when I was about eight years old. My stepmother had often observed my mother’s blatant favouritism towards my GC Bro, something she could neither fathom nor explain. Whether it was clothes or medical care, privileges or pocket money, GCBro got what he wanted I had to come up with justifications why I should have whatever it was I wanted (even if it was something as basic as a bra that fit properly). My stepmother was actually embarrassed to see her husband’s daughter wearing cast-offs that were 20 years out of fashion or dresses more suitable for flat-chested ten-year olds than a young teen with a rapidly developing figure—so embarrassed, in fact, that she bought me a small but age-appropriate wardrobe to be kept at my father’s house and worn when I was visiting.

It should be noted here that my NM was one of three children and the only daughter and was fussed over by both her parents, especially her father. She grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, a time when the society still had strict gender roles and in which girls, while cosseted by their parents, at the same time enjoyed much less freedom than their brothers. Everyone I spoke to about her—her mother, her brothers, an auntie—all said the same thing: she was coddled and spoiled, but her behaviour was still expected to conform to what was “proper” for a young lady of her era.

For some reason unknown to us all, some 25 years after divorcing my father, NM apparently set aside her irrational antipathy towards my stepmother and suddenly began acting like they were best friends. On one occasion, when they happened to run into each other in town and my stepmother couldn’t get away fast enough, NM buttonholed her and went on an extended rant about how badly her mother had treated her and how she had, unjustly and to NM’s great emotional pain, heavily favoured her brothers. Stepmama related this conversation to me some years after it happened, rolling her eyes through the whole telling, ending up with “I wanted to grab her and shake her and scream ‘You damned hypocrite! You stand here telling me all this after treating your own daughter like a poor relation you were stuck with?’ I wanted to smack her!”

Living a life of hypocrisy requires a strong tolerance for cognitive dissonance—or an extraordinary ability to fool oneself. I suspect narcissists, particularly malignant narcissists, fall into the latter category. If they redefine what they are doing so that it is “different” from what they publicly disdain, they never come up against that bugaboo, cognitive dissonance. I have a particular abhorrence of euphemisms as a result of my NM’s creativity when it came to redefining her behaviours so that she was not tainted by the same brush she used to tar others.

A good example of that was her hostility towards poor Mrs. MacKenzie, a widow with two young daughters who lived next door to us when I was about six. NM called the police on Mrs. MacKenzie for “beating those poor girls” while she, herself, beat me mercilessly with a thin leather strap that left whip-like welts on my legs and buttocks. How did she manage to seeing herself as the “hypocrite” I so clearly see? By 1) redefining what she was doing: she was disciplining an incorrigible child (and she called the beatings “spankings”) and 2) labelling me a discipline problem when, in fact, I was too afraid of her to defy her and the majority of my sins were committed out of ignorance (she would tell me to do something, fail to instruct me in how to do it, then beat the crap out of me for doing it wrong). In her mind, she was being a good mother, disciplining a problem child while Mrs. MacKenzie was a child abuser.

Hypocrites, particularly narcissistic hypocrites, may tell themselves that it is OK for them to do something, but not for others. In this situation, they have convinced themselves that they are special, that the rules that apply to others do not apply to them. A good example of this is Rick Santorum, erstwhile Republican presidential nominee and his rabid anti-abortion stance. Except that his wife had a second-trimester abortion with his agreement. His position is that abortion for any reason—incest, rape, pregnant little girl, to save the life of the mother—is wrong and should be outlawed. And yet when it was his wife, delirious from a high fever and looking death in the face, Santorum himself authorized the induction of labour in her fourth month in order to save her life. You or I get to die, leaving behind our motherless children, but not Rick Santorum’s wife and kids… 

Another trick of the narcissistic hypocrite is to blame the victim for his hypocritical behaviour in an effort to rationalize or normalize or simply make what he did OK. I have a dear friend who is in a relationship with a man who has abused her emotionally and verbally for years and recently has escalated to physical abuse. He does not view himself as an abuser because, in his mind, she provoked him, she made him do it. In his own view, he is a peaceful man who would never hurt anyone…

One of the hallmarks of narcissistic hypocrisy is the conviction that others must follow the rules, obey the laws…everyone except them. My narcissistic ex-husband was a great proponent of this theory. And arrogant enough to actually tell me to my face! Other people had to follow the rules so that he would know what to expect from them. Other people should stop when the traffic light turns yellow so he can jump ahead of everyone else waiting at the intersection without getting hit; they should also wait a bit after the light turns green so he can run a red with impunity. For the narcissistic hypocrite, rules are made to be broken, but only by them.

Narcissism cannot exist without hypocrisy. In order to rationalize or justify the behaviours narcissists undertake in order to get their Nsupply, it is inevitable that at some point, they are going have to take the hypocritical way out. They will always find ways to justify themselves, even if it simply comes down to narcissism’s “I’m special” component.

When you engage with a narcissist, expect hypocrisy. Expect double standards not only in his personal life, but in his observations of the lives and activities of others. Unless you enjoy courting disappointment, don’t expect fairness from a narcissist, at least not fairness as you or I would define it. My ex-husband professed a belief in gender equality but when I asked him to do half of the housework (I worked a full-time job too), he refused on the grounds that he made more money that I did. My view was that we both were out of the house ten hours a day, counting the commute—I had no more time to do housework than he did, so while I fixed dinner (he couldn’t cook), would he do some tidying up or maybe clean the kitchen after dinner. His view was that until I earned as much money as he did (he was an engineer and I was a secretary) and therefore made myself his equal, he was exempt from household chores—but still he saw himself as a staunch supporter of equality of the sexes!

This kind of thing can drive a person with a normal brain to absolute distraction. Like gaslighting, it can make you feel crazy and unbalanced. It is deeply unjust, something that strikes as the heart of anyone who was cursed with a narcissistic parent and forced into the role of family scapegoat. And yet, if the narcissist’s hypocrisy is dragged out and cast at his feet, he would deny the hypocrisy, insisting that you are misunderstanding, misinterpreting, or simply making a mountain out of a mole hill.

You can’t win with hypocrites of any stripe, and you can’t win with a narcissist. Both are deeply invested in their hypocrisy, their mind games, their entitlements. To maintain your sanity, all you can really do is walk away—and stay gone.

Denial—the core of Narcissism

Denial is at the core of narcissism. Without it, Narcissistic Personality Disorder simply could not exist.

“Denial (also called abnegation) is a defense mechanism…in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.” Simply stated, denial is lying to yourself and believing the lie.

Brought down to its very essence, denial is expressed in two basic forms: lying to oneself about others (the woman who cannot admit her man is cheating on her, for example, even though there is ample evidence of his perfidy) or lying to oneself about one’s own self (the jowly, bloated, middle aged matron believing she looks “hot” in fashions better suited to her 13-year-old daughter). One need not be a narcissist to engage in denial—we all do it from time to time, whether it is in reference to romance or fashion or health. But while not all deniers are narcissists, all narcissists are deniers—narcissism could not exist without the ability to deny reality and believe that denial.

When you are in denial about yourself it can take more than one form: it can be as superficial as believing you look really good with a trout pout or as deep as believing that you are entitled to whatever it is you want by whatever means you must employ to get it. You can deny what the mirror tells you, substituting in your vision what you want to see; you can deny that the rules of society and law apply equally to all of us and behave—without qualm—in a way the rest of us believe to be unethical.

Denial with respect to others is something you see all the time: people who essentially bury their heads in the sand rather than acknowledge unpleasant truths they don’t want to deal with. But there is a deeper, more pernicious kind of denial with regard to other people: the refusal to acknowledge the feelings of others and the substitution of something less true but more palatable to the denier.

The narcissist engages in denial that serves him, that allows him to always be right, that allows him to feel good about himself, no matter the cost to others. The narcissist’s lack of empathy allows him to look at someone who is crying as a result of some cold or cruel remark he made and believe she is not really hurt, she is trying to manipulate him. Or, if acknowledging she is hurt, she is hurt not because of something he said or did but because she has chosen to be hurt by his words or deeds.

Because a narcissist does not live in reality, however, sometimes his denial backfires on him and causes problems—but don’t think for a minute the narcissist learns anything from it. The boyfriend of a friend of mine now has a partially crippled hand due to his denial: he got an infection and refused to see a doctor about it, saying it was “fine.” Eventually, pain (and his girlfriend) drove him to see a doctor but by then the bones were involved and some of them eventually fused. His denial of the severity of his injury—whether because he subconsciously thought he was Superman or whether he was afraid to see a physician—caused a far-reaching consequence. Did he learn from this? No—he blamed the cat that scratched him and the next time he got really sick, he refused treatment until he was so sick he had to be admitted to a hospital in critical condition.

Unfortunately, most narcissistic denial doesn’t have the outcome of the narcissist being the only one injured. My mother denied I needed glasses—my science teacher sent me to the school nurse because I could not read the blackboard from the front row. The nurse checked my eyes and told my mother I needed glasses. When my mother said I was “faking it,” the nurse gave my mother the choice of taking me to the optometrist herself or she would call in CPS and lay a charge of neglect (she had been dealing with my mother for years by this time and was not fooled by her at all). All the way to the optometrist’s office I was harangued, terrorized and screamed at, accused of faking, and promised the beating of my lifetime after the doctor’s tests proved it. The drive home was absolutely silent—I needed glasses stronger than hers—but no apology was forthcoming for her tirade en route. Her denial of the reality of my needs took the form of believing me to be a “drama queen” and a “hypochondriac.” Even when I was truly sick, like when I had pneumonia or an allergy attack that swelled my eyes completely shut, I was accused of “playing up” my symptoms and pretending that I was sicker than I was. My mother’s denial of my medical needs not only caused me unnecessary pain and suffering, it set the stage for me neglecting my medical care: without my mother responding to my needs appropriately, I learned to endure long past the time I should seek treatment, because I was never sure when I should seek it.

The narcissist lives in denial about himself as well as others. To himself, a narcissist is special, talented, entitled, better than everyone else. He may be a short, plain, social bumbler, but in his mind, he is the superior being deserving of a supermodel girlfriend and a rich man’s lifestyle. That he doesn’t have it is not his fault—it is the fault of those who are jealous of his abilities, who don’t like him because of his colour, who won’t give him a chance because of his origins or religion or the school he went to (or didn’t go to) or his parents because they denied him those things that would have given him entrée into that to which he believes he is entitled.

In the narcissist, denial can be applied to any and everything. Laws? For the narcissist, they only apply if he is caught—but you had better abide by them! We must all be predictable so that the narcissist can anticipate what we will do and make his plans accordingly. It’s OK if he fails to return something borrowed—even money—but you have no such leeway. His front yard can be an overgrown mess and his house need painting, but you had better keep yours up or you’ll lower his property values!

James, my N ex-husband, was famous for his denial of economic reality—and when caught out, he was invariably angry with those whom he identified as the cause of the problems that cost him money. He, of course, never included himself among those at fault.

When I met James, he had about $3000 (about $16,000 in today’s money) invested in a company called Bowmar. “In 1971, Indiana-based Bowmar Instruments introduced the first hand-held LED (Light Emitting Diode) calculator. The “Bowmar Brain” was a huge success. Other manufacturers developed cheaper calculators, and when the company could no longer compete, it went bankrupt in 1976.” As Bowmar’s share price sank, James refused to acknowledge the company was crashing and he needed to sell out to minimize his losses. His denial of the reality of Bowmar’s decline—he kept telling me “it will go back up…then I’ll sell…”—caused him to ride Bowmar right down to the bottom. And then he got mad. He got mad at Bowmar for crashing, he got mad at the stock market, and he got mad at me for being right…so much so that when, a few years later, I suggested he buy a new stock called Redken, he got mad all over again and refused to invest a penny. Redken, of course, went on to be a huge success in its market.

The narcissist can sink himself into denial and hold fast to it, no matter how much reality may attempt to batter him. When James and I divorced, I retained possession the family home for a few years (and had to make the mortgage payments), after which we were supposed to sell it. I called in a real estate agent who had worked my neighbourhood for many years and asked her to get a comprehensive report of sales in my neighbourhood against which we could compare my house in order to set a selling price. Considering the age, condition and location of the house, she set the optimum selling price at $215,000, telling me to be prepared to accept offers at $200,000. But when I tried to get James to sign the sales authorization papers, he refused. He wanted to sell the house for $279,000, significantly more than the house was worth, and some $60,000 more than the best house on the street had sold for! And ours was far from the best house on the street.

I couldn’t imagine why he was fixating on this figure and eventually had to drag him back to court to get a judge to set a price and authorize the sale. I took my agent with me and she carefully explained to the judge why she had recommended her price and presented charts and other research of the sales of similar homes in my area over the previous year. When it came James’ turn to speak, he had no supporters, no presentation, no statistics. What he had was this: He wanted to by a house in Colorado, where he was currently living. He needed $90,000 cash to buy the house free and clear. So, he did calculations determining how much he would have to sell the California house for and, after taxes, commissions, paying off the old mortgage and splitting the proceeds with me, have that $90K left over. And the figure the house needed to sell for, in order for James to realize his $90K profit, was $279K.

He was in complete denial of the reality of the property market and sales. He was livid with the judge when he set the listing price at $215K and ordered we accept any offer of $200K or more. He was incandescent with fury when the judge stuck him with my lawyer’s bill and court costs for the hearing, saying if he had been reasonable, the hearing would never have been necessary. He fully expected the judge to side with him despite our research and the figures my estate agent had presented (and all of this had been presented to James before we decided to go to court—he simply denied their veracity). Interestingly, after being on the market for seven months at $279K and not a single showing, when the house was reduced to $215K it sold for $200K within a month.

James saw himself as a victim—he was my victim in the divorce, the victim of sandbaggers and backstabbers at work, the victim of the police who gave him citations for doing things (like speeding, running red lights, driving on the shoulder during commute traffic) that he considered harmless—speeding was OK because he was “in control”; blowing a red light was ok because he “looked and no traffic was coming”; driving the shoulder was OK because there was plenty of room and why should he wait with all those other morons who weren’t smart enough to take an opportunity when it presented? He was the victim of my “rapacious attorney” for taking him to court every month and sticking him with her bills—even though we only took him to court when he was in violation of court orders for things like support and maintenance costs for the house. He simply could not face that the trouble that were costing him so much money were of his own doing. So, instead of making his support payments on time, instead of paying half the bill to fix the furnace and the roof, instead of giving me half of the joint tax return, he viewed the situation as him being victimized by a greedy ex-wife, her voracious attorney and biased judges. Had he not been mired so deeply in denial he would have seen that on-time payments of both support and household repairs and refraining from forging my signature on a government check would have kept him out of court and my attorney’s fingers out of his wallet. He was so invested in his victimhood that he spent four years creating situation after situation that forced me to drag him back to court for redress...and every one cost him money and left him feeling further victimized.

My mother was no less in denial about most aspects of her life. When I was about 10, she told my father that she was going to start “seeing other men,” and that she might bring some of them home with her…and if he didn’t like it, he could leave. This was the 1950s and she was in complete denial about the moral strictures of the day. She didn’t need to adhere to a moral code she didn’t like (although the rest of us damn sure had to!). One of the clearest examples of her denial was how she treated my growing, developing body. As my breasts grew and my height increased, instead of taking me shopping to buy me appropriate undergarments and school clothes, she took my little girl dresses (size 12 or so) and let the seams out as far as they could go, let the hems down and even stitched a band of lace to the bottom of the dresses to lengthen them. I just thought she was cheap, but my stepmother remarked that she was doing an awful lot of work just to be cheap—it was her opinion that I was becoming competition for male attention and by keeping me looking like a little girl, NM could not only deny her own advancing age, but keep me a child and not a rival. In context of the way she lived and thought, it made perfect sense.

Denial is always self serving. There are a lot of people in America who are unwilling to admit even to themselves that they are racist. Rather than admit, for example, that they simply do not want what they secretly consider to be a sub-human to dictate to them as the ruler of their country, they will come out with incredibly outlandish ways to try to discredit the black guy in the Oval Office and get him evicted, without dirtying their reputations by revealing their closet racism. Chief among these are the “birthers,” those who refuse, no matter what kind of evidence is presented, to believe that Obama is a natural born American citizen. His birth certificate was released from the state archives of Hawaii—and they called it a forgery. The governor, who was personally acquainted with Obama’s parents at the time of his birth, has attested personal knowledge of the man’s birth in Hawaii—they refuse to believe him. Not even the fine point of law—the technical meaning of “natural born”—sways them from their denial (there are two kinds of citizens—natural born and naturalized; if either one of your parents is a US citizen at the time of your birth, it does not matter where in the world you are born, you are a “natural born” US citizen). Their denial of the incontrovertible facts of Obama’s citizenship serves them—it gives them hope that they can remove this person from the presidency and allows them to avoid accepting that their leader is a man of what they secretly consider to be a member of an inferior race.

Denial is a peculiar thing but it always serves the denier. My daughter, despite authentication from half a dozen people in the family who were—or became—aware of my mother’s plot to steal my children and give them to her brother for adoption, has consistently refused to believe the truth. NM told her that I had abandoned her, that I didn’t want her anymore and as proof, cited that I did not make any attempt to contact her for the whole eight years she was gone. No amount of logic or proof to the contrary has swayed my daughter from believing that despite knowing that I didn’t know where she was, despite a large kraft envelope of cards and letters I sent to her and her brother over the years (in care of my grandmother), despite my father, my uncle, and even my grandparents telling her I did not abandon her and that I had made regular attempts to locate her and they blocked me.

How did this denial serve her? It gave her a safe target for her anger: if she got mad at NM or some other family member, they might reject her but since she believed I had already done so, there was nothing to lose. By siding with NM and becoming virtually her only ally, she became NM’s new Golden Child. When she needed a fat loan for a down payment on her first house, Dear Daughter approached her grandmother (who was flush with cash inherited from her own parents) for a loan. Several years later, when NM wrote her will, she told DD that I was being written out of it in her favour, a fact DD could not wait to impart to me over the phone.

“Do you think that’s fair?” I asked.

I could hear the dismissive indifference in her voice, “Well, you and Grammi never got along, anyway.”

Not only was she in denial about whether or not it was fair for my mother to disinherit me in her favour, she saw nothing at all wrong with her two brothers being disinherited right along beside me. Her denial netted her a fortune…literally…and then she lied to her brothers about it, saying Grammi had left the money to all three of them but she was to administer it.

Like the trusting idiot I can be, I believed that foreshadowed her intent to split the money with her brothers. Since this is what I would have done in my own will—split my estate evenly among my kids—I was somewhat mollified at the money having gone to her. If she was sharing it her brothers, then I could go along with that. But it didn’t work out that way—when my oldest son, who was disabled, approached her for the money to buy a car, she refused because she had already spent it all buying herself a new house—a McMansion in a neighbouring town, a huge overgrown monstrosity of a place for her family of three (she had empty rooms that she had no purpose for!). And when asked why, she denied any intent to share with her brothers—it was her money and she could do what she wanted with it.

Denial is at the absolute core of narcissism. Without the ability to deny one’s own feelings of inadequacy and shame, without the ability to deny how one’s self-serving actions affect others, without the ability to deny that one is part of a whole rather than an isolated entity, narcissism is simply not possible. When you deal in reality you hear the note of hurt in another’s voice and respond to it viscerally, you wince with another’s pain—even today I cannot watch my husband inject his insulin without feeling a little twinge in my belly as the needle pierces his flesh, and he has been a diabetic for a decade.

Denial is at the heart of every narcissist, it is at the centre of their being, it is what allows them to live conscience-free, to truly believe in their superiority over us lesser mortals, to be blameless in all things. Without denial, narcissists simply cannot exist.

Next up: Selective memory

Narcissists are Delusional

From: House of mirrors

Let’s take a look at why malignant narcissists not only don't change but become worse. Keep in mind, they have mastered a lifetime of this twisted way of being in the world, and are always pushing their warped behavior to the limits.


Narcissists are delusional. They refuse to confront reality. Like a child, they use illusions and distortions to maintain their fantasy about themselves and the world around them. And everyone is expected to play along. If you refuse to play your role in the narcissist's fantasy production then the narcissist child screams, cries, and stomps her feet declaring that something is wrong with you.

Narcissists are not delusional in the sense that they see little green men or hear disembodied voices telling them to kill the local sports team or have worms living under their skin. They aren’t schizophrenic or hallucinating. No, narcissists simply don’t deal in the truth. They have fantasy perceptions of themselves and the world around them (and the people in it) that they convince themselves are real. Rather like a child, they live in a pretend world. And like a child with an invisible friend, it is very, very real to them.

Narcissists are very good at projection. They are good at rewriting history to suit their ends. They are masters of taking a grain or two of truth and cooking up a huge messy pot of lies. And they are positively brilliant at making themselves believe it all, even to the point of trying to destroy those who would drag them kicking and screaming into reality.

James (my N-ex) was brilliant at projecting. I used to walk around the house feeling like I didn’t really exist, that when he looked at me he saw someone entirely different, someone I didn’t recognize, but someone he did. One day we were going to take the kids up over one of the local mountains to a valley park that had picnic tables, a small lake and riding stables. Since my car was too small, we were going to take his.

Because he was too busy with TV and some financial program he was watching, we were running late. If James had been obsessed with these financial programs and magazines as a way to grow some investments and wealth, that would be one thing, but James was focussed on “one big score,” to use his phrase. It would be too mundane, too ignominious of him to simply earn and wisely invest to make money. No, he had to find an edge, an angle, a way to make others gasp in awe at his brilliance in coming up with a viable get-rich quick scheme…that, or he had to find a way to do it illegally and not get caught so he could gloat over it. Knowing this about James, I had little patience with him sacrificing time with the kids for yet another foray into the fantasy of being a sudden zillionaire.

The plan had been for me to get the kids ready while he took the car out and filled the gas tank and, because the car had a slow leak, top up the radiator. He was then to stop by a sandwich shop and pick up our order. Meanwhile, I would be getting ready and gathering up the rest of the stuff we would need like blankets, hats, sunscreen, drinks, etc. He groused and mumbled when I insisted he turn off the TV and get going because we were almost ready. He left and came back in amazingly quick time.

With the kids in the back seat and the picnic in the trunk, we headed up the mountain. But only a third of the way up the car started to misbehave. It was making rattling sounds in the engine and losing speed. But James kept driving. After it became obvious that the car was definitely in trouble and I yelled at him to pull over, James gave me a sidelong glance and his mouth formed into a sly smirk and he did. I slid into the driver’s seat, only to see that the temperature gauge was pegged to one side—the car was grossly overheated!

When I asked him if he had put water into the radiator, he said he had not. When I asked him why, he said he had not had time, and since I was in such an all-fired hurry, he gave me what I wanted. When I asked if he realized that running the car dry could seize up the engine, he gave me a contemptuous look and said “of course.” I was so flabbergasted, I couldn’t speak.

My oldest son and I saved the day by getting water from a helpful nearby farmer and filling the radiator before we resume the chug up the mountain. Despite James’ effort to derail the day, the kids had a good time and we made it home safely. But I was still angry with James and still baffled as to what he was thinking when he decided to strand us on a mountainside with a car he had deliberately caused to malfunction. I got answers, but it was the shock of my life!

Once the kids were in bed I asked him what was going on with him that afternoon. He professed to not know what I was talking about. So I asked him point-blank why he had not put water in the car.

“To teach you a lesson,” he said with a completely straight face.

“Huh?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

What came out of his mouth next made the hair on my neck stand on end, it was so creepy. While he had been gone getting the gas and the sandwiches, he had had an entire conversation with me in his head! It was of the “if I said this, then you would say that, and then I would say this and you would reply that” variety, and I listened slack-jawed as he recounted his fantasy conversation. And it made him very, very angry with me!

“Who were you really talking to, James?” I finally asked him. “I would never say those kinds of things—that’s nothing like me. I actually asked you to get water in the car, so why would I get angry with you for taking the time to do that?”

“Well, that is what my mother would do to my father…” I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence—I didn’t need to. The alarm bells were going off in my head, epiphanies were falling like dominoes behind my eyes, realization was creeping over me like a cold chill. I was no more to him than a blank screen upon which he projected his mother. Every word I had spoken, every opinion or belief or value I had voiced in the previous six years were never heard by him, never taken on board because they were drowned out by his projection of his mother onto me. I did not exist!! He knew nothing about me or who I was or how I felt or what I believed because none of that could pierce that projection of his mother. We were together for another seven years and he never did find out who I really was.

My mother had her own kind of delusions. She was the neighbourhood paragon (pretty ironic, considering we had to leave our small town in Oregon under the cloud of scandal she had created!). Judgmental to the nth degree, mother took it upon herself to save the neighbourhood from the woman next door, Mrs. McKenzie. The war she waged on that poor woman was awful! Narcissists think that they way they think is the way we all should think, that their likes, dislikes, beliefs and values should be shared by ALL of us. But most of all, they think they are the centre of the universe and any attention given to others is attention taken away from them.

At the time we moved into our house (I was in the first grade), Mrs. McKenzie was the object of neighbourhood sympathy. A war widow with two young girls to raise, she worked nights as a registered nurse to support them. The girls were a couple of years older than I was and, like their mother, tall and rail thin. People on the block felt sorry for Mrs. McKenzie and, because she had no husband to do the work (and precious little income), her house was a little shabby and the front garden rather unkempt.

My mother, however, did not share the neighbourhood sympathy and went out of her way to blacken the woman’s reputation, spying on her and making up the most outrageous lies and spreading them up and down the street. By the time she was done, Mrs. McKenzie sold her house and moved away and my mother was basking in the glow of having saved our neighbourhood from what she had eventually convinced herself was a terrible danger.

In later years she convinced herself that my children would be better off in the custody of her brother, despite the fact that he and his wife had failed their state’s home study for adoption on three separate occasions. That I had a welfare worker investigate my home and write a letter for the court that my home was fit and so was I, NM convinced herself she was “rescuing” my children from me. She went to her grave believing herself a “hero” and the champion of those poor kids, even though the reality was her entire family stopped talking to her and the damage she did to those kids continues on to the present day, fourteen years after her death.

Narcissists do not see anything they do not want to see and when they can’t find what they want to see, they make it up. This can make the people around them crazy. Because they can be charming and glib, narcissists often bring a lot of people to their point of view, even professionals like therapists, social workers, judges, law enforcement. In the hearings I had in juvenile court, we drew a judge who could see right through her…and she knew it. The judge told me to return to court in three weeks with a letter from my local social services agency, attesting to my fitness, and custody would be settled in my favour…he had NM sussed out! So what did she do? She filed an emergency petition for guardianship in another (higher ranking) court before the juvenile court hearing was scheduled, and drew a judge who was taken in by her false sincerity and the perjured testimony of my uncle. (This uncle, BTW, apologized to me years later with the truth finally came out.) When she could not persuade the juvenile court judge to take up her delusions, when the judge required more than unsubstantiated accusations and asked for proof from a trusted source, NM knew she had to change the venue and find someone to corroborate her accusations (among others, that I was a drug addicted prostitute). By the time it was all over, eight years later and I had regained custody of my children, NM believed her own lies and, despite most of the family finally embracing the truth, my daughter continues to believe them. “Why would a mother lie about her own daughter?” she once asked me. Indeed…when that mother is a narcissist, she will lie about anything and anybody—and believe those lies—in order to get what she wants.

This propensity for creating and believing their own reality can make the people around them crazy. It alters the perception of reality and sucks people into things they might never have otherwise entertained. When practiced on children, it can interfere with their ability to trust, to apply critical thinking, to make good decisions. When a child’s life is based on and guided by lies, that child grows up unable to tell lies from truth and their ability to function is compromised.

Narcissists have no peers. In their delusional world, no one is equal to them. The world is made of entirely of inferiors (most of us) and superiors (those whom they aspire to be like). Narcissists, for all they are full of themselves, do have people they admire. James once had a boss he admired so much he dressed like him and angled for assignments that allowed him to travel internationally, like his boss did. Unfortunately (for James), none of his get rich schemes came to fruition so he was unable to be as rich as his boss and therefore was never able to relegate him to “inferior” status.

Narcissists truly believe they are above the law…and that they are so clever that they can fool the police and therefore are not in danger of getting caught. In the months leading up to our separation and divorce, James began leaving things around that were highly incriminating…but proved he truly believed that even his most outrageous scheme was “doable,” meaning he could get away with it. I seldom entered his home office—he was an egregious slob—but went in one morning to vacuum. Collecting dirty coffee cups and glasses from the desk, my eyes feel on some drawings and notes left on the desktop in his precise, draftsman-like hand printing. Basically, he was drawing up plans to turn our huge family room (larger than a two-car garage) into a marijuana farm and to use the neighbourhood teen agers as his sales agents! Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of me, causing me to wonder what his plans were: either he was planning to get rid of me or his delusion of wealth via drugs included me going along with the scheme.

James loved porn and simply refused to acknowledge that not everybody else did. It was his firm belief that everybody liked porn, he was just one of the morally superior who admitted it. We had dinner guests one night and he ended the evening by putting on an XXX rated video for the guests, one of whom was a female co-worker, to watch! They excused themselves early and never accepted another invitation to get together, and he couldn’t seem to understand why. When I told him they were probably offended by the porn video, he didn’t believe me, and if they left because of it, it was because they were hypocrites.

The ways in which a narcissist can delude him/herself are limitless. Because they live inside their delusions—these delusions are their “reality,”—any attempt to deal with them on a rational basis is futile. The delusions narcissists engage in are not harmless fantasies but dangerous to those around them, because trying to reason with a narcissist is like stepping through the Looking Glass—remember, Alice was the only rational one in there.

Narcissists feel entitled

From the House of Mirrors:

Let’s take a look at why malignant narcissists not only don't change but become worse. Keep in mind, they have mastered a lifetime of this twisted way of being in the world, and are always pushing their warped behavior to the limits.


Narcissists feel entitled. Like bratty children, they expect favourable treatment and excessive amounts of attention and adoration despite their unsavoury behaviour. They feel special and exempt from living as others do. They have no desire to grow-up. They feel entitled to remain a spoiled, foul natured, controlling child.

One of the things that strikes me about my mother, looking back, is the double standard she lived by. Narcissists hold others to a higher standard than they hold themselves, and they exempt themselves from the very rules they hold others to.

She absolutely hated it when people dropped in on her, especially when her parents paid her a surprise visit. And yet, she regularly dropped in on her friends (when she had some) unannounced and later, when I was an adult, dropped in on me without warning. Why did she hate drop in visits? Because of the potential of catching her off her guard, her house a mess, herself not dressed—maybe even in the middle of one of her narcissistic rages and meltdowns. She had an image she conveyed to the world and in order to maintain that image, she needed notice of impending arrivals so that she could be sure everything was in place. Of course, she gave no such warning to others—how else could she catch them out in something that she could squirrel away as potential ammunition to use against them later?

She had no boundaries where other people were concerned, especially me. Of course her own boundaries were rigid, fixed, and zealously guarded: my brother and I were not allowed into her bedroom, for example, unless we were specifically invited and stood to be punished if we so much as opened the door. Or, rather, I stood to be punished, because if my younger—but bigger—brother misbehaved, I got the punishment for “letting” him. I was actually forbidden to have boundaries, something that was to have serious repercussions for me later in life.

By the time I reached my teens, my mother was giving me her cast off clothing in lieu of buying me new ones for school. Not only were they dreadfully out of date, but cheap and tasteless—she had always had tawdry taste and it just got worse as she got older. But between gifts from my Nana and my stepmother, and my summer job picking berries and beans, I managed to pull together a decent wardrobe by the time I entered my junior year of high school, something that did not escape my NM. In fact, my closet became the extension of her closet, despite the fact that I was slimmer, especially through the hips. My stepmother, who had excellent—and expensive—tastes, bought me several wool pencil skirts with coordinating blouses, skirts I loved and cared for carefully because my mother would not stand the cost of dry cleaning. By the end of the school year, every one of these skirts was stretched out in the butt, making them baggy on me when I tried to wear them, because of her incursions into my closet. One skirt—and a brand new top—was even ruined beyond repair by her, without even an attempt at an apology or an offer of recompense or replacement. What was hers was hers, and what was mine was hers, too.

She felt entitled to snoop, not just when I was a kid but when I was an adult as well. Anything she wanted to know, it was her right to know. Right to privacy? Only she had that. Being a malignant narcissist, violence and intimidation were part of her repertoire, so to object to her predations—like going through my purse, gym bag, dresser drawers or coat pockets—was to invite retaliation, both verbally and physically. I learned early not to say “no,” not to object to anything another person expected of me, because I would get hurt as a result. I couldn’t even allow my facial expression to convey anything lest I get smacked, so I learned to school my face into a blank, something that still happens without thinking in times of stress. I learned to make myself numb to her predations—then to all predations—then to all forms of stress—and to make my face reflect only a numb compliance.

Charlie, my late husband, had such a mother as well. Charlie was a magician with his hands…he could build anything. But Charlie, who was dyslexic, had failed to graduate from high school and because of his reading problems, his mother labelled him “stupid.” His younger brother. Alvin, was not dyslexic and he not only graduated high school, the family sent him to college (Maman said she would have sent Charlie to college if he wanted to go, but he was too stupid—whether she meant too stupid to grasp the opportunity or too stupid to make it through, she never made clear). Alvin was a self-made millionaire and very clearly Maman’s darling. The fact that Alvin’s millions were not cleanly made, that he was regularly in trouble with state regulatory agencies for the less-than-honourable methods he used to make his money, didn’t bother her a whit: Alvin was a millionaire and that excused everything otherwise unpleasant about him. Charlie was an afterthought…except when she wanted something. When she bought a new house and needed a deck build, she called Charlie. She expected Charlie to drop everything and come build her deck…and she expected him to pay for all of the materials, supply free labour, and do it on her timetable, regardless of what his plans might have been. If Charlie demurred, if he asked for money for supplies, if he didn’t get it done on her time-table, he got the sharp side of her tongue…and everybody in the family heard about it for months, even years, afterward. Charlie did not have the option to refuse…he was her son and she was entitled to the fruits of his labour long past the time he was married, a parent, and a homeowner himself. She monopolized him until he was done with whatever she wanted, then ignored him until she needed him again.

Charlie couldn’t say “no” either. His narcissistic mother was the only one allowed to draw boundaries, and those boundaries were one-way only. The problem with this kind of entitlement on the part of the parent is that children learn very early that there is an unpleasant consequence for noncompliance, no matter how outrageous the demand, and come to believe they have no right to say “no.” In later years, when the threat of repercussion may be long past, the person still believes they have no right to say “no,” and this can lead them down destructive paths they might not otherwise have taken.

This inability to say “no” cost me time (agreeing to do things I didn’t want to do), money (agreeing to donate or give or spend, even though I could not afford it or did not want to), and self-esteem. This last came from my inability to say refuse sexual advances from dates. This led to a promiscuity problem that perhaps could be more accurately called “date rape,” in that I initially resisted but if the man was insistent, I did not feel I had the right to say “no.” Lurking in my subconscious lay the fear of retaliation for refusal, and so I complied. This was the later effect, however—I was sexually molested by a neighbour at about age nine because I was afraid to break away and leave: he was an adult and I was compelled to submit to anything an adult might want (heavens, if I had to lay across the bed while my mother striped my bare butt with a thin leather strap and not move or cry out, how was I to know it was OK to run from a neighbour who was holding me securely in his lap, one hand under my skirt??). I was also sexually molested by my stepfather at age 16 for largely the same reason. I, of course, gave both men a wide berth after my experiences with them, not an easy thing to do with regards to my stepfather in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in which I slept in the kitchen!

The narcissist’s sense of entitlement extends beyond family members and friends. Narcissists believe that rules are made for other people and that they are exempt. James (now my N-ex) and I were going to work one morning in his car, and he was driving. The freeway ramp we needed to take to get to work was stacked up as usual and James simply drove onto the right shoulder of the ramp to pass all of the waiting cars—something he did every morning. I had complained about this (I am a “wait your turn” kinda gal) but his reckless, retaliatory driving after my complaints were scary enough to shut me up. On this particular morning I could see that there were several police officers standing in the grass just off the shoulder with ticket books in their hands and I warned James. He ignored me and, sure enough, he got pulled over and given a ticket. He was outraged! The fact that he had driven that shoulder every morning for weeks, in his mind, made it his right to do so, and he was livid at the police for “taking away” that perceived right.

But the story doesn’t end here. The following morning he did exactly the same thing and got another ticket and he was even angrier the second morning that the first, accusing the cops of setting up a “trap,” and his ticket entrapment and therefore unjust. This was not his last stupid car trick, either. Driving the kids home from some event one afternoon, James ran a red light. There was a police car behind him and when the police car didn’t pull him over, James took that as permission to run red lights and proceeded to do it again! And he was angry and verbally abusive to the officer when he got pulled over and ticketed again, because after he didn’t get nailed for the first light, he felt entitled to run the next one.

This kind of entitlement can be unbelievably petty: I once bought English muffins at the market because they were on sale—ordinarily we could not afford them. From that day forward, James complained bitterly about no English muffins for breakfast: he was entitled to his English muffins and I was a withholding bitch to refuse to buy any more! And it can be huge: I knew someone once who broke into an old house that appeared to have been abandoned and stripped it of antique furnishings, dishes, and a host of other lovely—and collectable—things. “Nobody is using them, so why shouldn’t I have them?” was his rationale. But the house and its contents was part of an estate that was being litigated and he was merely rationalizing his thefts, as narcissists are wont to do.

Children are born feeling entitled and they raise holy hell when their needs aren’t met. It is programmed into the as a survival mechanism—baby cries, Mama feeds, baby survives. Young children have no concept of “others” as existing for anything other than their own survival and entertainment. They have no empathy, compassion, or remorse (ask your infant how bad he feels about keeping you up all night…). But children are supposed to outgrow this infantile narcissism as they become socialized, they are supposed to learn that they can’t have everything, that they must share, and that the feelings of others are just as important as their own. Some children never grow past that sense of entitlement, that feeling that they…and what they want…supercedes the feelings, wishes, and needs of everyone else on the planet. It is this arrested development that leads to their epic sense of entitlement.