The Comparison Trap

You walk into a meeting, look around the room, and think one of two things: "I'm not as bad as that guy" or "I'll never be as good as that guy." Either way, the enemy just won. This week, Doc Jacques breaks down how comparison is quietly destroying recoveries that had every reason to succeed — and why the only person you were ever supposed to beat was yesterday's version of yourself. Spoiler: your lane is the only lane that matters.

Not treatment. Not therapy. Just a lifeguard on the beach of recovery telling you to stop drowning yourself.

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This is Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard. And if you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal, recovery is hard, and the road between them is longer than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jock De Brefer, your licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason. To walk that road with you. No sugar coating, no magic pills, just the truth about what recovery really looks like. Quick note, this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment. A real human being is. Now let's get to it. The recovery comparison game. You know, so many of us play that game in recovery. But you know what kills more recoveries than drugs itself? The guy sitting two chairs down from you in the meeting. That's what kills recovery. You comparing yourself to others. And that's the topic for today. The comparison game. Comparison is addiction's sneaky cousin. It looks harmless, even motivating, but one of the most effective tools that the enemy uses to keep you stuck is comparison. And so we need to dissect that. You know, I I've seen this destroy people who are doing everything else right. And it's kind of sad because they really maybe they went into recovery initially because they really wanted to work on recovery. But when you step into the rooms or you step into a treatment center, the the first thing you might do is look at somebody else and go, Yeah, well, at least I'm not that bad. So let's let's talk about that. One of the things that's like a classic move in early recovery is finding the worst person in the room and then use them as your measuring stick to figure out where you are in your recovery. And, you know, when you look around, you're gonna find that person that lost their house, or they lost their kids, or maybe they went to prison, something. And when you when you s when you hear that and you see that in somebody, and you think, well, I'm not I'm not that bad, so therefore I must be fine. But the reality is the spectrum of addiction doesn't care how far you you went, how far down you went, how bad it got, it cares about the direction you're heading. So we need to look at like from a clinical standpoint, that's what I look at is like how you know, where did this where is this person? Like, what's going on with them? And I always kind of look at whatever's going on with them and try to see if what they're doing is they're comparing themselves to other people. And it's easy to spot because they'll typically they'll tell you, like they'll say it. Yeah, I'm not, you know, I went to the meetings and man, they'll tell the story about this guy or this woman that told about their, you know, their divorce and then they can't see their kids anymore, or this one went to jail, or this one got out of prison, or this one overdosed ten times in the last four weeks, you know, something. But it it it doesn't you you can't compare yourself to other people, you compare yourself to yourself. What I do find interesting is that they will oftentimes look for that person that is worse, but they don't really compare themselves to the person that is most like them. Um, you know, if I were to think of it in like lifeguard terms, a person doesn't have to be drowning in the deep end for you to need to pull them out. They they can be going under, they're going under. That's it. Like I've pulled people out of water. I remember I rescued somebody that was in about two and a half or three feet of water, they could have just stood up and they were flailing around in the water thinking they were drowning. And I I literally just stood them up. If you're going under, you're going under. It doesn't matter how deep it is. So when you compare, you lose that perspective. Um you know, the the arrogance of uh of what happens in your head is I'm not that bad. So arrogance, that tool that the enemy hands you, that you gift wrapped and you received it. So thinking that like I'll never be like them, you know, you know what, you you might not be, but then again you end up might end up being that way. But the flip side of that is looking at the person with 15 years of sobriety and deciding before you even start that you're too far gone. You're too damaged, you're too different to ever get there. And that's kind of the other side of comparison is you look at somebody that's got 15, 20 years, I'm never gonna get there. It's it's too it's too much. I I look at look at all the damage that I have, which is funny because that same person who's giving you that comparison could have in the last couple meetings before that looked around the room and said, Yeah, but at least I'm not as bad as that guy. So the uh the the problem of comparing up differs from comparing down. And I'll never be like them can be I'm never gonna actually be in recovery like that. I'll never get my life together. You know, that one is a lot quieter and it's more dangerous because it looks like humility, but it's actually despair dressed up as self-awareness. It's the thing that that when you are um when you're comparing up, you typically will look at somebody that's got 30 years, 20 years, 10 years, you stand in there in the meeting and they're getting their tenure chip, and you're you know, eight months in, you think, look at look at them. I how am I ever gonna get there? I'm too old, I've been I've been doing this too long, there's too much damage, there's too many relationships are destroyed, or whatever. But the other one is the kind of a dismissiveness of it. Um when you're saying something to yourself like, I don't know, that's great for them, but you don't know what I've done. That kind of thing. Does that sound familiar to you? It's it's like I'm damaged and it's on the inside, or maybe you're showing it on the outside physically, but you look at the person who's got 10 years and they look healthy, and you don't, and that's you know, it's an unfair comparison. It's like going to the gym and you're not in very good shape, but then you pick out the one person who is in excellent shape, and they've been in the gym like every day for the last 10 years. Well, of course they look that way, but they didn't start out that way, so it's not a fair comparison, it's not a fair comparison either way, comparing up or down. But one thing I want you to remember is the enemy loves that comparing up because it shuts the door before you even try to get in. Comparing down is different, but it that's it's it's that's why it's more quiet, it's more subtle, and it's more dangerous. So I guess the question is like where where does that comparison come from? How does how does that happen? It isn't random. Comparison is is rooted in the same place everything else is, it's in trauma and shame. And when we look at those comparisons, I know because I've heard this in my in my practice over and over again, when you are comparing up or down, you are looking for something, and it's trauma that you're probably experiencing uh that that has gotten you there, right? So that's the comparison portion, the trauma, and then the amount of shame you feel, and that's a kind of a shutting down because you have that inside you. Um when you when you grew up being told you weren't enough or you were too much, or you were the problem, your brain learned to constantly measure itself against others just to figure out where it stood. So if if you know if you have siblings, or it maybe even you didn't have siblings, but you were in school and you were told that. You were told that by teachers, you were told that by parents, you were told that by um, you know, somebody you trusted that was older, and you weren't you weren't good enough, or you were you were too much of something. Or in in my case, like I was told I was the problem. Well, then I kept looking for people who were worse problems, and I think, well, how come they're not getting talked to that way? Um I'd also look conversely, I would look at people who weren't a problem, who had it all, had everything going on, and I was in sixth or seventh or eighth grade, and I think, well, how come I can't be that? I'm not ever gonna be that. So I must be the problem. And I certainly was told that by my parents. I'm I'm the problem. And so I kind of conducted myself that way. And that's where I learned to do that. And certainly in recovery, that's an issue as well. But it's also a survival skill. From childhood, it became a it became a weapon that you used against yourself in adulthood, but it's a survival skill, comparison, so you can try to measure up, right? You were trying to get to some place as a child, and then as adult, it it becomes weaponized. There's a clinical term for what I'm talking about, social comparison theory. We are wired to do this. The problem is addicts run it into overdrive because the shame underneath is so loud to them. That that comparison theory of like you have to compare yourself because that's how we achieve things, and we're wired towards like what's next. And so we look at, okay, I don't have enough food, I don't have enough clothing, I don't have enough shelter. Uh oh, that guy, that guy over there, he does. And so I think, oh, that that must be the way to do it. Thousand years ago, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years ago, it was just basic survival. But in addiction, it goes into overdrive, and it's that shame that drives it so much. Interestingly, your drug your drug of choice, whatever it is, that seemed to quiet that down. But now that the drugs are gone, that voice comes back in full volume, and you point it outward at everyone in the room. And you it's it's like we took away the coping mechanism for that problem. And the result is that you just kinda literally went into overdrive with it. Everybody else becomes a target, everybody else becomes observed by you, and the comparison game kicks in. What what it what does it look like, you know, in the real world? What does it look like? In the rooms, when we go to AA or NA or any of the A's, the person who won't share because their story isn't bad enough, or won't come back because those people are way worse than me, is something that plays out all the time. I struggle trying to get my clients to go into the rooms and say something. And they feel like uh in in one instance, I had a person whose history was really bad, it was really, really bad, and there was a lot of shame attached to it. They had gone to extremes, and they were very shamed, in internally shamed by that, and they wouldn't say anything. There was another guy that I know, he showed up and and he was just kind of horrified by some of the stories he had heard by the people in the rooms, and he was thinking that that well, they're way worse than I am. Why am I there? You know, I I I don't really have a problem. And I'm sitting there looking at their intake form, and I'm seeing all of the horrific stuff they went through, and maybe they're telling me their story, and it's it's really bad. But somehow they'd converted it into the people in their worst. And so I ask specific questions like, well, what did you see? And well, this guy was in jail, and this guy um he uh he actually lost his wife and his children, and he can't see them anymore because he has these restraining orders against him, and he can't, you know, and I'm like, well, okay, but you're comparing yourself to somebody that's living a different life. And I just have a hard time explaining to people sometimes that they just they belong there. And I and what I do is I say, listen, you're in the club, you're one of us, and we all are in a different place in the spectrum. And if I throw myself up as a comparison, I say, well, I seem perfectly fine, don't I? But you have no idea the the nightmare that I grew up with, and that my parents were alcoholics and that it killed my mother when she was 50 years old. And they kind of look at me and they, yeah, but you turned out okay. So I can hear them in their head, they're saying, but you know, he's better than I am, he's in a better place. So sometimes it backfires and sometimes it actually clicks with them. And like, you know what, you can get there, but you have to accept. And I uh actually it's it's part of like step one, to be honest. It's like, I can't do this anymore. This is my life's become unmanageable. Unmanageable looks different for different people, and hopefully they can get that in therapy. Um I, you know, the client who spends the whole session talking about what someone else did or didn't do because of looking inward, deflection disguised as analysis is what happens. And I, you know, I'll let them do it for half a session and then I point that out to them and say, hey, look, you know what? You you're not you're spending the whole time talking about somebody else. I I'm really curious about you. You know, you're my client, not your brother, not your sister. In in relationships, it plays out a little bit differently. Um the spouse comparing their addict to so-and-so's husband who got sober in six months, and then the addict feeling like a failure before they even started. You know, um, I can't, I can't, I it's taking me two years. This I keep getting compared to somebody that did it in six months. They just said that they stopped drinking and they never drank again, which I I know is not true, but it's like that's that's kind of what happens. And so your spouse, who is supposed to be your partner attacking the enemy in this battle for your soul, is comparing someone else's uh spouse to you as the addict, and it makes you feel like a failure before you before you had a chance to even try. Um someone someone who makes it for eight months and they're clean might have heard somebody in a meeting. They describe a relapse after twenty years, and then they decide after they hear that story, if that guy can't stay sober, what's the point? And then they walk out and they maybe go pick up. That happens to my clients. I have multiple examples of that happening, and it's it's disturbing to the person who experiences that. I've had people that relapse after 23 years or 25 years. Um, Philip Seymour Hoffman, he was 20, what, 25 years clean, I think, 28. He died of an overdose. And it's it's very defeating when somebody hears that. So that comparison trap, it isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it's just a quiet decision made when they're f folding a chair at the end of the meeting. It's something that just kind of quietly happens. But it it usually does happen. Um it's it's difficult to understand how to control that, and it's difficult to figure out can I do it? Yeah, I think it's a matter of changing your perspective. Um I I talk about this frequently in my practice. I was a lifeguard for a long time, a swimming instructor, and I would be teaching children to swim. And I would go through all the things they needed to do to be able to swim, and they get to the point where they can swim the width of the pool, and then they can swim the length of the pool. They can swim in the deep water, they can swim in the shallow, it doesn't matter. They're good swimmers. But invariably what happens is we have to go to diving. And in the uh learn to swim skills that we used to teach with the Red Cross, there's a point where you have to learn how to dive. Then you learn to dive from the side, and then you learn to dive standing on the side, and they can do it. Then we want to move them over to the the uh diving board. And when they stand up on that diving board, they f they panic. And I never could really understand why. And then I got up on the diving board one day and I was trying to help a kid just jump off feet first, just jump off in the water, and he was terrified. And I couldn't figure it out. And I looked down on the water and I realized, you know, when you're standing on the diving board and you're looking down, you're not seeing the surface of the water. You're seeing the drain at the bottom of the pool. And that's the perspective they had. So they didn't want to jump off the board. So what I did was I'd go down and I'd get a hose and I would be in the pool, and I would use the hose and make the the, I would spray the hose into the pool so that it distorted the surface and they couldn't see the bottom. They could they could see the splashing water on the surface, and they realized they're only about two and a half, three feet from the uh from the surface, and they would jump in. And they would realize, oh, I didn't go to the bottom. So they changed their perspective, and then they would start to enjoy it. And then by usually by the end of that lesson, or maybe the next lesson, I couldn't get them off the diving board. They're fighting to go off the board because they just couldn't stop doing it. Whereas, you know, a couple days before they just didn't even want to do it. It's a change of perspective, and that's the power of what you're going through when you do the comparison. You're changing your perspective, you're changing your perspective from one of positivity and and uh uh thinking that you can do it to one where you don't believe that you can at all. Well, you got to go reverse of that and start working on uh not seeing it as a competition. Because recovery is not a competition, it's not a comparison, it's the most personal thing you'll ever do. It's the thing that is you tackling your issues, not you comparing yourself to other people and their issues. Because trust me, just like anything else, you're always going to find somebody that's smarter or faster or richer or better looking or had an easier life, just like you'll be able to find people that had it worse, they're not as good looking as you, they're not as fast as you, they don't have as much money as you. It's it's a never-ending thing. And so recovery is different because everybody's recovery looks different. The only measuring stick that matters, are you doing better than you were yesterday? That's it. That's the whole game. And that's the measuring stick that you should be measuring yourself with yourself. Am I doing better than I did yesterday? And if it's yes, great. If it's no, great. What do I need to do? Step work hopes, uh hopefully step work. It is kind of designed specifically for that. Because if you go from step one to step two, step three, there's this point in your journey, particularly, step four, that is solely about you. It's not about anybody else, it's not about anybody else and their character defects. Step four, the fearless searching moral inventory of your character defects, not somebody else. And maybe that's one of your character defects is you you hide because you're afraid you're gonna fail, through and you look through the lens uh of I'm not as bad. So recovery, it's a singular verb. You don't recover in relation to another person, you just recover. It's it's you, nobody else. And the rooms, oh my gosh, the rooms are not a scoreboard. They're a community, it's a community of people. They're a community of people in all different lanes of the same race, and the only person you need to beat is the version of yourself that was using yesterday, last month, six months ago. You're measuring yourself against yourself. Your progress is for you, advancing you. Whether you feel the comparison creeping in is something you need to gauge. So when you do feel that creeping in, that's your signal to turn the lens around, ask yourself what is going on right now, where I'm at right now, that makes me need to measure myself against another person. That question will tell you everything you need to know. If you answer it honestly, I'm not feeling good about myself. I'm not feeling like I'm I'm strong enough. I don't feel like I'm capable enough. I'm struggling. That's true. You know, if I put this through a Christian perspective, God doesn't want you comparing your your healing against somebody else's. He's not looking at your neighbor's chip, your two-year, five-year chip, whatever, and saying, Why aren't you there yet? He's looking at your heart. And I want you to spend time looking at your heart and paying attention to you, not other people. And you know, if you have a family member, you have a spouse, please, for the love of God, stop comparing that person to your addict, special loved one. It's it's their journey. It's not your it's not it's your spouse's journey. It's not their journey. And so when you look at somebody and you think, I got there, you need to pay attention to that. Uh one of the one of the most i um I I guess moving things that I can do. And I I used to say it all the time to my clients, I don't say as much anymore, but it's like the only reward I get for doing this job is when I get to witness that journey. And I get to see them get that one-year chip. Um, it is so special to be able to witness that, to bear witness to that. If they have family members there, it's even better. But to get that one year chip because it's like, you know what, you made it. You made it a year. That's awesome. And hopefully I see when I see that that the shame has started to dissipate, it's starting to go away. Every addiction is unique because every trauma is unique. You're not raising or loving or married to a statistic, you're married to your spouse, you're married to your husband, your wife, your your children are your children. They are yours. It's a special gift. Um They're not a statistic. At least if they're as long as they're alive, they're not a statistic. So when you compare your when you compare your addict, loved one, all they hear is shame. And shame is the most reliable relapse trigger there is. It really is. So your job is to witness the journey and not grade against somebody else's journey. Well, I hope that uh you understand a little bit more about the comparison trap. Being isolation in disguise. Instead of pulling away from people, you're using other people to pull away from your own recovery. Um you gotta stop comparing. Compare yourself to yourself. The lifeguard in me, uh, you know what, I I didn't compare this drowning person to that drowning person and and try to swim to the person that I thought, you know, he's not drowning enough. Or that guy's, you know, so I'm seeing somebody on the water and there's nobody else in the water, and I think, oh, you know what, he's not as bad as the person before that. I just go in and I get him right now, where they are. It doesn't matter. Just go get him. And that's what I want you to do for yourself. I want you to go in and get yourself right where you are, nowhere else except right where you are, not where somebody else is, not where you think you should be, but right there. Well, that's it for this episode of Doc Shock Your Addiction Life Guard. If you need help, don't sit in that chair and compare yourself into doing nothing. Go to rehab, get a counselor, go to the rooms, do something. Because I can absolutely guarantee you, without any question whatsoever, not doing anything and ending your life to save your addiction is crazy. That's absolutely crazy. So go get that help. And if you've liked this podcast, please like, subscribe, send me a comment, give me a review, I'd really appreciate it. It means a lot to me. But whatever you do, keep hanging in there. So until next time, this is Doc Jock, your addiction lifeguard saying see ya.