LovebirdsFlying
My husband drew this cartoon of me.
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George Carlin observed, "Have you ever noticed that anyone driving faster than you is a maniac, and anyone driving slower than you is an idiot?"
It's the tendency to use ourselves as the yardstick by which we measure other people. Everybody who does something to a lesser degree than you isn't doing it enough, and everybody who does something to a greater degree than you is doing it excessively.
I first caught myself as a young mother. If I was walking with my children, I'd tell them to hurry up and quit poking along. But if I was walking with my husband, and as a man with longer legs, he was going faster than I could move (this was before the accident, after which I have even more trouble) I'd tell him to slow down. Finally it dawned on me, why am I the one to set the pace? I couldn't keep up with my husband, and I had to keep asking him to slow down for me, but I in turn slowed down for my children.
I've found it works the same way emotionally too. In another thread, I mentioned how I stopped watching some TV shows a season or two before my husband stopped watching them. There is a tendency to think people less sensitive than ourselves are "heartless," while people more sensitive than ourselves are "crybabies." If it only bothered me, I was too sensitive, but once it started bothering him, now THAT was a problem. When I was a child, my mother had a tendency to remark within our earshot on other parents' raising of their children. Without getting into whether or not a mother should do that, I noticed that any parent stricter than her was "awful, too hard on those poor kids" but any parent less strict than her is "letting them run wild."
How much have you noticed this tendency?
It's the tendency to use ourselves as the yardstick by which we measure other people. Everybody who does something to a lesser degree than you isn't doing it enough, and everybody who does something to a greater degree than you is doing it excessively.
I first caught myself as a young mother. If I was walking with my children, I'd tell them to hurry up and quit poking along. But if I was walking with my husband, and as a man with longer legs, he was going faster than I could move (this was before the accident, after which I have even more trouble) I'd tell him to slow down. Finally it dawned on me, why am I the one to set the pace? I couldn't keep up with my husband, and I had to keep asking him to slow down for me, but I in turn slowed down for my children.
I've found it works the same way emotionally too. In another thread, I mentioned how I stopped watching some TV shows a season or two before my husband stopped watching them. There is a tendency to think people less sensitive than ourselves are "heartless," while people more sensitive than ourselves are "crybabies." If it only bothered me, I was too sensitive, but once it started bothering him, now THAT was a problem. When I was a child, my mother had a tendency to remark within our earshot on other parents' raising of their children. Without getting into whether or not a mother should do that, I noticed that any parent stricter than her was "awful, too hard on those poor kids" but any parent less strict than her is "letting them run wild."
How much have you noticed this tendency?
That last part pretty much describes how my mother put it. According to her, the majority of the other kids we knew were wild hooligans who were going to end up in prison some day because they don't know the meaning of the word "No." And this because they stayed up an hour later at night than we did, or dared to show their displeasure in any way when they didn't like something.
