When the Golden Rule hurts a child

I realized that my ability to feel empathy and sympathy are essentially indistinguishable. What I mean by that is that I always had such a strong ability to put myself in someone else’s shoes that the feelings that I have whether or not I have experienced the same situation do not matter in my emotional response. I attribute this ability to being the eldest child in a family where I have brothers and sisters. Since I was not the parent in the household that was militant, I had no power to lead with my voice. My voice was actively suppressed by guardians. This means I developed something that I did not recognize how powerful it was until quite recently: I do not need to speak to talk to people. This is aura.

This is a very important ability in life and in my profession. Treating humans of all ages and abilities requires an understanding that not everybody communicates in the same language, at the same level, and in the same manner(s) that I do. This does not mean that I am “better” than people. It is the simple recognition that everyone is different but should be treated with respect. Unfortunately, one of my younger family members projected her own insecurity when she said something to this effect recently. This is, I believe, the reality when the leaders in the individual’s childhood are highly incompetent.

As a high-achieving child, though, I want to highlight something specific in this brief article. As a child, I empathized with my younger brother’s experience because of my own achievements so much that I was worried about achieving ambitious goals because of the standard it would set for him.

I felt bad for my younger brother because I was successful and sadly thought that I would not want to be in his shoes following me. I won a citizenship award, played a number of sports at a high level, and was at the top of my class academically with very little effort. Many things came naturally to me but I also had a strong work ethic and sense of discipline. In the words of one of my guardians, “99 percent of the world is probably lazy compared to you.” But as a child, I felt that my shoes were tough to fill for someone that followed me biologically and chronologically by less than two years. And since I love him unconditionally, I wanted him to be happy as much as me, if not more.

What is interesting, though, is when I had conversations with my brother about this, I realized how off base I was. He was proud to be my little brother. It was kind of mind-blowing because my perception of the difficulty that he had to be going through was completely wrong. He was also successful academically. When teachers accidentally called him my name, he never was mad about it. In fact, he was basically proud of it. We spent so much time together outside of school and he felt safe with me and we had so much fun in the time we spent together as children that in hindsight it makes perfect sense. Success is not a zero-sum game in the mind of a boy. That toxic behavior is learned.

Sadly, for me, it felt like it was because my guardians were emotionally incompetent. They never knew I felt like this. Perhaps they wanted me to feel like this because of the insanely, unhealthily competitive households that they grew up in. They were intentionally or ignorantly perpetuating generational trauma by not teaching me and him that we need to celebrate Elijah’s successes because his gifts and successes should be celebrated because he is clearly chosen. And so is Isaiah, in his own way.

Good families celebrate the successes of all families members irrespective of the comparative nature of their success. In fact, ideally they would strip away any comparison that is outside of healthy sibling rivalry and play. My brother and I did not have that. I needed it because my leadership style as a child made it such that, like I have said, my emotional response in sympathy and empathy is essentially indistinguishable. The blessing and curse here though is I am a living embodiment of the Golden Rule.