 Here's a quiz for you on this sunny day. Guess who is the narcissist and who is his long-suffering partner. And the penalty for getting it wrong is you have to watch this video to the end. Can you conceive of anything worse than this punishment? Don't answer this. Don't answer this. I'm sorry I asked the question. I will draw it. Please, I can't be confronted with harsh, cruel, bruising reality, the truth. Okay, Shoshanim Shvanpanim and happy Christmas, happy almost Christmas. Today we are going to discuss the narcissist doing you the greatest favor ever. The narcissist is endowing you, bestowing upon you the privilege of being with him. And I call this sacrificial entitlement. Now we all know that narcissists are entitled. They think they deserve special treatment just by virtue of existing, by virtue of gracing the planet with their immaculate presence. They are godlike, they are worthy of worship and admiration and prostration and special services, and of course the four S's, sex, services, supply, sadistic and narcissistic, and safety. Narcissists feel entitled to this. They don't think they have to invest or commit or do hard work or toil. They don't think they have to study. They don't think they have to progress up the ladder, corporate ladder or the ladder of a relationship. They're not into evolution. The narcissist is into revolution. The narcissist regards himself as a catalyst. His very presence, his very existence should trigger automatically the chemical or alchemical reactions, which would yield to the utter materialization and realization of his goals, cater to his emotional needs and soothe him and comfort him with narcissistic supply, a plenty. So, within this context of I exist, therefore I deserve, to paraphrase the column, within this context you must understand that it is your privilege to serve the narcissist. It is an amazing favor bestowed upon you. It's a gift to be able to witness, document and record his life. He is sacrificing himself to afford you with these opportunities. His entitlement, in this case, is sacrificial or self-sacrificial. Now, of course, sacrificial entitlement is a form of self-supply. It combines grandiosity and victimhood. The grandiose part is, I'm amazing, I'm perfect, I'm brilliant, I'm a genius, I'm drop dead gorgeous, I'm one of a kind, I'm endowed, I'm gifted, I'm skilled, I'm unprecedented and therefore I am something or someone to be aspired to. I'm a role model and I am such an enticing package that I am irresistible. Everyone would want, desire, crave to be with me. That's the grandiose part of sacrificial entitlement or let's say that's the entitlement part. And the second part in sacrificial entitlement is the victimhood. The narcissist says, for me to be with you, for me to accompany you, for me to provide you with advice and succor, to listen to you, for me to share my life with you, that's a sacrifice. I'm such an elevated being, I'm the equivalent of a deity and I deign to come down to earth to be with you. I'm sacrificing my superiority, my amazing intellect, my gifts, endowments and skills, my potential future, I'm sacrificing all this just in order to be with you and you must appreciate it and you should be grateful for my concessions and my sacrifices. So sacrificial entitlement combines grandiosity with victimhood. On the one hand it elevates the narcissist into a godlike posture. In this sense sacrificial entitlement is a form of self-supply and on the other hand it convinces the narcissist, sacrificial entitlement convinces the narcissist that he is giving up, missing out, sacrificing, being less than he could be just in order to be with you, to share his life with you, to serve as a companion, an intimate partner or friend to you, a father to you, a husband to you, whatever role may be, they all require the narcissist to minimize himself, to not actualize his full potential because his full potential is divine. You in other words, you are the human who drags him from heavens, you are the one who reduces him, you are the one who plunges him into the abyss of reality and humanity. He is above all this, he is godlike, he is a deity and you by virtue of your limitations and of the fact that you are mere mortal, mere human, you force him to reincarnate in your form and shape. Narcissus therefore is a Jesus complex. I am god but I am god incarnate, I am god in the flesh of a human being, I am god who consents, condescends, I am a god who agrees however reluctantly to share the human experience with you. Had you not been in my life, I would have been pure, unadulterated, immaculate, perfect being. You, my intimate partner, my child, my colleague, my neighbor, my good friend, you drag me, you reduce me, you push me into the imperfection that is the human condition and I am willing to do this. I am willing to do this for you but you must realize that I am a victim of my good heart, that I am doing this just to cater to your needs and to be there by your side and to hold your hand and you should really, really, really be grateful for this and appreciate it because this is the most amazing sacrifice, most incredible humongous sacrifice conceivable. I am sacrificing my essence, my quiddity, who I am says the Narcissus, I am sacrificing all this just so that you may survive, just so that you may experience well-being and happiness in my presence. So I recognize my uniqueness as a godlike figure, that's the grandiose part, but I am willing to let go of it just in order to be with you and that is the victimhood part, the sacrificial part. Similarly, Narcissus would say I am excessively moral, I attain the high moral ground, I am rigidly ethical, I would never do anything that breaches any boundaries or ethics or morality and they would use this morality as a club, they would beat you up with their morality, it's punitive, they would punish you with their morality and that is an example of sacrificial entitlement. I am entitled to special treatment by virtue of being the perfect moral agent, by virtue of being a paragon of ethics. So this is the grandiose part and I am sacrificing myself, I am constraining my behaviors, I am controlling my impulses, I am postponing gratification, I am doing all this for you, that's the sacrifice. So this is the moral Narcissus for social or communal Narcissus, similarly Narcissus give, they give money, they give gifts, they give to charity but their giving is grandiose, it's ostentatious and it's manipulative, they give in order to receive and so their giving is a form of sacrificial entitlement. I am sacrificing, I am giving you my money, I am giving you my property, I am giving you access to me, to myself, I am giving you my contacts, I am giving you, I am being altruistic, I am being charitable, I am being selfless, that's a sacrifice but in due to this sacrifice I am entitled, I am entitled to your gratitude, I am entitled to your obedience and submissiveness, I am entitled to your sex, to your services, to your supply and to your presence which makes me feel safe, I am entitled to safety. So Narcissistic giving or Narcissistic altruism or Narcissistic charity, quote unquote, they are manipulative, they are Machiavellian and they are intended to cater to the Narcissist sense of entitlement by ostentatiously sacrificing. You know the kind of mother who says I sacrifice my life for you, now you owe me, that's a Narcissistic mother. The Narcissist broadcast to you, his transmission to you is you have the privilege to be privy to my life, you have the amazing gift of being able to witness my adventures and my accomplishments and my moments of glory. This is something other people would die for and here it is handed over to you on a plate, you should be eternally grateful to me and your gratitude should translate into action by being obsequious, obsequious, obedient, submissive. The Narcissist says to you, the life you share with me is a transformative experience comprised of hundreds of teaching moments. Now it's very ironic because that happens to be true, a life where the Narcissist is most definitely transformative and has thousands of teaching moments. However, the Narcissist believes that your transformation is for the better, is improving you somehow, is upgrading you from less to more. That's his point of view. While your point of view is of course that the Narcissist is destroying you, ruining you, devastating you, punishing you, withholding from you, intermittently reinforcing you, trauma bonding you and so objectively, you are right of course. These are the outcomes of the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is the only way the Narcissist can relate to other people and it involves inevitably the evaluation and discard built into the shared fantasy. But the Narcissist is so self delusional and so self deceptive that he regards the time with you, the time he has had with you as a huge endowment, a huge gift that he has given you. Because you will never be the same afterwards, you will be far more mature, you will be more experienced, you will be more worldly, you will be more educated, you will be more something. Of course, your subjective experience is that you will be a lot less. So when you abandon the Narcissist finally or when the Narcissist even discards you because you are a bad object, you're a persecutory object, I'm sorry, and you're an enemy. The Narcissist discards you because you leave him no other choice. When this breakup, whether you abandon him or re-abandon him, when this breakup finally happens, the Narcissist regards your behavior as the most egregious form of ingratitude. You're ungrateful, you're ungrateful because he has given you everything imaginable, which millions of other people would be clamoring for, dreaming of, and would never attain. And yet, you bite the hand that feeds you, you reject him. And this is part of your inexorable devaluation. You're a persecutory object partly, in big part, because you are ungrateful. Perhaps you are ungrateful because you are too stupid to be ungrateful, to be grateful. Perhaps you don't even realize or appreciate what the Narcissist has given to you. Perhaps you don't possess the intellect to properly assess and evaluate the Narcissist's gifts. And perhaps you are just a slut, immoral. Now, whatever the case may be, the Narcissist has given you the world, and you were stupid enough to reject it in his eyes, and he will never forgive you this, even if he were to over you. Even if he were to go over you, it would be with a certain kind of reserve, because he would consider you somewhat inferior, having missed the first opportunity to be with him, having botched up this unique breakthrough that you could have had, just by virtue of sharing your life with him, then it says a lot about you. Re-idealizing you in the hovering attempt is not as easy as the first time around, because the Narcissist harbors the memories of the Narcissistic injury, and has to reshape the persecutory object in his mind, he has to convert you from enemy to an ideal object. That's quite an onerous work. It's a lot of toil, a lot of investment and commitment, and the Narcissist regards even this as credit, a credit to him. The very fact that he has idealized you should render you eternally grateful to him, eternally in his debt, eternally in hope even, because whenever have you been idealized, whoever treated you this way, hasn't he been the first to see the true you, your real potential, the fact that you're perfect? Hasn't he provided you with access to his gaze so that you can share this love that he has for this idealized image? You can fall in love with yourself, become self-infatuated? Hasn't he taught you to self-supply, in other words? Yes, he has, and he cannot forgive you. He cannot forgive you for having been too moronic, too stupid or too evil or too dysregulated to walk away from all these riches, from these treasure chests that the Narcissist is.