I can relate with you Philippa, since I was a young girl, my mom would compare me to a close friend's daughter (actually grew up calling them aunt, uncle, and cousins). Why I couldn't be more like her, she's so smart, beautiful, nice, and neat/clean. I was horrible at up keeping my bedroom when I was younger, she also thought my handwriting was hideous. She wanted me to be so much like her that she had me spend an entire summer with her. My mother told me that she was going to teach me how to write pretty and dress pretty (I had been hanging out with what people call "gothic" people, who if anybody really got to know them were really nice kids, just dressed differently). Anyways, I came back home after that summer, writing and dressing just like my cousin, and was probably the best year for my mom and I, we got a long so much better.
Then when we would walk through the mall, it would start all over (the comparing), my mom and my "Aunt" would count how many more guys would look at my cousin more than me. I actually heard them talking about it and my mom telling her friend that it's because her daughter was gorgeous and I wasn't. Yeah, talk about a shoot down of self confidence.
God...sorry. She sounds horrid, really horrid, and it's all so familiar, though in a different way of course. Dad makes it sound like he's just informing me when he says it, like he isn't really just being a nasty SOB. He's been telling me about my cousin for about 10 years now, it's an ongoing routine part of our regular conversation.
I wish and want to be able to say to him "do you even know how much that hurts me when you compare me to Andrew?" but somehow it never comes out. I've wanted to say it for so long now, but every time I even try to discuss my feelings or his behavior, he will laugh and/or twist it all around so that I'm being ridiculous or that it's nothing, and I'm just being over sensitive. I can't ever make him understand or acknowledge what he's done.
All I can do is talk to him in the privacy of my room, as though he were there, and really say what I want to say to him, and really let him have it. I'm also lucky to have friends who have actually allowed me to use them to pretend he (one male friend online) is my father and I can just say what I want to say to him, and he doesn't take it personally. That was really helpful...I've done it in a therapeutic context as well, so it helps to acknowledge the reality and validate my feelings, because god knows it ain't gonna ever come from him.
I've been thinking a lot about him recently, and I get a bit down on myself, like I'm terrible for cutting him off all together, but just coming here and reading your story which is similar to mine, make me more confident that it isn't me who is a selfish bitch...I'm just doing what I have to to survive and protect the remnants of my self-esteem, so I can build it back up again, because every time I start building it, someone comes a long, a male usually, who acts just like dad and knocks me down again. It's been going on since I was 20 (I'm 36 now).
I have this incredible determination and stubbornness to evict all those people from my life, because I know that despite how they try to make me feel, that I am just as important as everyone else is, and I just need to get away from all of them and be very choosy with who I allow in my world, according to whether they are supportive of me or not, in the sense that they encourage me, and not belittle me. It's so weird to me that so many men (that I've experienced...I haven't really seen it in women as much.) seem to think that belittling people is cool or somehow a desirable and right way to be. Destroying someone is such a casual thing for so many people to do, and they give each other kudos for doing it??:confused:
Now my husband and I are constantly being compared to my sisters and their husbands, not being in the military or having our own company, or not having all these nice materialistic items in our homes or really nice cars to drive. It all really makes me sick to my stomach and hate it so much!!
She sounds like a real piece of work. Take consolation in the fact that as messed up as you may be, she is a thousand times more f*cked up, and doesn't even know it!
Nobody should be compared to another person, everybody is uniquely different and beautiful in their own way. I've had such a self confidence issue since I was a teenager that it wasn't until my current husband to make me feel beautiful. Even when I'm having a tough day on myself, he still tells me how beautiful I am and that I'm nuts to not agree with him. He's truly the best guy for me!! I'm so blessed.
He sounds lovely. Hopefully I will meet someone like that one day.
