How to stop comparative suffering
Empathy is not a finite resource. Compassion doesn’t run out because you spend it on someone else.
I have a friend who is a Judge Advocate General in the US Military. That means he was the person who decided, on a case by case basis, if it was legal to kill a suspected terrorist. He was deployed many times to Afghanistan and was the legal advisor to a special operations task force conducting counter-terrorism operations. He would give the final thumbs-up before a kill or capture mission. Had they followed all the proper legal protocol? Were there any legal objections to killing these specific people? These people, that you can see on this live screen right here? The ones standing there, talking, maybe planning, maybe talking about their families, two on bicycles, one looking young — really young, maybe just a boy. Is he just a boy? It’s hard to tell.
The commander would ask him, essentially - can I take this strike, and should I take this strike? Can I kill, and should I kill? The pressure was enormous, and literally life or death. As my friend said in our podcast interview “Wait too long, and teammates die. Wait too little, and a life may be taken unjustly.”
Now that my friend is back home from deployment, he is haunted by the things he has done, even within the relative safety of his place removed from the combat zone. Sure, he was in Afghanistan, but he was not being shot at (other than occasional and ineffective mortar attacks, which sounds like enough to make me pass out from fear like one of those fainting goats, but those are apparently no big deal) so he doesn’t feel like his experience counts.
If he wasn’t staring down the barrel of a gun, if each step forward had zero potential to set off an IED, was he allowed to have post-traumatic stress? Had he suffered enough to be eligible? Was the responsibility of literally holding the life or death of another human enough, even if he wasn’t pulling the trigger?
This is the territory of comparative suffering, and it’s a shitty game played by both military and civilians. It’s also known as ranking pain. It can happen when we look at the suffering of others, or ourselves:
“They shouldn’t be suffering from the divorce so intensely, because at least they didn’t have any kids to worry about.”
“It’s just a migraine — there are soldiers who had their legs blown off.”
It’s the classic “there are starving people in the world, you know” mentality. And yes. There are starving people. But it still hurts like a motherfucker when I bang my kneecap into the coffee table.
So who does this comparison benefit, exactly? Does it help the person in a combat zone if you don’t have compassion for a migraine? Empathy is not a finite resource. The compassion well doesn’t run dry because you offer it to someone else.
Self-compassion is the plaster with which we pick up the broken parts and put ourselves back together. It is not a pity party. We are not sitting in the middle of the shards and asking why they are so sharp and why we have to have all of them when our neighbor has zero shards and that great hair. Compassion is a recognition of what is real and true. Compassion is the clearest path to healing.
When we refuse ourselves space for our pain and suffering because we think other people deserve it more, that gets dangerous. We can drown in 60 feet of water or 6. Drowning is drowning. Diminishing the pain you feel only prolongs its impact. It’s kicking yourself while you’re already down.
So if we don’t get the same amount of compassion because others have it worse - where does that stop? Someone will always have it worse. Someone will always have it easier. Accepting compassion doesn’t mean we have stamped our foreheads with WORST EVER.
So whatever your level of suffering you might be experiencing right now, you get to have some compassion. It’s not going to run out.
There is enough for everyone.