If You Really Loved Me You Would……

Disentangling from Entitlement in Relationships

If you really loved me you would …. the words of Powerless entitlement

Posted by Wholehearted, LLC on Tuesday, May 12, 2020

This is the extension of the series, “Relationship Crisis Care: How Your Heart and Soul are Your Life Line Right Now for You, Your Business, and Your Loved Ones”.

Topics focus on the rewards of boundaries in relationships and will include things such as entanglement, entitlement, and enmeshment in relationships as well as the hidden costs of emotional and economic codependency.

DISTINGUISHING ENTITLEMENT: RIGHT VS RESPONSIBILITY

Rights are protected permissions or freedom to access your needs and desires.

Responsibilities are obligations for needs, interests, and desires to be fulfilled.

When someone feels violated due to someone else not fulling a personal need, interest, or desire (responsibility), it is an indication of entitlement. When someone is violated due to a trespass upon his/her freedom to pursue and fulfill his/her own desires (right)for him or herself, then this would be considered an injustice.

When you take the responsibility to fulfill others desires for them, you will impede his/her ability to mature and access power to cultivate personal responsibility. This is why distinguishing what is a right and a responsibility is essential.

ROOT OF POWERLESSNESS

When people are not satisfied with the freedom to access their own needs and want others to fulfill their needs for them, they become entitled or demanding. This is due to the fact that they feel powerless to meet their own needs. Out of that fear, they demand it from others.

In relationship, people will often demand trust, respect, intimacy or disclosure, support, acceptance, and interest. This is because they feel powerless to cultivate respect, intimacy, or trust through patient nurturing of the relationship. In some relationships, we may actually be incapable or powerless in cultivating these shared experiences, but with skills you do have power to cultivate these experiences in some relationships.

This can happen financially because someone feels powerless to create finances for themselves, maintain boundaries for themselves. We all want to be powerful, but most of us have been trained into some forms of powerlessness. The heart is not just sentimental, it is also powerful. Personal power is important for everyone to develop.

TRAINING FOR POWERLESSNESS

The training comes from our first and foundational relationships. It may be parents, family, community, and/or culture. For instance,

• Parent feels powerless in adult relationships and therefore place all demands on the child to “love” him/her and affirm the parent’s self esteem by doing what is the best interest of the parent, something the child is incapable of doing consistently and effectively, leaving the child struggling with underlying powerlessness.

• Parent want to keep child’s affection and admiration at cost of the empowerment and individuation of the child. Therefore there is incentive for the parent to keep the child dependent.

• Parents misperceive the wounding from their own childhood as being from a void of help/gifts/niceness and therefore react by giving children everything. Not realizing the wounding was a void of love of which they feel powerless to fill for themselves, they try to “fix” this in their children by giving children what the children are responsible for cultivating for yourself. Love is not trust, disclosure, support, etc.

WHEN THOSE AROUND YOU ARE ENTITLED

People who are entitled, are very good at pointing out everyone else’s self centeredness, declaring “If you really loved me you would……”

Others entitlement will “work” on you if you feel powerless to validate your own goodness, self resource, or release guilt or shame when prioritizing yourself. You likely feel most powerful when you are fixing other people’s problems instead of your own, or you may want people to be dependent on you/like you (so you feel needed and valuable).

You may give other people what they demand but that keeps them and you locked in only momentary illusions of power. Not to mention, you reinforce that they have power over you.

When many people in your life are showing up as entitled, you may need to ask: what does caving into the pressure of relationship demands give me? It could be the relief from the fear of not being seen as good, loving, helpful, useful because you feel powerless to cultivate those assurances/feelings for yourself. It can feel like the only way to get social acceptance.

WHEN WE ARE THE ONES ENTITLED

Demanding from other people keeps us dependent and gives an illusion of power – but it is simply an illusion (manipulative “power”), not self resourced power. We never access our true power.

Celebrating other’s successes and achievements will awaken the pain of our own disappointments and places of powerlessness and this is helpful in understanding where we feel powerless.

3 steps to processing emotions of entitlement/powerlessness

1. receive and respect
2. reintegrate and regulate
3. resilient and resource

Recognizing when you feel entitled, gives you access to

1. Recognizing where you need to cultivate personal power
2. Appreciating the rights of freedom while accepting the responsibilities those rights require of you
3. Seeing the reward of personal effort and return & also recognizing where there is not ROI
4. Willingness to do the hard things and develop personal competencies despite the cost
5. Distinguishing between love and trust, therefore being able to receive love and at the same time cultivate/earn trust
6. Clarifying your definition of love
7. Cultivating long term mutually beneficial relationships for others

QUESTIONS

1. Look at a demanding relationship. Make a list of what is your responsibility and what is his/hers. Distinguish between rights and responsibilities.
2. Start with the assumption: I am entitled when I feel powerless. Where might you be wanting someone to fulfill on a desire in your life for you? Why may that be?
3. Where have I been trained out of my own power by my childhood, culture, relationships, or experiences?
4. What aspects of developing personal power are most inviting to you?