A Tale of Two Sisters

Imagine two grown sisters. They might be twins. Or brothers. Or gender fluid or whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’ll imagine them as two sisters with the same mother.

One of them is worried that the mother doesn’t approve of her. She acts very needy. She constantly asks her mother for reassurance. Secretly she’s trying to get her mother to demonstrate how much she loves her. Unfortunately it doesn’t really matter how hard the mother tries to show this daughter how much she loves her. The daughter still hasn’t learned how to get her self esteem from inside herself. She keeps outsourcing this work. It’s not a job anyone else can do. She needs to do it herself. Her mother loves her. A lot. So she tries to reassure her. She doesn’t understand why all her reassurances don’t seem to work. She might even begin to feel like a failure or to become frustrated with her daughter. Or maybe her daughter’s neediness makes her feel useful, at least until she realizes that nothing she does seems to have much of an impact on her daughter’s confidence in herself.

The other daughter also worries that her mother doesn’t think very highly of her. By the way, this mother has alway been very supportive and encouraging. There was a thing that happened with the dad. It was traumatic. We don’t need to get into it. I just didn’t want you to judge the mother inaccurately. Back to this other daughter. She’s so worried that her mother thinks she’s a failure, as in a failure at life, that she won’t let her mother get close enough to reject her. It would hurt too much. She has moved out of town. She doesn’t come home to visit. She rarely texts. She never calls. She gets very irritated when her mother reaches out. Her mother never criticizes. She mostly says “I love you,” but this daughter hears even those words as criticism.

Some of us do the daughter number one dance with people we love in our lives. People that maybe aren’t our parents. Sometimes we do the daughter number two dance. Other times we go back and forth. The point here is that while it’s true that we feel better about ourselves when we are around certain people no one can really make us feel good about ourselves except us. We have to recognize our own worth. We have to be willing to be true to who we actually are. There will always be some people who don’t like us. Who don’t get us. Who don’t see us. Just the way there will always be some people who don’t like pistachio ice cream.

Just remember some things cannot be outsourced. Self esteem is an inside job.

Cinse Bonino
2022