The Suffering Olympics: When Grief Turns Into a Competition

How hard is it for you to validate your own grief? To pause and give yourself credit for your survival? To offer yourself grace and permission to heal in your own time?

If that’s easy for you — congrats. You’re apparently God’s favorite. The rest of us mere mortals are stuck playing in the Suffering Olympics - a chaotic, unhelpful game where someone always has it worse, and you’re told to be grateful it’s “not that bad.”

I see this pattern so often in my counseling office. Clients comparing their pain to others, feeling guilty for struggling, or hearing things like:

“At least you can get pregnant.”
“At least you got to hold your baby before he died.”
“You have so much to be thankful for - why are you sad?”

These messages invalidate grief and create a hierarchy of worthiness, as if some pain deserves acknowledgment and some doesn’t. But grief doesn’t work that way.

You’re allowed to hold both grief and gratitude. Hope doesn’t cancel pain; it coexists with it. Healing begins when we stop competing and start allowing.

Read the full essay on Substack!

If you’re navigating loss or feeling pressured to “stay positive” while you’re hurting, learn more about my counseling approach here.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash