How Comparative Suffering Sabotages Religious Trauma Recovery

Have you heard of comparative suffering?

It’s a term Brené Brown discusses quite often in her work on shame and vulnerability, so it’s been swirling around the personal-development world for a while now.

However, it’s still something I see people doing all the time, particularly folks who have experiences of religious trauma.

The reason I wanted to take a deeper dive into this topic is because I see comparative suffering as a major hindrance to healing for a lot of folks.

Comparative suffering is when someone minimizes their own pain or trauma by comparing it to the experiences of others, somehow concluding that their own suffering is less significant or valid in comparison to the suffering of others.

This can be particularly prevalent in high control religion where there is a lot of pressure to maintain a positive attitude and focus on the suffering of others rather than acknowledging the very real ways in which you, yourself, are suffering.

And even though you may have left the control and dysfunction of that group long ago, that knee jerk response to deny or minimize your own experiences of hurt continues to persist.

Examples of Comparative Suffering:

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“My parents were much better with me than their parents were with them.”

“I was never  actually  abused, so I can’t really complain.”

When we engage in comparative suffering, we are essentially invalidating our own experiences and emotions.

And rather than acknowledging and processing our pain, we push it aside, instead focusing on the experiences of others rather than our own.

Here are a few specific ways comparative suffering inhibits our healing.

Your pain is still valid and deserves to be acknowledged and processed, regardless of how it “measures up” to someone else’s experience of pain.

It Feeds into Shame:

Comparing your suffering to others can lead to feelings of guilt and shame for feeling hurt or struggling, especially if you believe your experiences aren’t “as bad” as someone else’s.

This can prevent you from seeking support or talking about your experiences because you may feel like you don’t deserve help or attention.

It Can Hinder Your Progress:

When you minimize or invalidate your own pain through comparison, you risk stifling your healing process because you’re not giving yourself permission to feel and process the full range of emotions associated with your experiences.

Healing requires acknowledging and processing the emotions related to all our painful experiences, not just the ones that are deemed “worse” than someone else’s.

It Displaces Responsibility:

When you minimize the pain or trauma you’ve experienced as a result of someone else’s behavior, you’re essentially excusing their harmful actions and absolving them from taking any kind of personal responsibility.

This tends to shift the blame onto yourself, often leading to feelings of self-blame and guilt.

This happens quite often in the dynamic between children and parents because it can be really difficult to acknowledge that your parent was in some way responsible for your suffering, especially if they, themselves, deny or minimize their role in your suffering.

There is a unique interplay between religious trauma and comparative suffering that I think is essential to address.

In many ways, being indoctrinated into a high control religion primes people to deny and minimize their own experiences because they learned early on how to gaslight themselves in order to survive the demands of the religion.

Here are a couple other ways that high control religions create additional challenges for folks who are struggling to validate their own experiences of religious trauma.

The Role of Religious Indoctrination in Minimizing Self-Perception Of Pain

Religious indoctrination often comes with strict teachings on virtue, suffering, and repentance, which plays a significant part in how you might perceive and process your experiences of pain, abuse, or neglect.

For many, the pressures and expectations of the religious group can cause you to minimize or disregard your own discomfort or bypass certain emotions that indicate something’s “not right.”

This indoctrination instills a belief system where suffering is often glorified as a path to righteousness or divine favor.

This was definitely my experience with Evangelical Christianity.

I constantly filtered my experiences through a lens of “god’s refinement,” and that hardship was simply a conduit for spiritual growth.

The problem is that this mentality creates barriers to acknowledging personal hurt because the very act of acknowledging pain can feel like a moral failing or a lack of faith in “god’s plan.”

This then compounds the hurt and contributes to the development of religious trauma that’s probably already brewing under the surface.

High Control Teachings Prevent Us From Recognizing Abuse

High control religions often obscure our ability to recognize abuse or neglect for what it really is.

This is because of the prevalence of doctrines that emphasize obedience and submission, which creates an atmosphere where questioning or challenging authority figures is either implicitly or explicitly discouraged.

This becomes particularly problematic when those authority figures are the perpetrators of abuse, which happens quite often.

When you’re raised in such settings, you may struggle to reconcile the indoctrinated beliefs from these groups with the reality of your suffering, leading to significant confusion and internal conflict.

The struggle then becomes internalized, and you might end up blaming yourself for adhering to the belief of a system that was supposed to protect while actually harming you.

It’s a complicated cycle that can be incredibly damaging, both mentally and emotionally.

Here’s what I need you to know — learning to avoid the trap of comparative suffering is a key step in healing from religious trauma.

This means you must begin to acknowledge your pain and recognize that it is VALID.

By doing this, you’re giving yourself the compassion and empathy you truly deserve.

This might feel unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable at first, so I’d just encourage you to sit with that, trying to stay open and curious.

Ultimately, recognizing your trauma without comparing it or downplaying it is the starting point for your recovery journey.

And it’s an important part of the process of unraveling the beliefs and teachings that have hindered you from fully understanding the impact of your experiences.

This acknowledgment doesn’t mean you’re weak; it’s actually an extremely courageous act in light of all you’ve been through and it sets the stage for genuine healing and growth.