Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again (50 page)

Most patients with Entitlement do not feel any real distress about their pattern. This sets Entitlement apart from all the other lifetraps in this book. We have never had a patient come to us saying that he or she was in pain as a result of feeling entitled or special.

However, many of our patients have
partners
with serious Entitlement issues. This is how an entitled person shows up most often in therapy—as the partner of one of our patients. (We often ask the partners of our patients to come to some sessions as well.) To put it bluntly, rather than seeking therapy yourself, more often you are the person who drives others to seek therapy.

Your life becomes painful only when you are no longer able to avoid the serious negative consequences that result from your Entitlement—for example, when you actually lose your job because you cannot complete the work properly, or when your spouse threatens to leave you. Only then will you acknowledge that other people are not happy with your behavior and that your entitlement is a problem. You finally realize that the lifetrap has a cost—that it can really damage your life.

Entitlement can develop in three quite different ways. The first involves weak parental limits:

ORIGIN 1: WEAK LIMITS

Weak limits
is the most obvious origin for Entitlement. These parents fail to exercise sufficient discipline and control over their children. Such parents spoil or indulge their children in a variety of ways.

1. Spoiled Entitlement
   :
   

Children are given whatever they want, whenever they want it. This may include material desires or having their own way. The
child
controls the
parents
.

1. Impulsivity
   :
   

Children are not taught
frustration tolerance
. They are not forced to take responsibility and complete assigned tasks. This may include chores around the house or schoolwork. The parent allows the child to get away with irresponsibility by not Allowing through with aversive consequences.

They are also not taught
impulse control.
The parents allow children to act out impulses, such as anger, without imposing sufficient negative consequences. One or both parents may themselves have difficulty controlling emotions and impulses.

When we discuss
limits,
we mean reasonable rules and consequences. Both Mel and Nina had weak parental limits as children. In a sense, they were brought up by their parents to be entitled. Both were raised in permissive, laissez-faire environments where they were spoiled and indulged. They never learned appropriate limits.

Parents serve as models for self-control and self-discipline. Parents who are out of control produce children who are out of control.

MEL: Yeah, I guess my father used to storm around the house in the same way. He was always losing his temper and yelling at us. I’m a lot like him.

KATIE: And what about your mother? His mother is a total pushover who just takes whatever his father dishes out.

MEL: Yeah. I guess neither one was a paragon of good behavior.

It was acceptable in Mel’s household for his father to behave like a child. When adults cannot control themselves, they are unlikely to control their children. It is through parental self-control that we learn to control ourselves. We do to ourselves what was done to us. When we have parents who provide clear, consistent, and appropriate limits, then we learn to apply these limits to ourselves.

Patients brought up with weak limits usually do not learn the notion of
reciprocity
as a child. Your parents did not teach you that, in order to get something, you have to give something back. Rather, the message they gave you was that they would take care of you, and you did not have to do anything in return.

Mel and Nina had an interesting commonality: Mel was the only boy and Nina the only girl in their families.

NINA: I was the baby and I was the only girl. My mother really wanted a girl. She went through three boys to get me. I got everything I wanted as a child. I was just like a little princess. And everyone took care of me, my parents and my brothers.

It is possible that certain children—only children, the youngest child in the family, the only child of that sex—are more apt to develop the lifetrap. This is because they may be more likely to be indulged.

ORIGIN 2: DEPENDENT OVERINDULGENCE

The origin of Dependent Entitlement is parents who overindulge their children in ways that make the children dependent on them. The parents take on everyday responsibilities, decisions, and difficult tasks for the child. The environment is so safe and protected and so little is expected of the child that the child comes to
demand
this level of care.

The difference between the Dependence lifetrap and „Dependent Entitlement“ is one of degree. The more dependent you are allowed to be—the more you are overprotected and given everything—the more you will tend toward Dependent Entitlement. If you belong to this type, you should read the chapter on Dependence as well.

ORIGIN 3: ENTITLEMENT AS COUNTERATTACK FOR OTHER

LIFETRAPS

For the majority of our patients, Entitlement is a form of Counterattack, or overcompensation, for other core lifetraps—usually Defectiveness, Emotional Deprivation, or Social Exclusion. For the origin of these Entitlement cases, see the chapter relevant to the underlying core lifetrap.

If you developed Entitlement as a means for coping with early Emotional Deprivation, then you were probably cheated or deprived as a child in some significant way. Perhaps your parents were cold and non-nurturing, so you were emotionally deprived. You Counterattacked by becoming entitled. Or perhaps you were materially deprived. The families around you had money, but you were relatively poor. You wanted things that you could not get. Now, as an adult, you make
sure
that you get everything.

Your Entitlement may have been an adaptive, healthy means of coping when you were young. Entitlement may have offered you a way out of the loneliness, the lack of loving, caring, and attention that you experienced as a child. Or it offered you a way out of the material deprivation. The problem is that you went too far. As an adult, you were so afraid of being deprived or cheated again that you became demanding, narcissistic, and controlling. You began to alienate the people closest to you. In trying to make sure that your needs got met, you began to push away the very people who could most meet them.

It is an interesting question why some children who are deprived develop Entitlement as a coping style. How do they come upon this strategy? We believe a number of factors come into play. First, there is the child’s temperament. Some children are more aggressive. Their disposition pushes them to respond in an active way, rather than Surrender to feelings of deprivation.

Another factor is whether the family allows the child to Counterattack. An emotionally depriving parent might allow a child to be demanding in other ways. A third factor is whether the child is gifted in some way—whether the child is particularly bright, beautiful, or talented. A child can compensate by getting attention for such a gift. In that one area, at least, the child gets
some
needs met.

Anger
is another factor that can drive a person to develop Entitlement as a coping mechanism for deprivation. Extreme anger can be a strong motivating force for people to overcome the conditions of their childhood. It gives them the will to set right something they see as unfair.

Although Entitlement is most often a reaction against feelings of emotional deprivation, it can also be a response to other lifetraps. Certainly someone who feels defective or socially undesirable may compensate by feeling special. If your underlying feeling is, „I’m inferior,“ you can counterattack by saying, „No, I’m special, I’m better than everyone else.“

Problems with frustration tolerance and impulse control may also be forms of Counterattack for feeling subjugated (although this is not usually the origin of impulsivity). In these cases, the child was inordinately disciplined and controlled and later acts out by rebelling against discipline and emotional control.

These are signs that your choice of partner is lifetrap-driven. That is, you have chosen someone who reinforces your sense of entitlement.

SPOILED ENTITLEMENT

You are attracted to partners who:

1. Sacrifice their own needs for yours.
   
2. Allow you to control them.
   
3. Are afraid to express their own needs and feelings.
   
4. Are willing to tolerate abuse, criticism, etc.
   
5. Allow you to take advantage of them.
   
6. Do not have a strong sense of self, and allow themselves to live through you.
   
7. Are dependent on you, and accept domination as the price of being dependent.
   

DEPENDENT ENTITLEMENT

You are drawn to strong partners who are competent and willing to take care of you (see the chapter on Dependence).

IMPULSIVITY

You may be drawn to partners who are organized, disciplined, compulsive, etc., and who thus offset your own tendency toward chaos and disorganization.

In sum, you are drawn to partners who support, rather than challenge, your sense of Entitlement. Both Mel and Nina had been in many relationships that bore this out. Before getting married, Mel had been involved with other warm, giving women whom he had bullied and treated badly, and Nina had been involved with other strong men.

Probably, if you look at your life, this will be true of you too. Most of your relationships will follow the pattern. They allow you to reenact the Entitlement of your childhood.

Of course, we also say that people who accept a relationship with you are acting out lifetraps of their own. It takes two to do the dance.

The tables that follow list the most common life patterns into which people with each type of Entitlement fall:

SPOILED ENTITLEMENT LIFETRAPS

1. You do not care about the needs of the people around you. You get your needs met at their expense. You hurt them.
   
2. You may abuse, humiliate, or demean the people around you.
   
3. You have difficulty empathizing with the feelings of those around you. They feel you do not understand or care about their feelings.
   
4. You may take more from society than you give. This results in an inequity and is unfair to other people.
   
5. At work, you may be fired, demoted, etc., for failing to consider the needs and feelings of others, or for failing to follow rules.
   
6. Your partner, family, friends, or children may leave you, resent you, or cut off contact with you because you treat them abusively, unfairly, or selfishly.
   
7. You may get into legal or criminal trouble if you cheat or break laws, such as tax evasion or business fraud.
   
8. You never have a chance to experience the joy of giving to other people unselfishly—or of having a truly equal, reciprocal relationship.
   
9. If your Entitlement is a form of Counterattack, you never allow yourself to face and solve your underlying lifetraps. Your real needs are never addressed. You may continue to feel emotionally deprived, defective, or socially undesirable.
   

DEPENDENT ENTITLEMENT LIFETRAPS

1. You never learn to take care of yourself, because you insist that others take care of you.
   
2. You unfairly impinge on the rights of people close to you to use their own time for themselves. Your demands become a drain on the people around you.
   
3. People you depend on may eventually become fed up or angry with your dependence and demands, and will leave you, fire you, or refuse to continue helping you.
   
4. The people you depend on may die or leave, and you will be unable to take care of yourself.
   

IMPULSIVITY LIFETRAPS

It is important for you to consider these lifetraps carefully because your motivation to change may be low.

The issue of motivation to change is a big one with the Entitlement lifetrap. Unlike the other lifetraps, your entitlement does not
feel
painful. Rather, it seems to feel
good.
It is the people around you who are in pain.

THERAPIST: Mel, you’re going to have to let Katie pursue a career. What you’re doing isn’t fair.

MEL: Why should I? Why should I do the things you say I should? I like things the way they are. I like Katie centered on me.

It is easy to see Mel’s point of view. Indeed, why
should
he change? On the surface, his lifetrap only seems to benefit him. Similarly, why
should
Nina bother learning to do things for herself when she can get other people to do them for her?