Magda Murawska, M.Ed.
I hope that I am not alone what I recall the following scenario – Sitting at a table with friends, I listen to them discuss their accounts of job promotions and various exciting life experiences. Happy and proud of my friends’ accomplishments, I find myself comparing my own life to theirs. It’s almost an involuntary act, one that has been honed with years of practice. My comparison begins in the calm waters of commonalities, but quickly veers into the more dangerous high tide of comparisons, as I began to negatively compare what’s lacking in my life based on what is present in theirs. I soon hear the thoughts of “I should be farther ahead in my career,” “I should be doing this,” “I should be doing that,” etc. I’ve entered the ‘Sea of Shoulds’ – an unpredictable place, like the Bermuda Triangle, where few come out unscathed.
The danger of comparing ourselves to others is that our comparisons are never fair. Each one of us is a unique individual with characteristics and life events that are unique to only us. Unless you’ve been cloned at birth and your clone has been following you around and engaging in everything you have (down to your exact thinking), I’m pretty certain when I say that comparing yourself to another is a dead end. It is our entire life experience that makes us vastly different from those around us. Sure we may have things in common, we may even have the same job. But, even if we’re interviewing for the same position, what got me to this point and what got you here are two very different roads. By comparing ourselves to others we’re negating our own road and demanding that the past be different than what it was. The demands we place on ourselves to be like those we’re comparing ourselves may sometimes be motivations for change, however they are more likely to lead to feelings of diminished self-worth.
In such situations, we need to remind ourselves that our self-worth is not based on our behaviors or what we have (or don’t have). Though it is quite all right to admire a colleague’s wardrobe or a friend’s job, our admiration should stop there. Once we cross into comparing our own wardrobe or job to theirs, we enter a danger zone that may result in feeling quite lousy about ourselves. And that is just not a pleasant place to be.
Some of you may be thinking about the benefits of comparison (like when you end up feeling better about your life based on the crummy life your friend is currently leading). Though this may seem like the shorter end of the stick, it’s not necessarily the better one. What we do in such situations is similar – we are defining our self-worth based on what we have or what is currently happening in our life. What happens when we no longer have those things? Or when our ‘crummy life’ friend has a sunny day? Are we all of a sudden worth less?
So what do we do instead? In REBT, the focus is on helping a person move away from self-rating completely, meaning that we no longer rate ourselves based on our behaviors. We as humans are too complex to be rated or described by a phrase or two. We are similarly too complex to rate ourselves based on the comparison to another, complex human being.
#tbt #throwbackthursday