how do I stop thinking that everyone is better than me?

Post date: 2022-05-13 13:07:38

I feel like everyone's judging me and like everyone has a better social life than me, and I want to stop torturing myself this way.

I'm in my early 20s, about to graduate from college. For a very long time I've struggled with comparing myself to other people my age. I think part of this might be a consequence of being bullied/judged when I was a kid. I immigrated to the US from India when I was 7 and I was treated very unkindly by some people. For example, when I was 8, I was playing on a playground and one of the white kids told me I looked like a gorilla (at this point I already had more hair than other kids my age). I felt so disgusting immediately. I think I'd probably already developed a sense of inferiority by then due to other experiences that I'm not aware of at the moment, but that experience definitely made it worse.

Flash forward to now - I've been growing aware that for a long time, I've been feeling like everyone around me is better than me. When I talk to people, I get this sickening feeling that they're judging me for some reason - maybe my hair's out of place or maybe I made a dumb a comment. I can't pinpoint concrete evidence that they're judging me, but the thoughts come in my head anyways. And then, on the flip side, I find myself comparing me to others and concluding that they're all better than me. I experienced major friend breakups recently and my boyfriend broke up with me a few months ago, so I've experienced a pretty big shift in my social circles, and I've been feeling lonely. (This is exacerbated in times of togetherness like graduation). Everywhere I look, it feels like other people have so many more friends than I do and/or have partners and just in general have thriving social lives. And my brain likes to tell me that this is because they're better than me in some way.

I can tell that the reason I keep thinking these thoughts is because of deep-rooted self-hatred, conditioned into me by society. I would really like to stop feeling this way. I want to love me for me but I'm feeling so stuck. I've been in therapy for over a year now and have definitely made progress but these loops keep continuing and I'm just not sure what to do. I would appreciate your advice.

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