I think I can surprise you with this answer.

I believe that Comparing ourselves to others, is powered by the fear of exposing things we have been keeping secret.

In other words, if we have the courage to put ourselves Completely out there, nothing held back, these comparisons will never even come up. It won’t even occur to us.

This problem is unique to humans. It’s because we get a bad deal in our early years.

All other life gets full support from Mother Nature, in being exactly the one and only thing, it can ever be.

People don’t. As people, we like to try to customize our children.

It doesn’t work, as each child can only ever be the one identity that was originally created. Humans, as well as all other life, cannot be anything else.

What happens then? Children learn to hide all their Qualities that don’t fit that preferred mold.

That eventually leads to lack of connection with our feelings, and consequently identity, but we don’t have to go down that road, for this discussion.

The method that allows us to get over this habit, is to, one by one, drag everything out of the basement, and show the world who we really are, in all our ugly truth!

And then the surprises begin.

Every one of those horribly embarrassing qualities that we have spent our entire lives concealing, turn out to be awesome.

We discover we need to change our opinion about ourselves.

We have been believing what we were told. We have been an oak tree, pretending to be a maple, and feeling embarrassed with our oakness!

So we try to measure our value. As a maple!

It needs to be said that revealing our real qualities is quite difficult. It is worth every effort, 100 times over of course, because what we get is real life, living completely out loud.

But the feelings will be intense. It hurts to be denied expression, as our actual selves. There is fear, guilt, shame, and the horror of being completely inadequate.

That’s the hurt we all carry. That’s why people live in the prison of their own secrets.

Good luck on your journey. Thanks for inviting me in.

This blog is clarity of innocence.com There are other posts, exploring similar topics.

Norm