Elisabeth McKay

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.

Possessiveness over friendships, very common, definitely worth correcting.

Hyperfixation on fairness.

There is a very specific set of brain patterns that do hyperfixate on fairness.

And one of the things that's important for us to remember is that

Our world is not fair.

So trying to get your kid to orient safety to equal fairness is a setup from the outset.

You need to teach your kids that things are not always fair.

And if you think about where we've gone in the last 10 years, 9 years, there's been a shift toward thinking, well, this sort of everybody is a winner narrative actually benefits us.

it actually does not it does the opposite when somebody fixates on fairness and things needing to be equal we live in a world that is not necessarily fair life isn't fair sometimes you win sometimes you lose it's far better for you and your development to learn how to lose gracefully and to take radical personal responsibility and ownership rather than develop a psychological mechanism like blame shifting projection deflection splitting which often happens