Comparative Suffering during Covid-19
Do you ever catch yourself feeling low or miserable and then think of all those people who have it harder than you and then feel even worse that you’re such an awful person for feeling down in the first place? Like, how dare you feel depressed as you sit there and eat your hot dinner on your comfy sofa?!
I’ve seen several posts and comments on social media in the last day (since Lockdown was announced) from people who are struggling, yet don’t feel they have the right to struggle because they know things are much more difficult for many other people. It inspired me to write this blog post because I’m fairly sure that for every person that posts on Facebook, there’s a gazillion more that didn’t that probably feel something similar.
Comparative Suffering is harming us
I listened to a podcast by Brené Brown last year on Comparative Suffering. This is the idea that, in order to gain understanding of our own painful experiences, we compare them to those of others for perspective. This is sometimes helpful because perspective is good, in that it reminds us that things could always be worse, and to be thankful for what we do have. But it’s also damaging us because it’s disempowering us from feeling our feelings because we know others who have a much harder time of it than us. Comparative Suffering is just another manifestation of self-criticism that many of us are too familiar with.
Empathy is hard
A good friend of mine works with a young guy who has just lost his Mum to Covid. In a conversation the other day, he told me how he feels such deep sadness and grief for his work colleague and yet he said he has ‘no right to feel sad’ when he didn’t even meet this lady. It surprised me that my friend was desperate not to feel what he was feeling because he felt he didn’t deserve to and didn’t want to take that away from his colleague.
Grief, sadness and all the rest are not in limited supply. There’s not a finite amount of these feelings available for each situation that means you are somehow robbing someone more worthy of their sadness. I actually think this is why empathy can be quite a difficult feeling to experience. The Cambridge dictionary defines empathy as ‘the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation’. So by its very definition, practicing empathy induces pain. It’s a brave thing to do but we must also take care not to let it completely disable and disempower us from the very reason we feel it in the first place, which is to understand someone’s experience and comfort them.
Your feelings are natural; not man-made
A feeling or emotion comes from our response and reaction to a stimulus. Our brains are constantly taking in information, assessing it and responding to it. The thing is, emotions and feelings are just natural responses to triggers we can’t always control (especially if we’re living in a prolonged state of anxiety already). Saying that you don’t deserve to feel sad because there’s other people that have more reasons to feel sad, is like saying you shouldn’t enjoy the sunshine because you might use it all up. Enjoying the sunshine doesn’t take the sunshine away from anyone else and we won’t run out of these feelings if too many of us feel them.
So, if:
You don’t have children and don’t have to worry about homeschooling or;
You haven’t lost anyone to the virus or;
Your business hasn’t failed, in fact it has thrived or;
You don’t have elderly parents in care homes that you haven’t seen since March or;
You live in a beautiful part of the world compared to most or;
You have a garden when lots of people don’t or;
You haven’t had to shield or;
Your day to day life has barely been affected or;
You’ve enjoyed parts of Lockdown for whatever reason
You are still allowed to feel sad, despair, grief and fear. Anxiety, anger and frustration won’t just evade you because you’ve had an ‘easier’ time than your friends. And just being aware of this fact helps you to empathise with people without becoming completely unhinged and ending up in a downwards spiral of guilt over your privilege.
If this post speaks to you in any way, I hope it inspires you to be a bit kinder to yourself. Our experiences are all subjective and having empathy for one another can be a powerful tool for healing if we can also allow ourselves to feel whatever feelings we have without judgement or resistance.