Comparing Yourself to Others (Revisited)

[Pod]

There are other threads on this, but no clear answers.  I don't wanna launch into a text-wall of amateur philosophizing (banging on drums and saying you're covering Led Zep)  so I'll give a super duper condensed version of what I think so far and what questions I'm left with.  

 

I'm trying to figure out what the short term + of negatively comparing yourself to others is. My starting points:

 

• It's a bad habit like smoking (short term +, long term -).
• The "long term -" is low self-respect and everything that grows from that.
• It comes out of childhood trauma (I don't remember having the habit when I was a kid).
• When I imagine someone negatively comparing themselves to me, I hate that they're doing that to themselves.  

So what's the +?  Is it a form of self-flagellation?  Has Stef done any podcasts on this? 

 

If so plz point me.  I'm a philosophy guppy so I need an expert. 

[Jeridan Kowal]

A short term benefit might be that you are getting relief from having to do anything to feel good.
If you receive a good feeling from viewing yourself as being "one up" on somebody else, it can make you complacent.
But that only works if the comparison you draw is more positive for yourself.

 

That's how I see it: Comparing yourself to others can act as a paralytic to mental or physical growth.

It's interesting though that you can turn it into a positive habit. Seeing others as role models and examples to be emulated is highly desirable.
I guess it depends on your ego strength.

[MiraiRonin]

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're referring to comparing yourself to people and concluding that you are inferior to them, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, in the meantime I'll proceed on that assumption.

 

This is off the top of my head, but it seems to me that the secondary gains of comparing yourself negatively to others are:

 

• Feeling sorry for yourself. This allows you to be the centre of attention in your own mind, so that being less important paradoxically makes you the most important person in your own world. It also releases you from empathising with others, saving you time, effort and discomfort.
• Being the most capable person in the room, and the most moral, in pretty much any situation, lands the burden of taking action on your shoulders.  Being inferior or less capable means that anything important is best done by someone else, allowing you to offload the responsibility for taking initiative, taking risks, taking the blame when things go wrong. 
• Having an excuse for not progressing in your life. If your life is in stasis and not improving, you can use comparisons with others to conclude that you are incapable of making changes to your life. This temporarily diffuses the anxiety of your life direction, long enough for another frozen-pizza-fueled World of Warcraft binge.

I have to stress that these reasons are not in any way an endorsement or encouragement of comparing yourself negatively with others. It takes only a moment's thought to see that these habits provide scant short-term gain for massive, irreparable, long-term pain. I hate to admit it, but I've looked at these from the inside long enough to say that it's not worth it.

 

Of course, a rational recognition of an exceptional person's abilities is another matter, one I can go into more if you're interested.

[Pod]

@ MiraiRonin

 

Those three examples make sense but now I'm wondering where the habit came from.  Because those three examples all points the finger at the person but don't point to anything in their past that could have formed the necessity for the habit. 

 

The only thing in my childhood I can think of that may have started this was mid-way through school where I was the outcast and my father had a talk with me that went something like this:

 

"All the kids at school tell me I'm stupid..."

"Well they're wrong.  You know why?"

"Why?"

"You're smart and can get good grades. If you get on the honor role and stay on it, you'll prove them wrong."

 

This instantly communicated that: 

1. If I didn't get on the honor role, they were right.
2. My worth is dependent on what I can achieve over others.
3. Appeasing those in authority (teachers/parents) was the only way to find personal worth. 

But I still have no clue where the habit comes in.  If it's of any help, my dad is addicted to self-pity as an attention net similar to your first example.

[MiraiRonin]

Pod, I feel like you were setting off cherry bombs throughout that post and then dropped a nuke in the last line 

 

If you have this habit of comparing yourself negatively to others, and your father was, as you put it 'addicted to self-pity' for the purposes of attracting attention, then I think it's a near-certainty that you, on a mostly unconscious level, are mimicking the behaviour he modeled for you. The reason for this is that we all want to get our own way, and, as children, we scan the people the people around us. We watch what they do, we see what works for them, and you saw that your father, I'm guessing, got positive reinforcement, encouragement, compliments, and his own way in disagreements by visible self-pity that affected the behaviour of the people around him. This strategy, which you observed throughout your childhood, got built into the firmware of your brain in a mostly unconscious way, such that you find yourself employing that strategy without realising that you are.

 

Bear in mind that this is off the top of my head; is there any part of it that does not tally with your experience?

[Pod]

@ MiraiRonin

 

No it definitely does tally.  There's a few other tactics that he uses against me and my family though that may interest you.

 

When he's angry he'll slam drawers or throw stuff onto the table.  He knows when he does this my mom, sister and I will ask what's wrong and just like that he's got us trying to fix/find whatever needs to be fixed/found, lest we don't in which his temper escalates.  We all know where that bomb's gonna land because we've all seen it go off before. 

 

He also uses guilt in the same way.  Like when he was installing a hood to an indoor range and it wouldn't fit, he'd start audibly whimpering and getting really rough with it.  It came to a point where I just said right there "I need therapy." not in an accusatory way, just stating.  He immediately turned around and say in an angry tone "What, because of me???" and that pretty much shut me up. 

 

So you're right that he is getting our immediate compliance, and that's the short term + for him, but I've since worked those habits out of my life. 

 

The question still lies with the benefit of comparing myself to others.  From what you typed I think I may have a good start on it. 

 

My goal when I was a kid (and still today) was to keep my dad and his temper faaaaaar far apart.  I'd do this however I could by getting on the honor role, getting good test scores, going and finding whatever he was looking for, getting authority figures to say good things about me, acting depressed along with him when he went through depression, and shaming myself when confronted by him to show him that I wasn't trying to put up any opposition. 

 

Just a few but yea that "addiction to helplessness" thing you said sorta opened up a spicket in my brain. Any thoughts on what I've barfed up so far?

[MiraiRonin]

Oh, I have a few.

 

The first that comes to mind is, doesn't your father's behaviour strike you as infantile? He doesn't get what he wants, so he shouts, breaks things, whimpers? That's how a toddler goes about solving their problems, and that's an insult to toddlers because they at least have the excuse of not knowing any better.

 

Secondly, this immediately reminded me of something Stef wrote in RTR about the distinction between "active" or "overt" aggression and "passive" aggression. To paraphrase, active aggression is "If I don't get what I want, I will be angry, and you will feel afraid", whereas passive aggression is "if I don't get what I want, I will be sad, and you will feel guilty". That doesn't quite cover all the varieties of passive aggression (another is "if I don't get what I want, I will do as you say with pedantic precision that completely fails to achieve what you wanted, and you will feel annoyed"), but it's a good starting point. Now Stef described these as the male and female tactics, respectively, but it seems that your dad was like mine and went for the twofer   What's interesting about it is the power relationship that these tactics depend on to work; in active aggression, your dad positions himself as the powerful one, who can bring his wrath down on you if you don't do his bidding; in passive, he puts you in the position of power, the power to make him 'the bad guy', like in your range example, and immediately seeks to make you feel guilty about using your 'power' selfishly.

 

Finally I just find people who rely on others to regulate their emotional state kind of pathetic, but utterly repulsive when these people foist that responsibility onto their children. For why? Because the children can't leave, and they're only just learning to gain emotional mastery over themselves, and they desperately need their parents to model emotional strength and self-reliance, with appropriate levels of openness and vulnerability. Forcing your kids into the role of emotional punching bag/relief valve leads to exactly the situation you described in your goals as a kid; you self-erased. You ceased to have your own needs and became a kind of regulatory mechanism for your dad's poorly designed emotional reactor. Then you get launched into the real world with these emotional mechanisms designed for managing someone else, and lo and behold, you find yourself managing people's behaviour through self-pity.

 

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I hope they're of some help.

[Pod]

@ MiraiRonin

 

yesyesyesyesyes that hit the nail on the head.

 

When I was a kid it was physical threats, yelling, spanking and occasionally hitting on the face.  As I got bigger it was yelling and guilt, now that I'm 21 it's exclusively guilt.  He's transitioning through aggressive tactics and I have no doubt that when I blow this popsicle stand it'll be all "Why don't you talk to us?  What do we have to do to get you to talk to us?" and if I give them conditions for talking to me, they'll follow them, then if I wanna end contact they'll go "WE DID EVERYTHING YOU ASKED" and blah blah blah. 

 

I knew making an account on this site was a good idea. 

 

You said your father was similar?  Was he similar in any of the ways I listed?  How did you learn to deal with him/the effects afterwards?  For me I just walk away or ignore him. 

[MiraiRonin]

Sadly, that phased de-escalation that you're describing, where your parent's behaviour is dictated by the question "what can I get away with?", is very familiar not only to me but a lot of people. A stark example is in podcast 2718, this episode:

 

 

Specifically, this part: https://youtu.be/S4E_2utxR5k?t=1h6m59s, although the entire episode is well worth a listen.

 

What you describe with your father is very familiar to me. When I was very young, I was hit. When I got too big to hit, I got verbal aggression. When I became inured to the verbal aggression, came passive aggression, guilt, and manipulation. This continued until well after I moved out, after a few years of grimacing every time I saw him on my caller ID, that he got the message and became more patient and solicitous. Ironically that only drove home the fact that he could've reigned in his earlier unpleasant behaviour, but he didn't have to, so he didn't. The harm it was doing to our relationship in the future, or to me right there and then, were non-issues. It did cross his mind from time to time; I remember a conversation where he sadly told me that he never thought he and I would truly be close or understand each other, and like the well-programmed appeasement-bot I was at the time, I tried very hard to comfort him and tell him it wasn't true.

 

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but moving away and letting the relationship dissipate was not the best way to deal with the situation. The best way, once I'd gotten some therapy, done some self-knowledge work and understood how my behaviour in the present was rooted in my past (to the point of being so timid around people that I was afraid to even post on these forums - seriously), the best way would have been confront him with his behaviour and the effects it had on me. This is the approach Stef champions: confront, always after consultation with and with the guidance of a therapist, but confront, and you will learn if there is any capacity for remorse or empathy in the other person on which a true relationship can be built. Not a perfect relationship, not the relationship you'd have if your father had been stable and emotionally available your whole life, but something positive and honest. And if not, well, you're freed from hoping and can make way in other parts of your life. 

 

Another podcast that may be relevant is FDR3032 - Economic Determinism: Weekend at Bernie Sanders'. About an hour in a guy calls in to talk about boundaries in relationships and the conversation struck so many chords with me, it may do the same for you.

 

I realise we drifted pretty far from your original post Pod, was this helpful?

[Pod]

@MiraiRonin

 

Yes it was.  Sorry about the late reply.  I listened to both and they touched on what I was thinking too. 

 

But you said that you regret not confronting your parents before cutting the rope, I sorta regret cutting it way too early.  I've had at least 5 conversations with them about this stuff and made it clear to them that this is the only subject I'm willing to talk about until it's resolved, and they've pretty much ostracized me in their own house.  We don't speak or make eye contact, and I'm unemployed right now so the best part of my day is waking up to an empty house and the worst part is them getting home from work.

 

They've even tried the typical "why don't you speak to us" guilt trip, and literally have asked "can we just talk about something? it doesn't have to be important!"  It's sickening.

 

We have similar fathers so I think you saved yourself some time and hassle.  At least you're not in proximity to them.  I made the mistake of charging into battle with 3 months of FDR under my belt the first time and kinda got stomped.