"Other People Have It Worse"
There is a moment I have witnessed more times than I can count, and it never stops striking me.
A client sits across from me and describes something genuinely painful — a childhood that asked too much of them, a loss that was never properly mourned, years of being unseen in the ways that matter most. And when I reflect that back — when I say, simply, that sounds like it was really hard — something shifts in their face. Not relief. Something more guarded than that.
And then come the words: Well, other people have it so much worse. It wasn’t that bad. It’s just part of life.
They say it quickly, as though they need to get it out before I can object. As though the most important thing, in that moment, is to make sure I know they are not making too much of themselves.
I want to expound upon that moment. Because that swift, practiced retreat from one’s own experience is one of the most tender and most costly things I see in my work.
The instinct to measure your pain against someone else's is not perspective. It is a way of making sure you are never quite allowed to hurt.
What Minimizing Actually Is
When we compare our suffering to someone else's and use that comparison to dismiss our own, we call it perspective. We mean it as a kind of maturity — a sign that we are not self-indulgent, not dramatic, not making too much of ourselves.
But let's look at what is actually happening in that moment.
Something painful is on the verge of being seen — by someone else, or by yourself. And before it can be fully seen, a very fast, very practiced part of you steps forward and says: that doesn't count. Not enough. Others have survived worse. Who are you to call this hard?
That voice is not perspective. That voice is protection.
It learned, somewhere along the way, that your pain was not safe to show. That needing comfort was a burden. That acknowledging difficulty was weakness, or ingratitude, or self-indulgence. It learned to pre-empt the vulnerability of being seen by making the case, swiftly and preemptively, that there is nothing here worth seeing.
That is not clarity. That is a defense. And like most defenses, it once served a real purpose — and it is now costing you something important.
The defense that says, “It wasn’t that bad” is usually running fastest in the moments when it was, in fact, THAT bad.
The Myth of the Hierarchy of Suffering
Underneath the phrase "other people have it worse" is an assumption worth examining: that suffering operates on a hierarchy, and that only those at the top of it — those who have endured the most objectively terrible things — have earned the right to hurt.
This is not how pain works.
Pain is not a competition. There is no tribunal that weighs your losses against someone else's and issues a verdict on whether yours qualified. Your nervous system does not know about the hierarchy. It only knows what it experienced — and what it experienced, it experienced fully, regardless of what was happening to someone else at the same time.
A child who grew up with a parent who was emotionally unavailable does not hurt less because somewhere else a child was being hit. A person who was told, repeatedly, that their feelings were too much does not carry a lighter wound because someone else was told something crueler. The wound is the wound. Its validity is not determined by comparison.
When we use other people's suffering to invalidate our own, we are not being generous to them. We are simply denying ourselves.
Your nervous system was not comparing. It was simply experiencing. The hierarchy is something the mind invented afterward — to make the experience feel less deserving of care.
Where This Habit Comes From
The minimizing reflex does not appear from nowhere. It is learned, usually early, usually in one of a few familiar ways.
Some people grew up in households where comparative suffering was explicitly invoked — where a parent's difficult childhood was held up as context for why your struggles did not warrant much attention. You think that's hard? Let me tell you about hard. The message, absorbed rather than stated: your pain is only legible in relation to mine, and mine will always be larger.
Others learned it through a more ambient silence — a family that simply did not have language for difficulty, that moved through hardship by moving past it, that equated emotional expression with weakness or instability. In these households, nobody said your pain doesn't matter. But nobody asked about it either. And that taught its own lesson.
Some learned it culturally — through communities or traditions that emphasized collective endurance, stoicism, or gratitude as primary virtues. There is much that is genuinely valuable in these traditions. But when the emphasis on gratitude becomes a prohibition on grief, and when the honoring of collective resilience leaves no room for individual tenderness, the result is a person who can acknowledge everyone else's difficulty with great warmth and cannot extend that same warmth to themselves.
And some learned it simply as a way of surviving an environment in which their pain, if fully expressed, would have been dismissed, mocked, or punished. Better to dismiss it yourself, quickly, than to risk that someone else does it first.
In every case, the minimizing reflex was adaptive. It was a way of managing. And it deserves to be understood as such — not criticized, but gently examined, with curiosity about what it was protecting and whether that protection is still needed now.
We learn to dismiss ourselves in the same voice, and often the same words, that once dismissed us.
What It Costs
The cost of chronic self-minimizing is not immediately obvious, because in the short term it works. It keeps the discomfort manageable. It maintains the image of someone who is coping. It sidesteps the vulnerability of being truly seen.
But over time, the cost accumulates.
When you consistently move away from your own pain before it can be witnessed — by yourself or anyone else — you are also moving away from the possibility of healing it. Because healing requires contact. It requires that the wound be acknowledged, not in a performative or self-pitying way, but simply as real. As something that happened. As something that mattered.
Pain that is never acknowledged does not dissolve. It relocates. It shows up as a background anxiety that has no clear source. As a tenderness that flares unexpectedly at things that seem too small to justify it. As a tiredness that is not quite physical. As a distance from yourself that you cannot fully explain.
The body keeps the score, as the saying goes. What the mind refuses to acknowledge, the nervous system continues to carry.
Minimizing your pain does not make it smaller. It makes it quieter — and quieter is not the same as healed.
Survival Is Not Nothing
Here is what I want to say to anyone who has sat across from someone — a therapist, a friend, a partner — who offered them the simple acknowledgment that what they went through was hard, and responded by immediately making the case for why it wasn't:
You survived something.
Maybe it was a childhood that did not give you what you needed. Maybe it was a relationship that cost you more than it should have. Maybe it was years of performing a version of yourself that was not quite you, in order to remain safe or loved or acceptable. Maybe it was a loss that no one around you seemed to understand. Maybe it was something that has no name, that you have never been able to fully describe, but that you carry with you in ways you can feel even if you cannot always articulate them.
You survived it. And surviving something is not nothing. It required something of you. It shaped you. It left marks — not as evidence of damage, but as evidence of what you moved through.
To acknowledge that is not weakness. It is not self-pity. It is not a claim that your suffering is greater than anyone else's or that you deserve special treatment or that the world owes you anything.
It is simply the truth. And the truth, spoken with kindness toward yourself, is where healing begins.
You do not need to prove the weight of what you carried. The fact that you are still here, still trying to make sense of it, is proof enough.
On Honoring Both the Wound and the Wholeness
There is a fear, I think, underneath the minimizing reflex — a fear that if you allow yourself to fully acknowledge how hard something was, you will be consumed by it. That opening the door to the grief, the anger, the sadness, will be the beginning of a collapse you cannot recover from.
This fear makes sense. But it is not accurate.
Acknowledging your pain does not trap you in it. In fact, the opposite tends to be true. It is the unfelt feelings, the unnamed griefs, the experiences that were never allowed to be witnessed — these are the ones that persist. Because they are still waiting. Still hoping that someone will finally turn toward them and say: I see you. That was real. You did not imagine it. It mattered.
You can honor your pain and your resilience simultaneously. These are not opposites. The same person who survived something difficult is also the person who carries real strength, real wisdom, real capacity — earned, not inherited. Both are true. You do not have to choose between them.
Honoring the wound does not diminish the wholeness. It completes it.
You are allowed to say: that was hard. And also: I am still here. Both of these things can be true at the same time, in the same body, in the same breath.
A Gentle Invitation
If you find yourself reflexively minimizing — in the therapy room, in conversation, or in the privacy of your own thoughts — I am not asking you to abandon that reflex overnight. It has been with you a long time, and it has served a real purpose.
But I am inviting you to pause, just briefly, the next time it arrives. To notice it. To ask: what am I protecting myself from right now? What would I feel if I let this be as hard as it actually was?
You do not have to answer those questions immediately. You do not have to feel everything at once. Healing does not require that you flood yourself with everything you have been keeping at bay.
It only requires a small turning toward. A moment of not immediately moving away.
That is enough to begin.
You deserved someone who asked how you were — and waited for the real answer. You still do.
Reflection Prompt
What might you allow yourself to acknowledge about your own story — if you knew that acknowledging it was an act of courage, and not a complaint?
About Dr Vicky Huangfu, Psy.D. | Raven Psychotherapy | Henderson, NV
Vicky is a first generation Chinese American who honors cultural heritage with humility and curiosity. Her passion is in helping women say the things that feel too hard to say; things like, "NO," "I am not OK," "I am OK," and "STFU!". As a clinical psychologist and EMDR-certified therapist for over 20 years, she is committed to providing a trauma-informed and affirming space where you can get in touch with what is true for you.
