The Olympics of Suffering- Why Invalidating Your Feelings Never Works

Most of us have had this thought at some point:

“I really shouldn’t be upset about (fill in the blank), so many people have it so much worse than me.”

What happened next? Were you filled with a wave of gratitude, no longer concerned about whatever you were just dealing with? 

If you said yes to that last question, I call bullshit. 

I hear some version of this sentiment regularly as a therapist, and I cannot tell you one instance in which someone expressed that belief, and it made the situation better. So, I thought it would be worth some time to really break this down and try to understand it and why it is so common, yet so ineffective. 

First, let’s see if this belief can stand up to a few basic questions. If this is the truth, who then is allowed to experience suffering, hardship, stress, dissatisfaction, anxiety, despair or any other painful emotion? Do you need to be suffering from extreme poverty, live in a war-torn country or have cancer? Who qualifies? Should we host an international competition to determine who gets to have their hardships be valid every four years? In the spirit of the Winter Olympics, this is why I am writing this blog today. I think we often feel like unless we compete in the Olympics of Suffering and win, our feelings don’t count.

Fight with my spouse? 

Disqualified.

Parents are emotionally immature?

 Disqualified. 

Starting each workday in an existential crisis that leads me to looking up countries with higher life satisfaction and wondering how hard is it really to learn Danish and is the paid version of Duolingo worth it?

 Disqualified. 

So, the next question would be- if only certain people at certain monumentally challenging parts of their lives are allowed to feel upset about it, how does dismissing or ignoring my feelings help or validate their pain? 

Short answer, it doesn’t. 

Then why do we do this? Here’s what I’ve gathered from my clients and other experts over time: Our brains were not designed to make us feel happy and content, they were designed to keep us alive. Your brain is a tool. A tool that IS.ALWAYS.ON. Never turns off. Always working to keep you alive, everything else is secondary. 

So how does this keep us alive? Well, shame. Shame is one of our most interesting feelings, because it is basically born out of the evolution of our survival as a species. In our most primitive times, isolation was a death sentence. You break the social rules of the group and get exiled- “Good fuckin luck out there with sabretooth tigers!” So, in order to not be that guy, we internalized the shame we received from the group and shamed ourselves in order to stay connected, to stay loved, to stay alive. 

Shame has since become an intrinsic part of our basic operating system for the better part of our existence. It is typically our go-to tool for motivating ourselves or trying to shift into a version of ourselves that is better in some way, or more acceptable to others. So, this idea of shaming ourselves when we experience hardship or struggles, appears to be a way of shaming ourselves into feeling more grateful and appreciative of our lives or our situation.  But it doesn’t work. We don’t feel more grateful after, we just feel like shit. And then we feel like shit for feeling like shit. Thank you evolutionary adaptations!

Here’s something that works a lot better: self-compassion. Self-compassion is the basic concept of treating ourselves how we would want to treat others. Because here is the batshit crazy thing- our body can’t tell the difference. It feels the same if someone else treats you like shit, or if you treat you like shit. If you are dismissive and invalidating of your feelings, it would feel the same if you talked to a friend and then told you: “Tough shit, dude, everyone has it worse.” That guy sounds like a blast to talk to. 

Self-compassion takes work though. Specifically, because it goes directly against our hard-wired survival instincts. But now, those instincts actually don’t help us survive and they also don’t improve our relationships either. Being compassionate to ourselves helps us show up more for the other people in our lives. For some great information on how and where to practice this, I highly recommend checking out research and practices by Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff: Join the Community Now, one of the leading researchers of this as well as Chris Germer, Mindful Self-Compassion and Psychotherapy | Chris Germer. 

So please, be kind to yourself folks. It’s good for your brain, good for your body, and no one gets a gold medal for suffering the most this year.

 Except maybe the people who compete in the Skeleton races. How the hell do you convince yourself that it is a good idea to strap yourself to a sled going 85 miles per hour down an ice tube headfirst, and the difference between winning and losing is a fraction of a microsecond? They all should get a gold medal. Anyways, I digress.