It's taken a very, very long time for me to get to this place, but I've arrived at a place where I've accepted that people might think what they've experiences is the worst because it's the worst thing they've ever experienced. I definitely had a lot of...dislike for people who tried to compare their trauma to mine in the past, but honestly, they're doing what they know how to do in order to try to contribute to the conversation. That's okay with me.

My best friend suffered from severe poverty as a child and started running the streets very young. I don't share that experience. I grew up in the suburbs and also experienced sexual abuse at the hands of my former husband over the course of almost a decade. My best friend has never been raped. He and I have very different stories and we both have different ideas of what "the worst" is.

I know that what you're sharing comes from a place of pain and I'm truly sorry about what you experienced. I do also want to affirm that as trauma survivors, we enter a very dangerous sphere when we begin to invalidate the pain of other people. Technically yes, all trauma is not created equal.

Like you, I've found myself in frustrating positions when people try to relate. But I've also been in positions where my trauma truly pales in comparison to what people have been through. I've read psychosocial summaries of children that have brought me to tears and worked with the children of kids whose parents made the news for what they did to them. When we feel the frustration bubbling up as people try to relate to us, I think it's important to ground ourselves in the truth that our reality is exactly that--our reality. What we've been through shapes the way we view the world, but the same can be said of everyone else. Wishing you hope and healing. <3