Getting into a cycle of comparing our pain to the pain of others is actually a pretty common thing to do.
Especially if you are someone who naturally has a lot of empathy for others, or who spends time thinking about the plight of the world around you.
It can often seem totally reasonable to think that we don’t deserve whatever time, care and attention we genuinely need to heal from whatever we’ve been through/are going through, based on the idea that other people have it worse than us.
We can even get into a state of perpetually believing we are weak, flawed or inherently broken if we find ourselves struggling to heal in a world where it seems like people who ‘had it worse than us’ have seemingly ‘transcended’ and become what we think is ‘better’ than us.
But the truth is, doing this pain comparison and healing comparison, in the long run, tends to only serve to hold us back from doing the work we need to do to feel better, and it can get us caught in loops of shame, blame and guilt when what we really need is love and compassion.
We are going to be exploring why pain comparison is so toxic but also so common, and how we can work to move past it so we can heal what needs healing in ourselves without all the shame, blame and guilt.
In the next few posts, we’re going to explore all of this, so we can hopefully come to a place of being able to hold more than one reality as ‘true’ at a time.
Others can be hurt, others can be hurt worse than us and we are still deserving of love, care, attention and whatever we need to heal.
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Empathy Turning Into Self Denial
Have you ever found yourself contemplating your own pain/suffering, and then immediately coming up with stories about how other people have it so much worse than you?
Have you ever thought about your own trauma, the ways in which you were unsupported, the ways in which you were antagonized or otherwise harmed in life, only to then start scanning your social media or just your memory for evidence of others who have faced things that were in your view SO much MORE than what you went through?
Have you ever then felt like you shouldn’t ‘need’ healing, help, support or to focus on yourself because your suffering isn’t/wasn’t that bad?
Do you then start to tell yourself that you should be fine, that you should be able to just ‘get on with things’, that you have nothing to complain about or that you should otherwise be able to simply move on with your life fit as a fiddle?
Do you then start to believe that you’re actually weak, flawed or in some way not good enough, because you seem to still be hurt by things that are so much LESS than what has hurt others?
Do you start to feel like there’s no time/not enough ROOM for you to focus on yourself and your healing, because what others went through and are going through is so much worse and thus so much more important?
Now, to start us off, I want to make it very clear that there’s nothing wrong with having empathy.
Also, there are times and places where it IS genuinely good for us to ‘put things into perspective’ a little and to realize that what we’re dealing with - though important to us - may not ACTUALLY be the world's BIGGEST deal. Sometimes when we are caught in loops of seeing our problems as being bigger than they actually are, we DO get trapped in them - and being able to take a step back and realize that what we are going through may not be as difficult as we were making it in our minds can help us solve problems.
BUT.
The problem here is this - generally speaking, when we are repeatedly ‘dealing’ with our issues via trying to minimize them for ourselves via pain comparison, what we are actually doing is ignoring ourselves.
We aren’t actually dealing with our issues. We aren’t actually processing. We aren’t actually moving forward, healing or getting better.
What we are doing is sweeping how we feel, our experience and what’s actually occurring in real reality under the rug - and in doing so we are setting ourselves up for cycles of feeling the pain, swatting it away, being able to carry on for a short while, having the pain re-surface or getting triggered, having to convince ourselves it’s not real again - over and over again.
We’re setting ourselves up to be STUCK in what we’re feeling, to be stuck in our pain and trauma and to be in a state where we perpetually fail to actually integrate and heal - and this means that we don’t allow ourselves to move FORWARD in life.
We can acknowledge that what we are ATTEMPTING to do IS to move on - we are attempting to make ourselves feel better and to get to a place where we can STOP feeling what we feel and feel better - there’s innocence in this and a genuine desire to make the pain go away and to get to a place where you aren’t feeling it anymore - but the truth is, this method doesn’t actually help us move on.
It keeps us stuck.
Because at the end of the day, the only way to actually get through something, the only way to actually ‘move on’ when we have a pain that continues to be present in our lives, is to look at it, feel it, be validated, process what was painful and then gather whatever tools we need to remedy what was hurt and to shift whatever needs to be shifted now so that the harm doesn’t continue or happen again.
That process is the process - and generally there’s no short-cut or getting around it - as much as we may want to believe we can simply convince ourselves to feel differently or that we can ‘put it in perspective’ enough to eventually not feel what we’re currently feeling - in real reality if we are hurting we need to process our hurt, and that processing is the only REAL way we’re going to be able to ‘move on’.
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of this behavior, so we can be clear on what we’re talking about and how it can manifest.
What This Looks Like In Real Life
It’s very common for highly sensitive/naturally empathic people to use that sensitivity and empathy as a coping mechanism/scapegoat for avoiding dealing with our own pain and trauma.
Meaning, even the most pure intentioned, open hearted being who genuinely deeply cares for others and humanity at large, and use this empathy and sensitivity as a tool for shifting the focus off of their own pain, trauma, wounds and programming - keeping their focus ‘out there’ on all who need (in their view) to be rescued, helped, served or otherwise tended to INSTEAD of tending to the self when the self NEEDS tending.
- This can show up in the form of being deeply co-dependent with those close to us and the world at large, where we get into cycles of ‘service’ that is actually self-sacrifice which lead us to repetitive burnout, pain, illness, breakdown, overwhelm, stress and resentment.
- This can show up in ‘but they have it so much worse than me’ attitudes that we use as a way of AVOIDING looking at our own pain, and justifying this through the idea that our pain isn’t legitimate because we can think of others whose pain is WORSE and therefore ours doesn’t need attention.
- This can look like constantly brushing our own healing off because there is always someone else to serve/help.
- This can look like always ‘biting off more than we can chew’ in life - setting up our day to day lives in a way where we are taking care of SO many things and SO many others (friends, family, work, pets, community etc) that we can only really manage the load on our BEST days - but on any day when we are extra tired, stressed, or when any ‘extra’ task is added we don’t have what it takes to maintain and we end up crashing.
- This can look like perpetually minimizing how we are feeling when our own big feelings come up - being that person who never really cries or gets angry or expresses any ‘extreme’ emotions, because we are always able to rationalize our feelings away.
- This can look like getting upset with ourselves when we do get to a point of not being able to hold our emotions in. We can find ourselves in cycles where we DO express our anger, sadness, pain or upset in some form or fashion, and then find ourselves trying to ‘put it all back in the box’ afterwards either with ourselves or in conversation with anyone who may have witnessed/been in the receiving end of our expression via ‘but I know it’s not that bad and other people have it worse and I’ll be fine.’
- This can look like perpetually apologizing for your feelings, needs and hurts because they ‘aren’t that bad compared to others’ as a way of trying to avoid inconveniencing others or trying to avoid being or looking needy/not all put together/not perfect. It can also be a way of trying to avoid rejection in our pain if that is something we have experienced a lot in our lives.
We have to remember that looking at our own pain is hard. Looking at our own suffering is not fun. Dealing with our own traumas is just as hard for us as it is for anyone else.
We have to remember that many of us were never taught HOW to process our pain, we were never given the actual tools we needed to healthfully face what we’ve experienced and to figure out what we need in order to truly ‘move on’ in a healthy way, and many of us experienced being shut down/ignored/minimized in our experience so much that we learned to turn around and do the same things to ourselves.
Many of us experienced that there wasn’t room for us to have our feelings or to be in any state of pain because those around us simply couldn’t handle it/support us or those around us were demanding that we be there for them. We may have learned that the BEST way to get love and the best way to be seen and supported was to be HELPFUL to others, meaning when we are down, when we are sad, when we aren’t feeling good, our instinct is to look for someone to support, someone to help, someone else to focus on in the hopes that if we do so, we will THEN receive the love and connected that WE are actually wanting deep down.
We have to acknowledge that we may have been taught that it’s not ok for us to look at our pain. That it’s not ok for us to have our emotions, to not be ok, to not be put together. We may have experienced being deeply ignored or even antagonized when we did express our pain - having others tell us that we were ‘too much’ or that we need to just ‘get over things’ so often that now we feel like we HAVE to shut ourselves down in order to be safe.
We may have experienced being written off, minimized or otherwise told that our pain wasn’t that bad growing up, leading us to a place where we learned how to minimize our own pain because that was literally what we were taught to do.
We may have experienced being told that us expressing our pain, our struggle, our response to being hurt or harmed in some way was hurting or inconveniencing those around us, if we were told that us expressing our pain was ‘too much’ or that we were making others feel bad, if we were continually decentered in our pain because the people around us weren’t capable of holding space for us or of admitting their role in our pain again, we may have learned that it was safer to just focus on others rather than ever focusing on ourselves and our pain.
When we don’t have legitimate tools to process and work through what’s going on with us, when we don’t have healthy models of emotional processing, when we were shamed, blamed or guilted for our emotions, when we were told that our experiences weren’t valid or how we FELT about our experiences wasn’t valid we were going to learn that shutting ourselves down was the safest and best option. We were going to learn to center others instead of ourselves. We were going to get into the habit of avoiding our own feelings because that’s what felt the best to do when all other options were considered.
Again, this isn’t to say that having empathy for others ISN’T healthy and sometimes ISN’T what is most important at any given time - it’s just to say that if this is our GO TO strategy for dealing with our own pain and emotions, then we are likely falling into a method of bypassing that isn’t healthy and again, that is only serving to keep us stuck.
The instinct to AVOID our own pain through focusing on the pain of others is innocent and again, oftentimes well intentioned - but ultimately it only leads to a world where the ONE PERSON you have the power to heal - yourself - doesn’t heal.
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Let’s take a break here and let this digest.
We will come back next week to continue with this exploration!
<3
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