(~5 minutes)
On Valentine’s Day, I had an interesting exchange with a dear friend whose mother did a rather complete and terrifying job replacing her son’s growing needs with her own. Five decades later, that original violation still affects his emotional well-being and interferes with his major life decisions. Well, that’s my view from knowing him for a while. He’d probably agree, although saying such things about yourself out loud is far more challenging than having a third-party observer state the case.
Recently, he was watching a video about narcissism—there are a ton of YouTube LCSWs out there, offering their expert advice on this difficult, ubiquitous subject. He says, though, that he was put off when one of them referred to “unconditional love” as the kind of “real love” that narcissists aren’t capable of.
Then this brilliant man took what I thought was a massive emotional/logical leap and said, “How narcissistic does someone have to be to assume they're owed love no matter what they do?”
There were things, important things, he was eliding with that question, and it made me very sad to see him missing the point.
I first said to him that “deserving” was not the real issue. Some kinds of love are just there no matter what. A parent who decides to change the house locks to keep an adult child junkie from robbing them or harming them may have come to the end of their rope, and yet they still in some significant sense may love their child, and probably always will.
(Having recently ended both a longstanding marriage and a first important post-marriage romance, I’m also keenly aware of what it’s like to have enormous love for a person and still not want to be in a relationship with them.)
He countered by saying he was talking about the other direction: the “I deserve” assumption. So I let myself ponder this a bit, and here is what I came up with—and I shared at least some of this with my friend. I hope he could hear it.
First, let’s define our terms. I personally avoid the word “deserve” because it’s premised on the concept of a just, fair, and rule-abiding universe in which certain outcomes have been pre-decided as “good” or “bad,” and there’s some actual engine—god or gods, or even some quasi-evolutionary drive toward “perfection”—driving us all toward good and away from bad. I don’t buy any of that in the first place.
Even the word “need” can take on a religious patina if it presumes certain outcomes without stating what those might be. So let’s define a person’s “needs” very narrowly as the factors that enable them to make the best use of their inborn abilities and thrive in their specific cultural and historical moment.
Context matters. Before the age of our full self-sufficiency, we absolutely deserved unconditional love. We should not have had to jump through any hoops to meet our caretaker's narcissistic needs in order to feel loved or lovable. In that regard, I think it’s perfectly apt to say that babies and young children, who have no self-sufficiency and did not choose to exist in the first place, “deserve” to have their “needs” met by the parental figures who created or adopted them, took responsibility for them, invited them into the community of human beings.
This can be a challenge even for healthy, happy people to pull off. The fact that humans have an urge to reproduce might itself be labeled a form of “narcissism,” right? We do it based on our needs, or the needs of the larger community to survive—not the needs of a child that doesn’t exist or isn’t in our lives yet.
But once you have put that separate human being in your life, it behooves you to elevate their needs above your own—to a great degree if not quite absolutely.
It obviously does no good if you sacrifice too much of yourself to be a good caretaker—you need to put on your own oxygen mask before helping them with theirs—and it really sucks if you perceive yourself as having sacrificed too much AND THEN TELL YOUR KID THIS. (It shocks and disgusts me how often I’ve heard people say their mother or father made it clear they never really wanted children in the first place.)
Nor does it serve a growing human well to honor all their innate greed and selfishness. To function as adults, they need to eventually understand that other people are real and have sometimes competing needs, too. We start out as little narcissists; we learn both empathy and good boundaries when our caretakers model those things for us.
I think “unconditional love” is simply a way of labeling the way a good parent or parental figure strives to raise, support, teach, and treat kindly this growing person as they make necessary mistakes. You pledge to meet their needs because that’s what you signed up for—and you never let them feel they have to “earn” your love by being, behaving, looking, acting, talking, or thinking a certain way.
It’s all degrees, shades, and nuances. We have expectations of our children; we are all apt to signal our disappointment or frustration from time to time. It’s not narcissistic to want better from them or for them, but it is narcissistic to withhold love and affection if they don’t conform to our plans for them.
I think an adult who grew up without that feeling that they’re loved unconditionally—an adult whose parents made them feel that they owed the parents something (grades, looks, thinness, achievements, religious obedience, hours of piano practice, social graces, whatever) instead of the other way around—is perfectly within their rights to say I DESERVED BETTER.
Of course, as my friend suggested, it's only narcissists who think, "I deserve to be loved without any conditions by other adults or even my children." The other kind of very “real” love—along with trust, respect, mutual aid & comfort, etc.—absolutely requires reciprocal high standards to be "real."
But even in those relationships, if you're giving a lot more than you're getting—in your marriage, your friendships, your place of employment—you have to start with the belief that you potentially deserve better.
That’s the only way to get to the next step: believing you could deserve better, and then working hard to become better—in order to truly deserve better treatment from others.
That’s not narcissism. That’s just real self-love.
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