Entitlement is the belief that you have the right to do or get something. In social interactions, it is considering your right to do or get something to be superior the rights of those who may want you to do or get something else. When you feel entitled, you are not merely disappointed when others disagree with you or fail to accommodate your presumed rights, you feel cheated and wronged, which produces anger and a stronger sense of entitlement as compensation. Of course, once you're older than five and not cute anymore, the world is not likely to meet your entitlement needs. So it gets to be a downward spiral -- the more you don't get what you think you deserve, the more justified you feel in demanding compensation. The person who cuts in front of you in line is often saying, "With the way I've been treated, I shouldn't have to wait in line, too!" Not surprisingly, criminals, domestic violence offenders, aggressive drivers, and abusers of all kinds have been observed to have an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
Unfortunately, exaggerated entitlement is not merely the domain of those who run afoul of the law. In the daytime talk-show, self-help, personal-growth mania that dominates popular culture, we are entitled not just to the pursuit of happiness, not even just to happiness, but to feeling good most of the time. I believe this new sense of entitlement, this "cult of feeling good," is partly responsible for the reported sharp increases in anger and stress.
Chances are, the emotional states you observe most often in the course of a typical day is some form of low-grade resentment, usually manifest as impatience, agitation, annoyance, irritability, sarcasm, superiority, or frustration, plus entitlement. Resentment comes from a perception of unfairness; you're not getting the expected help, relief, consideration, praise, reward, or affection, i.e., you're not getting that to which you feel entitled.
Compounding the situation is the incredible contagion of even low-grade defensive/aggressive emotional states like resentment. If someone comes into work resentful, by lunchtime everyone around him or her is resentful. Aggressive drivers make other drivers aggressive. A hostile teenager ruins the family dinner, and an impatient spouse makes TV-viewing tense and unpleasant.
The rapid, largely unconscious transmission of defensive/aggressive emotions (described in the emerging literature on social intelligence) has created a kind of emotional pollution. The psychological equivalent to litter and secondary smoke, emotional pollution is the spread of defensive/aggressive emotions in the environment, in complete disregard of their adverse effects on others. The most casual contact with emotional polluters can make you feel dismissed, ignored, defensive, impatient, self-righteous, sullen, or depressed, with no clue of where those feelings are coming from. If you encounter emotional pollution at work or on the street, you will not be so sweet to your children when you get home. If you face it before you leave the house in the morning, you're likely to drive aggressively or carelessly on the way to work and be in a sour mood once you get there. Emotional pollution passes cubicle-by-cubicle throughout the workplace, car-by-car down the road, locker-by-locker in school, and room-by-room at home. Worst of all, if you are exposed to enough emotional pollution over time, you are bound to start spreading it yourself, unless you develop pretty strong self-regulation skills.
One reason that defensive/aggressive emotions spread so relentlessly is that they feel very different on the inside than they look on the outside. On the inside you feel like a victim; you're being treated unfairly. On the outside it looks mean or, at best, unfriendly. If you feel that nobody truly gets you or appreciates where you're coming from, you may well be guilty of some form of emotional pollution, which inevitably controls the way people react to you.
Try this mirror test to see if you're an emotional polluter. Standing in front of a large mirror, think of something you resent. Think of how unfair it is and how it should not be that way. You'll find that in doing this, you'll look down or away from the mirror, but really concentrate on how unfair the thing you resent is and force yourself to look back at the mirror with that disgruntled expression intact. You will see what the world sees.
In the next post, I'll talk about how aggression rises inevitably out of the defensiveness created by entitlement.
Full circle
I agree that there is an unhealthy rise in people's belief of entitlement, however, isn't expecting days free of "emotional pollution" also a form of an over-developed entitlement belief? I hate nothing more than people who take out thier bad moods on others and am all for promoting coping skills that prevent that kind of frequent displacement, but I also can give people the benefit of the doubt if they are rude to me. If a person cuts in front of me at the grocery store I can reason that he or she may be having a really bad day and I stop the spread of anger right there. Am I entitled to shopping trips that never involve rude people? That would be nice, but I don't feel entitled to that, only to going about my day in the best way possible and trying to do my part in giving off a positive vibe.
You're exactly right. One
You're exactly right. One way to deal with emotional pollution is through conscious self-regulation. But that requires being aware of your reaction, when the effects are often more subtle. On automatic pilot, emotional pollution wins. Most people develop defenses of ignoring other people, which makes them less sensitive to the world around them, if not more rejecting of it. We need to develop habits of automatically valuing the people we encounter in our heads, not necessarily in overt behavior. If you don't put out an automatic low-grade compassion, you may well download automatically a low-grade resentment.
I agree! Please let me know if this is similar
I have noticed over the years of going to different therapists on and off, something that I hope is just a trend in therapy. Maybe I'm just not understanding but something dosen't seem right to me.
Therapists seem to always side with the client because that is their job. That bothers me when they follow it up with saying that I did all I could and to let it go without probing more or encouraging communication and social skills. I feel as if I've led a life of entitlement by treating people as disposable because I of course was "entitled to better treatment". I've brought 2 boyfriends into therapy and felt that the therapist didn't even try to disagree with them. What I found out later while alone with my therapists was that they felt the boyfriends "just weren't getting it". I thought to myself, if that was me hearing her I wouldn't have gotten it either. Sometimes they are so gentle at suggesting and afraid to make someone defensive that it's just not helping. Even my ex at the time said he would have been happy if she would just have been more direct. Which leads me to wonder what am I not getting in therapy because they are too gentle with me. All I am hearing is how right I am, and entitled to better all the time, but no clue as to how to attain this elusive treatment from friends and family that they so often claim exists. This is very disturbing for me as it has isolated me from what little family I did have before several family members passed away.
The problem is we live in a dysfunctional world, and I am losing people more and more because while therapy is sending me this message that I have clarified over and over, it seems we don't tolerate anything anymore because we are entitled to better. But what if their is no better? What if therapists are just giving band-aids? Am I going to be entitled all the way up to my old age all by myself?
I was very happy to read your book Love Without Hurt because it went beyond the codependency stuff. I agree with much about codependency but sometimes think that we are becoming a society of individuals way too much.
I have seen a few of my friends, in therapy, take on the same attitude towards me. Not talking about things, just quietly pulling away. Now if I took that info to a new therapist they would agree that I was doing all I could do and to let it go. But I wonder now if we all got our therapists together, and they could hear both sides of the story would they be giving the same advice?
Thanks, see new post.
Thanks, see new post.
Stressful Environment
Excellent post, Steven. I decided to move to Costa Rica to get out of the extremely stressful environment in the U.S. Feeling stressed out is so much of a habit for many in the U.S. that it's hard to see how much the environment is polluted in that way until we leave the U.S. and feel life in a different place.
I've been in Costa Rica for more than two months, and the environment is far less stressful. Although some of those in the youngest generation seem to have a sense of entitlement, it is rare among the adult Costa Ricans I've met.
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