Elisabeth McKay

Meltdowns if somebody else perceives praise, and a good way to look at this one, and this is something that we start to justify socially as totally acceptable based on their age,

I have Irish twins, as you know if you follow the show.

My youngest, River, is four.

Harley is five.

When one of them gets a present, the other one naturally, if not corrected, will melt down.

Where's my present?

What about me?

When's my birthday?

You have to be able to correct these with intention, right?

You don't just want to shut them down and shame them.

You want to help them understand that attention on one child does not mean that the other child is not loved.

There isn't scarcity to go around, but today we should all be celebrating XYZ person.

And with that, just in general, difficulty celebrating others.

There have been plenty of people in my life where when things go really well for me, they actually, maybe it's subconscious, often I think it's somewhat conscious, they start to become an intentional thorn in my side.

They can't be happy for me, they start to pick fights with me.

So instead of just kind of riding the wave, it starts to bring up some sort of internal conflict inside of themselves.

So another way to look at this would be this is pretty common.

I've even seen people ruin celebrations or birthday parties or a party that is supposed to be celebrating somebody else, somebody who has one of these deeply entrenched patterns.

They may not be doing it consciously, but subconsciously they could unravel the whole party to draw attention back to themselves.

There are certainly some overlap here with the cluster B personality disorders like histrionic disorder, etc., where this is very common, covert narcissism, etc.