The Dangers of Comparing Your Grief
When facilitating grief groups, one of the instructions I often give is to not compare grief. But why? It’s just human nature to want to rank things and put them in order. In some circumstances, this can be useful or even essential. But with grief and loss, it’s not.
Comparing losses goes both ways.
A client once told me of a relative she had who had experienced one of the most tragic losses I’d ever heard. This man would go to a grief group, but not speak up because he felt that everyone else had it worse than him and he didn’t want to take up time and space from others who were also grieving. By comparing his loss to other people’s losses, he was minimizing his own grief and making it less important than theirs.
If this man was a different sort of guy he could have been irritated that people with such minor losses were in the same group as him. Thoughts like, “How dare this lady take up time in the group over the loss of her elderly cat when my entire life has been turned upside down by my tragedy?” Or “She’s so upset over the loss of her cat, she won’t be able to handle it when something actually tragic happens.” In this case, he’s minimizing other people’s grief.
The feelings of inferiority or superiority don’t accomplish anything other than diminished compassion. When we feel our grief is inferior to other people’s our self-compassion is reduced. When we feel our grief is superior to other people’s, we are not able to feel fully compassionate to them. And none of that helps us feel better.
All loss is felt at 100%.
A friend taught me the phrase “the stories are different but the pain is the same.” All loss is felt at 100% for that particular loss. The only true comparison of grief you can make is with your own losses. You can look back at losses you’ve experienced and rank them on their magnitude for you. But because grief is very individual and based on our individual relationships and thoughts and feelings, we can’t compare loss with other people.
One person could be devastated by the loss of a grandmother who had been nurturing, kind, and their biggest cheerleader in life. A person whose grandmother was distant, abusive, and manipulative will have very different feelings. Both people will experience loss at 100% for their particular relationship. It won’t necessarily look the same, and that’s okay.
Others will often minimize the grief of people who lose pets. They don’t understand the relationship that people can have with their animals, and so they don’t understand what the big deal is. That doesn’t mean that the pain of losing a pet isn’t valid.
Sometimes people judge our outward expressions of grief. “I never saw him cry. I don’t think he felt anything.” I remember a few days after my maternal grandma died, my living grandmother on my dad’s side called me to see how I was doing. She seemed disappointed or upset that I wasn’t crying on the phone with her and even said, “I thought you’d be a lot more upset over this.” And I was upset. I had cried a lot. But I wasn’t crying in that one snapshot of time. Our outward expressions of grief, especially publicly, may not be an indication at all of the depth of our feelings inside. We can’t compare what we think our reaction would be or is with someone else’s.
The temptation for perspective.
It can be tempting to compare losses for the purpose of gaining or giving perspective. And while it can be healthy to realize that you are not the only person grieving and that you have plenty to be grateful for in your own painful circumstances, we can sometimes take this too far.
Sometimes though in an attempt to force gratitude, we think we shouldn’t be grieving because somebody has it worse than we do. And while it’s true that someone probably, almost definitely, does have it worse than you, that doesn’t mean your feelings are invalid or need to be changed. We never think this way about happiness, where someone else is so happy about something that we don’t deserve to be happy about ours. Katie is so happy about her new house, I shouldn’t be this happy about my job promotion. No! We don’t think like that. And we don’t have to think that way about grief, either.
Recently we found out one of my daughters has to have a second brain surgery on a malformed blood vessel. This news was unwelcome and upsetting, and I felt devastated for my daughter to have to go through this again. And at the same time, I had the thought that I couldn’t and shouldn’t feel devastated about it because a friend in our church congregation is fighting with all her might, mind, and soul to beat an aggressive brain cancer. She’s had more surgeries than I can count on two hands, and I am sure that she and her family wish they were dealing with a blood vessel and not this. Anything but this.
But then I remembered I don’t need to compare. I can feel sad that my daughter has to go through this AND sad that my friend is going through what she is going through. I can be upset that this is her circumstance AND I can be grateful for so many things that she isn’t dealing with. I can have compassion for my daughter AND compassion for my friend. They don’t have to compete with each other. And interestingly, when I dropped my resistance to feeling bad about her surgery, I could just feel bad about it, and then move through those emotions and process them. I couldn’t do that while I was still comparing.
Banish “at least…”
We often try to comfort other people by comparing one loss to another. Many years ago I experienced a late term miscarriage. I was feeling the full weight of this grief, when a woman from my church (notice I’m not calling her a friend) came to visit me and asked what happened. I told her, and she scoffed and said, “I don’t know why you’re so sad. At least it wasn’t your three year old.” Her words stung and made me feel like I was overreacting and wrong. She was never a particularly kind person to me, so I don’t know her if her intent with those words was to be unkind or to try to provide perspective. I was obviously grateful that my children were alive, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t also be devastated by my loss.
When we use the phrase “at least” or others like it, we are minimizing people’s emotions. We may be doing it because we are uncomfortable with their emotions or because we are trying to provide perspective in order to help them feel better, but this never helps people feel better. I didn’t need to compare the imagined grief of losing my 3-year-old to the real grief I was feeling when I had a miscarriage. Generally, whatever comes on the other end of “at least” is something the grieving person is already aware of and doesn’t need reminding of.
It’s hard to rewire that natural human tendency to compare and rank, but it’s a skill we can develop. We often hear the phrase “comparison is the thief of joy”. (Somehow I thought that phrase was coined by Emily Dickinson or Eleanor Roosevelt. I was surprised to discover it’s most often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt.) Comparison can also be the thief of self-compassion, the thief of empathy, the thief of validity, the thief of comfort, and the thief of acceptance.
