Scanning further down the OED entry, however, we come across
this little entry: “The belief that one is inherently deserving
of privileges or special treatment[2].” Now that sounds more like
the narcissist’s sense of entitlement. The American Psychiatric Association includes
entitlement in its diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality disorder in
its Diagnostic and Statistics Manual. The fifth revision states: “Feelings
of entitlement, either overt or covert, self-centeredness; firmly holding to
the belief that one is better than others…” and “…personal standards are
unreasonably high in order to see oneself as exceptional, or too low based on a
sense of entitlement [3]” The fourth revision of the manual stated
it even more clearly: “Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable
expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his
or her expectations.[4]”
To feel entitled is to believe you have a right to something.
And we do have rights to some things, both by law and by the social contract of
your culture in addition to the “human rights” to which all of us are entitled.
The narcissist, however, believes that s/he has rights that the rest of us do
not have, rights that advantage him over you, an absolute right to have what he
wants regardless of the cost to others. This kind of entitlement is what I call
“toxic entitlement.”
Narcissists defend this entitlement very vigorously. They get
angry and indignant if you even hint that they are not entitled to whatever it
is they think they are entitled to. And those entitlements can be bizarre to
the rest of us: my NexH, Jack gave a perfect example when he accidentally ran a
red light with a police car behind him and the cop didn’t pull him over. Jack
took this as a sign that it was okay for him to run red lights and so he
deliberately ran another one, the cop still behind him and, of course, he was
pulled over and ticketed. When he got home, he was livid—in Jack’s mind, the
fact that the cop didn’t pull him over the first time meant it was okay for him
(not anybody else, mind you, just him) to blow red lights. When the cop pulled
him over, Jack genuinely felt betrayed—in his mind, the cop had given him
permission, Jack acted on that permission, then the cop betrayed him by giving
him a ticket. He insisted that the cop had deliberately set him up so he could
write him a ticket and “fill his quota.” It never occurred to Jack that the cop
may have been distracted the first time and didn’t see him run the light or
maybe it was the cop’s end of shift and he didn’t want the hassle of a stop and
writing up a citation. Nope—in Jack’s narcissistic mind, he was entitled to run
that second light because the cop didn’t punish him for running the first one, and
to cite him for the second light was unfair, unjust, and police entrapment.
Jack had a lot of entitlement issues—there was the time that
the Highway Patrol had set up a duck pond—very visible, with police cars parked
right out in the open and officers standing in plain sight with ticket books in
their hands—for drivers who were turning a one lane freeway on-ramp into a two
lane ramp by driving in the shoulder. Every car that tried to access the
freeway via the shoulder of the ramp was flagged down and the driver given a
ticket. Most drivers were obediently staying in the marked lane while the cops
were there and the few who were arrogant enough to try using the shoulder were
duly pulled over and cited. Jack, of course, got cited for being in the
shoulder despite seeing what was going on because he believed he was entitled
to use the shoulder. Why? Because he had been using it for a year and nobody
had told him he couldn’t. But the story doesn’t end there—the following day,
Jack did it again—in front of the cops who were standing there with ticket
books in hand—and got another
citation, which made him red-in-the-face, eye-poppingly, foaming-at-the-mouth
mad. How dare they give him another
ticket? They gave him one yesterday, wasn’t that enough? Now, lest you think
Jack was perhaps a little bit thick, the guy was a brilliant engineer with a
genius-level IQ: he was just a narcissist who believed that he—not everybody—was entitled to drive
that shoulder.
Narcissistic parents create the same kinds of bizarre
entitlements that accrue to themselves only. My NM used to tell me “parents are
entitled to the fruits of their children’s labours” as a way of justifying turning
me into an unpaid servant (literally my labour) and taking and keeping money
that came my way, especially money I got for singing (she put me in contests,
talent shows, and even arranged guest performances at bars and nightclubs when
I was between the ages of 6 and 9), money I earned picking crops in the summer,
and money I earned with my after-school job. Any objection I raised (in those
rare moments when my indignation was stronger than my fear of her) was met with
a smug “Who do you think paid for all those singing lessons [that I didn’t
want] or the roof over your head and the food you eat?” That, of course, is
irrefutable, since she did pay for all of those things but, being a child, I
had no idea that I was actually entitled to those things and she was not
entitled to recompense off the sweat of my brow.
Perhaps the worst entitlement that a narcissist parent puts
on their children is the never-ending entitlement. From my earliest childhood,
from the very day I learned that I could be legally free of her once I turned
18, that was my goal in life—to be 18 and get away from her. What I could not
have anticipated was that, in her narcissistic mind, she was free of her
obligations towards me but I was not free of my obligations to her. Many of us
bump our noses on this particular bit of narcissistic entitlement, the idea
that our Ns are entitled to remain in our lives, in whatever capacity they
choose, for as long as they choose to be.
An ignoring NM, like mine, will let you go—sometimes for
years—without popping back into your life until there is something they want
from you. I got married six weeks before Christmas and moved into my own place,
just 17 years old, and that year I received nothing from my mother—not even a
phone call or a Christmas card. In fact, I didn’t receive so much as a letter
from her for several years and she showed no interest in me and mine until a
situation emerged in which I had something that she desperately wanted. Then she became my mother and a doting
grandmother to my kids.
Despite their feelings of entitlement, most narcissists are
not stupid enough to think that everybody else agrees with their entitlement.
This is where manipulation comes in: they manipulate situations, perceptions,
and information to support their feelings of entitlement. If manipulation doesn’t
work as well as they had hoped, they will tell outright lies, fabrications that
will bring about the desired result. All of this stems from entitlement: they
believe they not only have an absolute right to whatever they want, they also
believe they have an unfettered right to do whatever is necessary to get what they
want because you are in the wrong to withhold it from them. This is key: you are in the wrong when you prevent a
narcissist of from getting what she wants and that, which the narcissist takes
as fact, is what allows the narcissist undertake the most awful actions without
a shred of remorse or sense of wrongdoing: they believe what they are doing is
not only right, they believe they have an unfettered right to do it.
When you, yourself, do not feel an inflated sense of
entitlement, when you don’t know what that feels like, it can be difficult to
grasp what it actually means. I often hear people say things like “I don’t know
how she sleeps at night…” or “her conscience must be eating her alive” when
speaking about the behaviour of a narcissist. When we do that, we are projecting
how we would feel—we would find it
difficult to sleep at night, our
conscience would interfere with our sleep—onto a person who does not share
those feelings with us, who may actually be incapable of sharing those feelings
of conscience and remorse. What we don’t understand is that the narcissist feels
just as entitled to fuck us over, to manipulate us, to take what she wants from
us, as we feel entitled to receive a pay check at the end of a pay period. The
fact that she did not earn that right like we earned the pay check is
immaterial: she feels just as entitled and believes her entitlement to just as
valid as you feel about your pay check. And if someone stands in her way, she
feels just as indignant as you or I would feel if we found our pay arbitrarily
shorted.
Your narcissist truly believes she has a right to anything
she decides the wants, including things that belong to others. Ordinary people
like you and me take our sense of entitlement from our culture and its rules:
our laws and our customs tell us what we are entitled to and, by and large, we
accept that. We know that it is wrong to steal, for example, and even thieves
know it is wrong to steal, they just choose to do it anyway. The narcissist
thinks differently, however. The narcissist believes she has an absolute right to
have or do whatever she wants, even while acknowledging that other people might
think it is wrong. Peculiar to the narcissistic mind, the narcissist believes
the rules apply to you and me and that we
are wrong to violate them, but she, the narcissist, is the exception: she sees
herself as literally above the rules of her society and culture. In the
narcissist’s eyes, you and I need to abide by those rules because 1) we are not
special like she is and, 2) it makes us predictable to the narcissist, giving
her the advantage of being able to fairly accurately predict our behaviour and
reactions. But they don’t need to abide by them because they are special, they
are above the petty rules of society—they are entitled.
But they aren’t stupid—they know that there are penalties for
violating the rules, assuming they are caught, and so they manipulate. Lying is
an effective form of manipulation and they use it without a hint of conscience.
Your own mother can, with a straight face and sincere expression, tell your
grandmother that you are a prostitute or a drug dealer or mentally ill or a
host of other horrifying things that will not only turn your grandmother
against you, it will make Granny worry about the safety of your children. Your
mother can tell these lies to a judge, jerking out a tear here and there for
effect, along with a big lie about how she worries for your children, what if
they get up one morning and find you dead on the floor with a needle in your
arm? The fact that this kind of thing has actually happened and been featured
in news reports all over the globe doesn’t help you—even though the strongest
non-prescription drug you take is the occasional aspirin—and it alarms your FOO
to the degree that there is a good chance that your narcissist can enlist one
of them the lie and give false evidence against you in court, rationalizing
that it is ok to break the law against perjury in order to save those innocent
little kids from the trauma of finding their hooked hooker of a mother dead on
the floor one morning.
Narcissists have no conscience. If getting custody of your
children is her objective, she not only honestly believes she is entitled to
have custody of them, she also truly believes that she is entitled to do
whatever it takes to achieve that goal. And, as much as we don’t want to admit
it, there are narcissists who use the sexual assault laws to punish people who
don’t bend to their will or who do not behave as the narcissist expected,
believing themselves entitled to do so because that is what was necessary to
get what they want. Nothing is off the table for a narcissist, as long as she
can maintain plausible deniability or shift blame onto someone else. The woman
who falsely accused my friend of sexual assault in order to escape conviction
for assault and property damage, laid the groundwork for shifting blame even as
she testified against my friend. She blamed her late filing of the complaint on
“bad advice from another [conveniently unnamed] lawyer” while she was in jail,
thereby creating plausible deniability if someone later accuses her of misusing
the sexual crimes laws for personal gain: that unnamed lawyer told her she had
a case, otherwise she wouldn’t have filed it.
What is important for us to remember when it comes to
narcissists and entitlement is that narcissists do not see things the same way
we do. They honestly believe they are entitled—they have a right—to have
whatever they want and anyone who tries to stand in their way is wrong and, if
they succeed in keeping the narcissist from her goal, deserves punishment. It
never occurs to the narcissist that she is not
entitled to what she wants any more than it would occur to you that you were
not entitled to take a walk around your block if that appeals to you. And, just
as you would feel wronged if a couple of thugs tried to prevent you from
walking on the public sidewalk, the narcissist feels wronged if you try to
prevent her from having what she wants, whether it is your husband, your
children, credit for your idea, or your time, efforts and expertise.
Being special and entitled, the narcissist truly believes she
should not have to pay for your services, whether you are a wedding planner or
an accountant or you bake and decorate beautiful cakes as a hobby: you should
be honoured to give them to her for free. She does not feel obligated to
respect you or anything about you, from your marriage to your parental rights
to your ownership rights of everything from your earrings to your clothing to
your car and home. A narcissistic mother will rearrange your kitchen cupboards,
closets and furniture, a narcissistic sister will “borrow” your clothes and
jewellery, a narcissistic “friend” will seduce your husband and blame you,
saying it’s not her fault that you
can’t keep your man satisfied… They will do these things—and more—believing that
they are doing nothing wrong because, while they acknowledge that society has a
set of standards, they do not accept that those standards apply to them. In
fact, it is not uncommon to hear a narcissist say something like “Well I have my truth…” that truth being what serves
the narcissist, even if it is diametrically opposed to the objective truth. Narcissists
have their own sense of right and wrong and what serves them is right and what
does not serve them is wrong. The narcissist is just as convinced that she is
entitled to whatever she wants and those who obstruct her are wronging her as
you are convinced that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West.
It is called entitlement and it is a sincere belief that the
entitled person has an absolute right to whatever s/he wants and any action
taken to secure the entitlement is justified by the existence of the
entitlement. You and I know that is just so much convoluted, self-serving
bullshit but the narcissist doesn’t see it that way: she’s not kidding, she’s
not even over-the-top: she is entitled and will break every rule in the book—and
every person who stands in her way—to get what she wants because she believes
in her entitlement and will move heaven and earth—often in small,
passive-aggressive and painful ways—to get it. And any hurt you suffer is just
collateral damage for which she takes no responsibility.
It is important to grasp this, to wrap your head around the
idea, that his narcissistic mistress truly believes you are in the wrong
because you aren’t the wife she thinks he should have—as such you are not
entitled to anything beyond the roof over your head (and she will work to
deprive you of that) while she is entitled to champagne suppers and expensive
sparklies. She will have no sense of guilt that your kids are deprived of music
lessons or a trip to camp because the money was spent on her—she will only feel
bad that she had to give up on that Christmas trip to Aruba because he decided
to spend the money on his kids. Your narcissistic co-worker will not feel bad
about stealing your idea and presenting it to the boss as his own and he has no
compunctions against calling you a liar when you tell the boss the truth: your co-worker
has his own truth and that is that he thought of it first, even if you were the
one who voiced it first. Your narcissistic neighbour doesn’t care that your
lawn is pocked with yellow spots where his dog pees, or that his cats use your
carefully-tended flower beds for litter boxes, digging up your newly planted
greenery—he is pleased that he doesn’t have to clean up after them himself and
proud for having found a way to make you do it. For the narcissist, life is a
series of triumphs, of getting one over on the next guy, either to advantage
himself or to relieve himself of something onerous. She doesn’t care if your
brother goes to prison for three years on a bogus sexual assault charge, just
as long as she isn’t convicted of
assaulting him and damaging his car. She doesn’t care if your business goes
belly-up because she failed to pay for the goods and services you provided to
her and now you can’t pay your suppliers. It doesn’t affect her so she simply
does not think about it and, when she does, she is pleased with herself for
having succeeded, for her cleverness, for her superiority. She is, after all,
entitled to it all...
1.
Oxford
English Dictionary. “Entitlement.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/entitlement.
First accessed April 25, 2019.
2.
Ibid.
3.
American
Psychiatric Association. “DSM-IV
and DSM-5 Criteria for the Personality Disorders” https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/materials/Narc.Pers.DSM.pdf.
First accessed April 25, 2019.
4.
Ibid.
