High achieving sibling-dealing with envy

[Anonymous]

OP, if you take away all of the material stuff and the money, do you like your sister? What happens when the two of you go out to lunch or spend time alone?

[Anonymous]

10:56 again. Forgot to add this...

For high achievers, they may look at someone like you and I, and think "why would someone choose to to want so little out of life?" It's very difficult for them to understand.

But for me, I look at super high achievers and think: "Man, that looks exhausting, stressful, and difficult to maintain." It's very difficult for me to understand.

It's all a matter of perspective. We all have different goals. I'd rather be happy, have less stress, and less "stuff." But some people really need that kitchen that looks right out of a magazine. To each their own. Stop comparing yourself to others.

[Anonymous]

OP, you mentioned that you and your spouse are in fields where you are helping others (teacher and social worker). While they may not be high paying jobs, they are both jobs where you have the opportunity to affect the lives of others in positive ways. Many people will have much more admiration and respect for people in helping professions than for those in much more highly paid fields. Maybe it's worth it to think about and focus on the people whose lives are better because you and your husband were there for them?
I had a parent who spent eight weeks in hospice care. One of the hospice personnel was a social worker who did so much to help my parents through this difficult time. She does not earn a high salary, but I have way more admiration for what she does than for many of the people who our society deems worthy of high recompense.

[Anonymous]

I am in a similar situation except I a not jealous. I have many siblings. 3 are well off financially.

I don't envy them because we are relatively open and honest with each other and their lives suck in my opinion. I would not trade it for my job (that gives instead of takes), my salary (which landed me in a nice neighborhood with nice neighbors), my community (which is way more diverse and compassionate than theirs), and my physical well being (they have anxieties and health issues that go along with stressful lives).

Also, their perfect children are not perfect and it all begins to unravel when they are 16ish.

I love them and support them but I do not envy them.

[Anonymous]

Some people do lead charmed lives but their lives are not yours. Their great lives do not necessarily have to be a facade. It gets easier to accept that as you get older and your children grow up and lead their own lives. It's harder when your kids are young and you see things for them that you wish you could give them. What gives you joy, OP? Try to find ways to bring it into your life.

[Anonymous]

OP here again. A PP asked if I liked my sister. My sister and I have some common interests and we can have fun together. I like her but sometimes I feel like she's being condescending. Of course, some of that could be my insecurity, too. My DH thinks it's a bit of both.

Thanks to the PP who commented about my DH and I both being in helping professions. It does feel good to have careers we don't feel ethically conflicted about! While the salaries aren't the best neither of us ever questions the value of what we do.

Thank you for all of the thoughtful replies. This has been helpful and has helped me clarify some things. I have a bad habit of worrying about how others perceive me. I should focus more on living my own life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My younger sister is very successful. She has a doctorate degree, a great career, a successful, high earning husband, a happy marriage, a beautiful house, a large social network and three smart, high achieving children. I know no one is perfect, but she has what appears to be an almost ideal sort of life. My husband and I have decent jobs (teaching and social work), a small group of friends and our kids are intelligent but they aren't high achievers. We are solidly middle class while my sister and her husband are upper middle to upper class. Compared to the rest of the world, I feel like we are doing pretty well but compared to my sister I feel like a failure. Our kids don't have the same opportunities that her children do-they go to better schools, have had more opportunity to travel, etc. I love my sister but being around her and our family is hard sometimes as I feel constantly compared and seen as "lesser." We are very close in age (1 year apart) and growing up we were compared and pitted against each other. As a teen she reacted by pushing herself harder and achieving more while I reacted by slacking off, partying and withdrawing from the competition. It's been tough living in her shadow. In most families I would be considered reasonably successful but not in my family. I have had therapy to try to work through significant issues from childhood (our family was and to some degree continues to be very dysfunctional) but I still can't seem to get past the envy and feelings of inferiority. It's to the point where I dread family events and interactions with my sister. I really feel as though she looks down on me and I get nervous when I speak with her-I feel like she judges my vocabulary, the content of my speech, etc. She's a nice person but is very impressed with herself.

I know this is really unhealthy. Any thoughts as to how to deal with this? Therapy really wasn't all that helpful in this area.

According to you, you slacked off and so did not become a high achiever. Why are you blaming your sister? You each made your own choices and now you have to live with it. The only person you really should compare yourself to is...yourself. You can only be the best You you can be. Focus on improving yourself until you are happy with You.

Your parents were awful, but it was probably out of ignorance rather than being mean spirited. I'm sure they tried the best the could, as you do with your kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here again. A PP asked if I liked my sister. My sister and I have some common interests and we can have fun together. I like her but sometimes I feel like she's being condescending. Of course, some of that could be my insecurity, too. My DH thinks it's a bit of both.

Thanks to the PP who commented about my DH and I both being in helping professions. It does feel good to have careers we don't feel ethically conflicted about! While the salaries aren't the best neither of us ever questions the value of what we do.

Thank you for all of the thoughtful replies. This has been helpful and has helped me clarify some things. I have a bad habit of worrying about how others perceive me. I should focus more on living my own life.

I think there are four relationships at work. There is the relationship with yourself and by all accounts you sound mostly happy with your life. All I can say is for the regrets you do have(how you handled sibling comparison by slacking off) try to turn that experience into something positive. Maybe help mentor a kid that could use a positive influence. Be that person you wish had been there to help guide you. With your kids, be the parent you wished you had and soften the blow of natural sibling rivalry and help your kids be on the same team. How will they form and keep close relationships with each other despite any later differences in economic and educational status?

Second is their relationship with your sister's kids, between you and your niece/nephews and between the first cousins. I've seen siblings go thru rough patches but put differences aside when it comes to their kids being friends and how they treat nieces and nephews.

The third is your relationship with your sister. Once you really feel like you have made peace with the past, maybe it's worth it to have an honest conversation to understand each other better. Also, if you feel like she is condescending to you and it's not you being overly sensitive call her on it. I would say something if a close friend was being condescending along the lines of you do realize that I already know "x"? Maybe you need to come up with code words till you guys can communicate better. With my now DH, I thought he could take jokes a little too far to the point it seemed like he was putting me down. We had a heart to heart and it took a few months for him to get when the sarcasm was too much for me and he would check what he would say. DH does like to show off what he knows at times but I let it roll off my back because I know I'm intelligent and on top of my game in my areas of interest. If showing off crosses into condescending then I will say something.

Saving the best for last, relationship with your parents will be the hardest. You have the least influence there and would be trying to change decades of behavior. If you and your sister become allies, you may be able to try to gently correct course with your parents when they stir the pot of comparison and sibling rivalry or at least get to the point you don't transfer your anger at your parents unto your sister. However, at the end of the day you may change nothing with your parents and have to not give your parents the power to ruin the relationship between you and your sibling and with you and your nieces/nephew, and between the cousins.

P.S. I wanted to add that I don't buy into the "oh because they are rich, they must work 1000 hours a week and be so stressed out, how happy I am that I didn't choose that life". I think that is just a different form of comparison and putting down someone else's decision . You would be pissed if your sister was doing the same with your decisions. You should not and do not have to justify your decisions to anyone else assuming you take on the consequences of those decisions. You are also not your sister and she is not you and you have different strengths and weaknesses. I'm horrible at rote memorizations (but I will remember the boyfriend from 10 years ago that you told me about ) so there would be no point in me wondering why I couldn't be a lawyer or doctor making 300,000 a year. It's not about what other people are doing, it's about what makes sense for me to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My younger sister is very successful. She has a doctorate degree, a great career, a successful, high earning husband, a happy marriage, a beautiful house, a large social network and three smart, high achieving children. I know no one is perfect, but she has what appears to be an almost ideal sort of life. My husband and I have decent jobs (teaching and social work), a small group of friends and our kids are intelligent but they aren't high achievers. We are solidly middle class while my sister and her husband are upper middle to upper class. Compared to the rest of the world, I feel like we are doing pretty well but compared to my sister I feel like a failure. Our kids don't have the same opportunities that her children do-they go to better schools, have had more opportunity to travel, etc. I love my sister but being around her and our family is hard sometimes as I feel constantly compared and seen as "lesser." We are very close in age (1 year apart) and growing up we were compared and pitted against each other. As a teen she reacted by pushing herself harder and achieving more while I reacted by slacking off, partying and withdrawing from the competition. It's been tough living in her shadow. In most families I would be considered reasonably successful but not in my family. I have had therapy to try to work through significant issues from childhood (our family was and to some degree continues to be very dysfunctional) but I still can't seem to get past the envy and feelings of inferiority. It's to the point where I dread family events and interactions with my sister. I really feel as though she looks down on me and I get nervous when I speak with her-I feel like she judges my vocabulary, the content of my speech, etc. She's a nice person but is very impressed with herself.

I know this is really unhealthy. Any thoughts as to how to deal with this? Therapy really wasn't all that helpful in this area.

According to you, you slacked off and so did not become a high achiever. Why are you blaming your sister? You each made your own choices and now you have to live with it. The only person you really should compare yourself to is...yourself. You can only be the best You you can be. Focus on improving yourself until you are happy with You.

Your parents were awful, but it was probably out of ignorance rather than being mean spirited. I'm sure they tried the best the could, as you do with your kids.

This is the OP again. I'm not blaming my sister for anything. I made some choices in my teens and twenties that I regret-I certainly don't blame her for that (or anyone else for that matter). In regards to my parents, I can't say that they tried the best that they could. Our Mom did her best most of the time, our Father is another story. He's a sociopath and said and did some terrible things. He should never have been a parent.

[Anonymous]

OP for perspective, I am actually a lot like your sister. My sibling however, who was a much less good student than me is now a mega successful gazillionaire, gorgeous and the apple of my parents' eye.

So it's all relative. It sounds like you have a nice family and a good life.

I also have a stepsibling who sounds a lot like you. In many ways, I envy her much more than my sibling. A good person, good spouse, and genuinely happy with life. I think those are the real goals, and I am not just saying that. I know a lot of unbelievably successful but miserable people in my line of work. And when work does bring you happiness, that happiness tends to be fleeting. A solid life and friends is a much more real source of satisfaction.

[Anonymous]

I am the high achieving sister in my family. It's very lonely. I know my sisters resent me for it. So over the years, I have learned to hide the things that make me different from them, I downplay my experiences, I don't share information about what me and DH do, or where we go or the people we meet. I'm paranoid about appearing boastful.

I go out of my way to compliment their Facebook photos but I don't post any of my own. I go out of my way to encourage them on their accomplishments but I celebrate my own in private. I'm afraid to disagree with them for fear of being told I am being condescending. The last time i disagreed with one of my sisters, she said I had a superiority complex and then ignored me for months.

My sisters are very close to each other, they hang out all the time, their kids are close. If I don't initiate contact, they pretty much don't care. The worst is when they post photos of them hanging out together and no one thought to invite me. When I ask why no invite they say they thought I would be busy since I travel so much. I wish they knew how much it hurts to know that I want to be close to them so much more than they want to be close to me.

[Anonymous]

OP, I am the successful younger sister. I spent most of my life learning through their experiences how to behave/act and not making the same mistakes. I worked hard and given myself that opportunity. As an adult, I feel the resentment towards me but I long for a closer relationship with my siblings. My siblings now want the same thing that I have and it's driving them harder. One is saving more money, planning for retirement etc., the other is going back to school. OP, if you feel this way, you should drive yourself too. Maybe you are at a point in your life that you feel stagnant, not going anywhere; find something that you can get into. Join a running group, go back to get a degree, do something for yourself that would take months to achieve but stick by it cause at the end it would help your with self-esteem. I built my self-esteem by achieving things that took time and patience to build and when I finally achieved it, it was such a self esteem booster that I wanted to achieve more with many more aspects of my life. OP, good luck, it sounds like it's time to stop envying and start doing something more for yourself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here again. A PP asked if I liked my sister. My sister and I have some common interests and we can have fun together. I like her but sometimes I feel like she's being condescending. Of course, some of that could be my insecurity, too. My DH thinks it's a bit of both.

Thanks to the PP who commented about my DH and I both being in helping professions. It does feel good to have careers we don't feel ethically conflicted about! While the salaries aren't the best neither of us ever questions the value of what we do.

Thank you for all of the thoughtful replies. This has been helpful and has helped me clarify some things. I have a bad habit of worrying about how others perceive me. I should focus more on living my own life.

OP, you are very brave to admit these insecurities. I don't have this exact issue with my family, but I experience this with my neighbors. We are the on the lower "achieving and educated" of our very wealthy and educated neighbors. My husband and I are in similar "helping" "public interest" types of jobs -our kids go to public school and inexpensive activities. I do have satisfaction in that I don't have ethical conflicts about my job and we are very present in our children's lives. As we've spent more time with our neighbors, I've learned that even though things can look good from the outside, reality may be different (this was the case with my family when I was growing up).

No matter what your status is in life, nobody is immune from tragedy, illness, death, loss etc. Perhaps down the road, you and your sister may be in different circumstances, for better or worse.

Your situation right now is a "test" as to how comfortable you really are with yourself. I agree with the other posters that people who "look down" aren't really comfortable with themselves. Truly secure people don't need to do that. Yes, be busy living your own life.

At the end of the "chess game", the pawn and king go back in the same box.

Good luck.

[Anonymous]

My sister and I were also often compared and I think time & space really helped reduce the tension that created. As we've grown, and we're now on different sides of the country, when we do get together, it's become much more enjoyable. I'm genuinely impressed with all she's achieved for herself and she seems so happy. It helps that we're in different fields, different phases of life - so there's less to directly compare now than when we were both in high school, both in AP classes, etc. She's doing really well and that makes me happy.

Maybe you'll feel better equipped to spend time with her when you've had some space - both in terms of time and distance. I'm not saying cut her off, of course you shouldn't, but keeping some distance for now and reengaging later when you feel ready might be the right course.