Entitlement—you, me, and the narcissist

We all know that one of the hallmarks of narcissism is an overweening sense of entitlement, but just what does the word “entitlement” actually mean? The Oxford English Dictionary first defines it as “the fact of having a right to something^[1].” That doesn’t seem very pernicious, does it? In fact, it sounds quite reasonable—don’t we all have rights to certain things, like Human Rights?

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.

No Contact is for you, not for your Narcissists

We all know we can’t change other people—just ourselves. But for those of us who have chosen No Contact as a way of dealing with our narcissistic parents, that knowledge can be difficult to embrace because we expect those NPs to respect our wishes and not contact us.

If we think about it logically, that is not a particularly realistic expectation, is it? I mean, if they can’t be bothered to fix the things we have told them time and again are alienating us, why would we think they would respect our wishes for having no further contact with them? The very core of narcissism is to be self-serving, so it is pretty inevitable that our narcissists will, regardless of any apparent agreement on their parts, do exactly as they please.

This drives many of us nuts. Some of us get outraged, others of us hurt, still others feel bewildered and demoralized by the continued calls, cards, uninvited drop-ins, and flying monkey visitations. We have made our wishes known, why won’t they cooperate and just leave us alone?

Because they are narcissists, that’s why.

So how do we handle this? We are NC—let’s not break it just because they haven’t chosen to go NC with us. Don’t forget, we are the ones who chose to go No Contact—they didn’t. And just as we are not bound by their demands on our behaviour, they are not bound by our demands on theirs. Yes, it would be nice if they could be respectful and accede to our wishes, but these are narcissists we are talking about, remember? Respect for anyone or anything that doesn’t advantage them is just not their forte.

So why go NC if they aren’t going to respect it?

Because going NC means that you are not in contact with them. It means you will no longer rise to the bait, no longer engage, no longer to respond to their messages, provocations, or manipulations. NC is for you, it is your declaration of independence, autonomy, and sovereignty. It is you cutting the puppet strings, even if they do not agree, accept or respect your act of separation. NC is for you, it is about you, and it is controlled by you: you do not need their consent, permission or even their compliance. You do it because it is necessary for your well-being.

Imagine you have strings attached to your wrists, ankles and knees and every time your mother tugged on one of those strings, a part of you moved in response. Now, imagine you have a sharp pair of scissors and you cut each string cleanly in half…now what happens when she tugs on one of the strings in her hand? Well, provided you have completely severed the string, nothing can happen, can it? You can see the string dangling, you can see it bounce around futilely as she yanks and jerks on it, but nothing happens as long as it remains detached from you, right?

And guess what? She cannot reattach the string without your assistance! It is absolutely impossible for her to reattach any of those strings unless you help her—you are in full control of this!

You can be guaranteed that she will keep trying. She will come up with a multitude of ways to try to reconnect with you. She will not respect your NC until and unless she comes to the conclusion that she is wasting her time, that nothing she does gets a response out of you and, without response, there is no NSupply.

Think of it as junkmail or spam…

When you open your mailbox at home, what do you find? I remember coming home from work and pulling out a dozen or more pieces of mail almost every day. I would come into the house, put down my handbag and quickly riffle through them, sorting the junkmail directly into the trash and putting the rest of the mail into two piles: real mail and “not sure what this is.” Then I would pick up the “not sure” pile and open each envelope and, if it was more junkmail, sort it right into the trash.

Did I get upset at the junkmail? No. I had long since learned that junkmail will happen, that there was nothing I could do to stop it, but I did not have to respond to it. I accepted that cleaning junkmail out of my mailbox was inevitable and I had no control over whether or not some company was going to send it to me. But I had the ultimate control because I was the one who decided what I was going to look at. So let them waste their time and their money sending me shit I don’t want—when it arrives, it goes straight into the bin. No angst, no second-guessing, no regrets because I know just exactly what is in those envelopes: solicitations for me to give up something I want to keep (my money) in exchange for something I don’t want (their crap).

I handle phone solicitations the same way. If they are clear in the first few words that it is a sales call, I hang up the phone. If they are not immediately clear about the purpose of the call, I interrupt and say “Is this a sales call?” If they don’t answer the question, I ask one more time. If they respond “Yes,” I say “I am not interested. Have a nice day,” and hang up the phone. If they don’t answer my question the second time, I hang up the phone. You see, it is my phone and my time and I get to choose how to use them and with whom. These callers are intruders—I did not invite them to call me—and by remaining silent and listening to their spiel I give them permission to continue talking and sucking up my time, even when I do not want to be listening to them. But I have the option of taking control of the situation and I do that by hanging up the phone, taking my time back to spend it on what I want instead of wasting it listening to a stranger trying to pick my pocket from over the phone.

Contact from your Ns and their flying monkeys is no different!!

Seriously! Mail from your Ns, phone calls from flying monkeys—they are the junkmail and telemarketing calls of the hoovering narcissist and you handle them the same way I handle junkmail and telemarketers: dump the mail in the bin and hang up on the sales calls. Just like a telemarketer cannot sell you a timeshare condo in the Gobi unless you listen to her long enough to get sucked in, so you cannot be sucked into a conversation with your long-lost cousin about your poor NM and how distraught she is over your exit from her life. Just as the junkmail solicitation cannot suck you in to buying a set of 200 pieces of the latest in cutlery technology if you don’t open the envelope, so can you avoid being sucked into their drama—or hurt by their sophistry—if you dump their mail (and email), unopened, unread, unseen, straight into the bin.

You are in control of this and I know it feels alien and you perhaps don’t know exactly what to do, but the truth is, you completely yanked control away from your N the minute you went NC and the only way s/he can get it back is if you return it.

NC is for you, not for them. It doesn’t matter if they cooperate or not because this is not about them, it is about you. You are in control of it, you get to decide what you will put up with and what you will not (but remember, the more you put up with, the more they will throw at you).

So, if they won’t cooperate with your NC, start thinking of their attempts at communication like junkmail, spam, and telemarketing calls. You are under no obligation to respond…you aren’t even obligated to be especially polite. Imagine calling someone you haven’t spoken to in years and trying to tell her how she needs to talk to her mother—is that rude and presumptuous? You bet it is—so what makes you think you need to use your best manners in dealing with someone who has the temerity to call you and waste your time with that kind of disrespectful twaddle? Cousin Lou in Bumfuck, Arkanbama, who you haven’t seen or heard from since great-grandma’s funeral when you were in the tenth grade, calls you out of the blue to tell you how upset your mother is over your silence and admonishes you that the Bible says to honour your mother—exactly how is this her business? And why be reluctant to tell her that? “I appreciate your concern, Lou, but this is my business and I will handle it as I see fit. Thank you for calling.” click.

You do not need them to cooperate for NC to work. You need you to set your boundaries and then honour and respect them. You need you to resist their blandishments, your misplaced, toxic guilt, and second-guessing. The only thing you need to make NC work is a commitment from yourself to yourself to find ways to make it work instead of reasons why it won’t or can’t. Every time they find a creative way to get through to you—sending mail to your office in an envelope with a typed label and fake return address or getting an auntie to send an email or leaving a voice mail on your office phone—discard whatever it was and try to find a way to block that access.

Commit to finding ways to making it work, work on making it work, and don’t give them access to those tattered pieces of string dangling from your wrists and ankles. They can’t reattach them without you giving them access.