Yesterday we covered the personally felt mourning stage of becoming an inheritor. Today we will explore the topic of hostile envy, or how becoming an inheritor might affect your interpersonal relationships.
Every minority individual has stories of how they’ve encountered hostility in their day-to-day life. Such an interaction is often called prejudice. Every gifted individual, be it someone with great beauty, intelligence, athletic abilities, creativity, or talent, also has experienced a similar form of prejudice in the shape of envy. Inheritors tend to find themselves face-to-face with hostility and envy at the same time. The irony is, like those born into marginalized identities, an inheritor’s circumstances are not their choosing. Heirs don’t do anything to be born into their position, and like the gifted, they are in a no-win situation where they have a responsibility to hone their gifts or else be accused of squandering their potential. Inheritors are not so unlike the famous musicians who overdose or the Nobel prize winners who cannot deal with the pressure of fame, and diminish into obscurity, never to get another good idea.
Navigating both hostility and envy while maintaining sanity requires a special combination of self-confidence, self-compassion, and education. Luckily, we at TWC understand how to achieve that balance and are experts at guiding our clients to overcome the negative effects of hostile envy.