Are childhood comparisons and family gossip holding you back? Learn how breaking external validation is the key to unlocking your true progress and living a life of sovereign growth.powerful and insightful piece about the psychological chains that hold us back. It perfectly aligns with your brand’s focus on transformation and sovereignty.
The Gossip Chain: How Childhood Comparisons Keep Us from Our True Path
A lot of the reasons we are not progressing in life is we are spending most of our free hours on “he said, she said.” This isn’t just idle chatter; it’s a learned behaviour, a legacy passed down through generations that keeps us trapped in cycles of judgment and inaction. It starts as children, sitting at the kitchen table, hearing our parents—mothers, primarily—dissect the lives of other households. In these conversations, children become pawns in a silent war of measuring behaviour, comparisons, and competition.
“My child wants to be a doctor,” becomes a weapon against a mother whose child has no idea what they want to be. The unspoken question hangs in the air: Why isn’t your child as driven? As good?
This external focus becomes a family habit. In households where the television remains a central hearth—even now, as viewership declines—the dramas on screen provide a convenient escape from the unresolved dynamics playing out in the living room. Soap operas become a blueprint for entanglement, and attendance at clubs or visits to other houses becomes less about connection and more about reconnaissance: What are the other families doing? How do we measure up?
Perhaps the most damaging dynamic is the bonding between mothers over shared, unhealed childhood trauma. In these friendships, their own children often become unwitting vessels for their projections. A child is labelled “uncaring,” “manipulative,” “selfish,” or “unambitious.” This assault of opinion, delivered as fact, is rarely about the child’s true character. Years later, for those who pause to look back with clarity, it becomes tragically clear: these were nothing more than a parent’s own fears and deep-seated low self-worth being projected onto a blank canvas.
They were raising children before dealing with their own wounds, and in doing so, they enforced those very wounds upon the next generation.
The Resilient Underdog
What has always amazed me is how the very children whom everyone had nothing good to say about often turn out to be the most resilient and progressive, in spite of those opinions. I’m not necessarily talking about “successful” in society’s narrow, monetary terms. I mean successful on a human level. They become the ones who learn to trust their own inner compass because the external one was so clearly broken. They are forced to build their own foundation because the one they were given was cracked. They tend to do a lot more than society ever gave them credit for, achieving things they were never supported to pursue by their immediate family.
Breaking the Chain for Sovereign Growth
The path to sovereign growth requires us to recognise this “gossip chain” for what it is: a distraction from our own potential. The energy we spend analysing, comparing, and judging others is energy diverted from building our own lives.
The journey of transformation involves:
- Awareness: Acknowledging these patterns and how they shaped your early sense of self and worth.
- Divestment: Consciously divesting from conversations and thought patterns that revolve around judging the paths of others.
- Reclamation: Reclaiming the energy you once spent on “he said, she said” and redirecting it inward. Ask yourself not “What are they doing?” but “What do I need to build? What dream have I been neglecting?”
The child who was never validated externally often has the hardest, but most rewarding, journey: learning to validate themselves. And in that journey, they find a strength that no amount of external approval can ever provide.
This is the core of the work—breaking external validation to build your own internal source of worth. It’s how we stop being characters in someone else’s story and finally become the authors of our own.
If this reflection resonates with you, I invite you to share your own experiences. How have childhood comparisons influenced your journey? The first step to breaking a chain is to acknowledge that it exists.
Lita, Goddess of Growth