Daughter super jealous of another girl in class

Can you try a different kind of therapy? Equine, dog, surfing, etc? Teens often struggle in a traditional therapy environment.

What was her early life like? Age 0-3? How would you describe her attachment profile?

Have you spoken to your GP? Been in touch with the School Nursing Team?

How does she respond to criticism, when she has done something wrong?
Is she ever responsible for her mistakes or is it always because of someone/something else?

She absolutely needs to keep going to counselling. Even if she doesn't engage, she needs to consistently understand that this will not go away until she works on it. And a space has been provided for her to do so each week/month.

She sounds incredibly like my sister when she was a child, the jealousy, the internal monologue, the never feeling good enough, feeling like she doesn't get what she deserves, someone else is getting more, being better and taking away from her experiences.

She grew up to be what looks exactly like a covert narcissist.

Obviously nobody can diagnose her but both I and our parents have been to counselling as adults (she refuses) and we've all come back to the same thing, covert/vulnerable narcissism.

She was raised in a lovely home by lovely, caring , hard working parents who did all they could for us though counselling/therapy as a child just wasn't accessible to us in the 90s, perhaps if she had had the chance to go, she wouldn't have carried that way of being into adulthood.

Perhaps not, who knows..
But my parents beat themselves up now that didn't do more about it back then.

She unfortunately has grown up to be a stressed out, overachiever who blames everyone and everything when she gets a less than perfect result, no matter what it is.

While she is married with children, is unable to really express joy or form close bonds with them, she's constantly jealous of others and trying to control her family into matching her insanely high bar as they a merely just an extention of her and her achievements. It's stressful and miserable for everyone..

We haven't spoken in 10 years.

I think you’re massively downplaying this and I think it’s very concerning behaviour. The want to defeat her is worrying.

If I was the other girls parents and I knew someone felt like this about my daughter I would be horrified and asking school what they are doing to keep them apart and my daughter safe.

School have called her a threat to others and your calling it silly? What have the doctors said? Have you pushed for a CAMHS referral? I would be pushing this further with the school. It’s a safeguarding concern.

You sound quite dismissive of the feedback by the school. Perhaps you are just too close to the situation and cannot see it objectively...

a couple of principles your DD would benefit from understanding by discussing with her -

The concept of "comparison is the thief of joy"
Ask your DD to think about something she is really proud of, that she can do. Then ask her how does she feel if she's the only one with that unique skill. Lastly ask her to explore her feelings if someone else is also good at the same skill. By comparing herself to others it can take away all the pride and happiness she feels, so can she come to terms with the fact there will always be others who share a talent or skill, she is still adding value to the world with her talent and nobody can take that away from her. In the future, in the world of work, she can collaborate with the person, use their shared enthusiasm to good effect, they aren't in competition.

Resilience - the ability to recover from a disappointment and use it to good effect. Even if she feels disappointed that someone else gets the attention, can she use that to develop her skill or talent to the next level, to spur her on to greater skill. Skills are not fixed or set, they evolve and grow. As your DDs maturity increases, she will be able to find motivation in continually honing her skills so she doesn't see herself as not adding value, but contributing it in her own way, because she is unique,

It’s worrying that some people are dismissing this by suggesting that maybe this other girl will ‘peak in secondary’ and be less successful in future than she is now. Not only is it a spiteful take, it fails to take into account that OP’s daughter will encounter people like this all her life. For example, if she’s struggling with these kinds of feelings in the relatively small pond of school, she’s in for a rude awakening when she gets to the much bigger pond of university. She’s going to encounter people who are better than her at all kinds of things all her life. OP is right to be concerned, and right to have realised that patting her daughter on the head and pointing out other people’s flaws in the hope that it will provide reassurance isn’t going to work. The solution to this has to come from within her daughter. Her thinking is the problem here, not the other girl’s success. She needs to learn to measure her success in terms of self-improvement rather than competition.

I think I would have been like this at school if someone had beaten me academically. It was my primary source of self esteem and the only thing that made me feel decent about myself, for years. I also have that tendency to get fixated / obsessed with someone. In my case, years later I was finally diagnosed with autism. While obviously no one can say, online, what’s going on with your DD, I would definitely look into a full screening for neurodiversity. It might help her to understand herself better.

Aside from that, I’d focus on self compassion rather than anything punitive.

Ah well hopefully she doesn’t give up completely. Maybe an online writing forum or group could be anonymous enough for her to share but supportive enough to boost her confidence and drive to develop her craft.

This is an excuse. She needs to learn about failing as a way of learning to get better at a skill. You're actually learning wen it's difficult.

It would be worth her trying to unpick why she is so all or nothing. It's often a shield for very low self-esteem.

So why do the school consider her a concern for others?

I'm going to share this with my DD. It's so very true. Trying things, enjoying things, that's what makes life worthwhile and makes people interesting. Not being the best.

Who does your DD admire?
I agree wanting to beat people is not a healthy attitude. Could you do something together that you both enjoy that neither of you are good at? You say she doesn't have many friends, but maybe she could try something out for school that's just for fun?

This..
She needs to keep going to therapy. There's a chance something may sink in eventually.

If she doesn't keep going, there is zero chance of anything sinking in.

I know which option i would carry on with.

She needs to learn that the problem is not this other girl existing and living her life , the problem is inside herself.

OP- she can't be internalising this completely if the school has identified her as a threat to others. Come on. You need to get your head out of the sand on this. It's great she talks to you about it. But you need to act in her interests and that means specialised targeted support. Okay- so she thought the previous counsellor was a waste of time - shop around. My older DS (14) was in counselling for a while due to low self esteem- he did not get on with his counsellor either. It was a bit of a mismatch. But he / we found an alternative that has worked for him.

My first response to your question was based on the understanding that your DD felt jealous and inferior because another girl was doing better than her academically/ has more friends. In other words normal teenage stuff. As this thread as developed imo this is a more serious situation. It sounds like your DD is mentally unwell and needs professional help. What you are describing is personality disorder territory. At this point, if the school has concerns, resisting help shouldn't be an option.

I don't think that volunteering with the 'less fortunate' would make any difference because she already thinks she's better than them and doesn't need anything more to make her feel superior.

To other people, your DD might be 'that sort' but less likeable than the other girl because of this meanness/resentment/jealousy.

Maybe appealing to her self interest would be a way to address this - that people will see her attempting to defeat or destroy this child and she'll never be able to overcome being seen as a jealous loser in a competition the other person doesn't even know she's in. She's intelligent enough to understand that it's making her miserable, after all - she needs to realise that whilst feelings are OK although they aren't making her happy, acting on them is going to cause her far more trouble than concentrating upon finding things that will make her happy and trying to let them pass.

Yes. Although I feel really sorry for her - the force of will to like & love herself in the face of her mother & her aunt putting her down all the time ....

Depends on the amount of effort you put in in this particular scenario - the golden girl in question is not a Nobel prize winner, not the winner of an International Mathematics/Chemistry/Biology Olympiad and neither has she won the Olympic games - otherwise the OP would have mentioned that. So, the golden girl in question is only good at school-level activities. Like thousands of English kids who 'do piano to grade 8' - so what? This is perfectly ordinary - that is what unemployed ladies used to do in the Victorian times before they discovered other avenues to pursue. So, if an immense amount of effort were to be invested, the OP's daughter could become better than this girl at the bog-standard school subjects. Time and effort - that is all. Now, this golden girl might achieve the same results in 1/10 of the time dedicated to the outcome, but this is a different matter. This is how Chinese pianists outperform European ones, bearing in mind that they have zero historical predilection and natural aptitude for European music. Basically, effort bordering on obsession.

Children don't develop in a vacuum - where is she getting these ideas from? Are you prone to jealously? I think you many need to challenge some of your thinking OP (your throwaway line about "you know the sort" is quite telling). How about you model good behaviour and offer to go to therapy with your daughter? Show her that you value the idea and that it l therapy isn't about "fixing" her but exploring how the pair you relate to each other and how this then helps you relate to the wider world.

This is really tough for your daughter and wonder why & when she started basing her self worth on being the best?

What is the rest of her personality (eg, is she shy?)?

I agree with others that she needs proper counselling, not because there's anything wrong with her but because she's going to hit some dreadful mental health problems later on if she doesn't tackle her underlying insecurities. It can take a few go's to find a counsellor who one clicks with so I'd persevere with getting her there.

She will certainly struggle at university if she struggles so much when she's not the best at her studies, I've seen it before, so she needs to learn how to deal with it.

The fact is that it doesn't matter how good we are at something, there is always going to be someone who is better. Even successful Olympians will have their number 1 spot challenged. For sports people, age and injury catches up with them, in academia there will be someone else who's quicker, sharper and in drama there will be someone who's style of acting is more popular (though not necessarily better).

It's really hard for someone who's built their identity around being No.1 in the class to accept that someone achieves more highly than them and when it's the become the core of their identity then it should be taken seriously.

Can you identify why she might have latched onto this being the focus of her personality? Did she feel ordinary or inadequate in others aspects of life beforehand?

I think you should try to help her to realize that this girl is literally nothing to do with her. There will always be someone who is prettier, cleverer, more popular, richer... it's normal. Your daughter has put her self worth into the hands of someone else instead of realizing that her self-worth will never be anything to do with anyone else. It's hers and hers alone. Once she understands this it will be easier for her to start working with her own envious thoughts.

I understand how hard this must be to witness, but I think it’s important to be honest about what’s going on here. The issue isn’t the other girl, it's your daughter’s response to her. That’s not something the school can realistically fix.
Pastoral teams are usually there to manage day to day concerns that affect behaviour or learning, not to provide long-term emotional support. Most pastoral people aren’t clinically trained, and with limited time and resources, they tend to work reactively. It’s not realistic to expect them to deliver what is essentially therapeutic work. If you, as her parent, don’t know how to support her with this, it’s unfair to assume the school will.

Your daughter sounds like she’s struggling with low self-esteem and possibly a fixed mindset in believing that if she can’t be “the best”, there’s no point trying. That’s serious, and if left unchecked, it can spiral. But the presence of a high-achieving peer hasn’t caused this. It’s exposed it.

You say she thinks there’s nothing wrong with how she’s thinking and this is exactly why therapy would help. Not because she’s broken or “acting out”, but because she’s got stuck in a way of thinking that’s painful and self-limiting.

If she’s already rejecting the counsellor at school, it might be worth exploring someone with a different approach or a better fit. School counselling is usually very short term anyway, and your DD needs long term counselling.

It’s difficult and it's expensive, but this is a long game. Your DD needs help to build a sense of self that isn’t based on comparison. No school can do that for her.

DD needs to stop it.

You must speak to her and re- enforce the fact that Girl has nothing to do with her own success or failure. This girl has zero business being in her thoughts.

She has be highlighted as a concern. That is serious. You DD needs to understand that she can control her thoughts, and needs to substitute a safe object or fictional person for this girl in her thoughts.