Reply to High achieving sibling-dealing with envy

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "High achieving sibling-dealing with envy"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [b]As a teen she reacted by pushing herself harder and achieving more while I reacted by slacking off, partying and withdrawing from the competition.[/b] 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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics