How much of yourself do you deny or try to hide from others to look good and appear to be right?
It might not make much sense, but some of the most successful people in the world have reached their pinnacle of success because of their need to look good. Yes, they too have other-dependent esteem and a good enough success is never quite good enough. Neither is the next success good enough nor the one after that. They keep raising the bar and good enough is never good enough to look good enough to others.
Many who need to look good live in constant fear that someone will get a glimpse of their inadequacies and point them out to others. They fear that others will find out what they already know about themselves. If that happens, they aren’t going to look very good. They fear not being liked by others if they are exposed for who they really are. They fear that nothing about them will appear to be right.
When we rely on looking good to feel good about ourselves, we gauge how good we look by comparing ourselves to others. Comparing is so common today that we have coined a brand new word, comparanoia, to illustrate the magnitude of the unhealthy, obsessive comparison of ourselves to others.
Comparing ourselves to others is a no-win situation. Individuals who are other-dependent almost never compare themselves to someone they see as less than themselves, unless they do so as a way to make themselves look better. Instead, they almost always compare themselves to someone they think looks better, and sadly, they find themselves lacking when compared to that person. In their own opinion they don’t measure up and don’t look good enough.
