I am looking for a term to describe the line of thinking that goes something like “I hate my work, I am sick all the time, I am depressed, I can’t find happiness. But I should be happy. Those problems don’t matter. All my problems are so insignificant, there are little. They’re just some stupid first world problems. I have it good, I have food on the table and a loving family. There are millions of people who have real problems, people living in severe poverty, starving to death, being bombed.”
I think about this often, it came up when I was talking with someone with mental health issues and I remember him telling me that this way of thinking has a name/is a common symptom that occurs in people with a specific personality disorder, although I cannot remember what disorder he claimed it was. Also this was more than ten years ago so it might have either changed or my memory of this event changed.
I might call it gaslighting yourself, but I think the psych term is minimisation
Comparative Suffering is close possibly.
https://withtherapy.com/mental-health-resources/what-is-comparative-suffering/
I think these thoughts are a bi-product of empathy. When you are attuned to the pain of others, it can be easy to invalidate your own. I once heard an exchange on public transit where 2 strangers were discussing their hardships and a sort of one upping of trauma was occuring. Eventually one of the participants said “we all feel pain in our own way” and that stuck with me as a tool for understanding my own tendancy to under value the trauma I have experienced throughout life.
Hope that helps provide some insight or a thread to tug at for understanding.
I used to get this a lot, until someone reversed it on me, and I’ve thought about it this way ever since: If you can’t let yourself suffer because others might have it worse, then you also can’t let yourself be happy, because others have it better.
It’s all about personal experience and perspective.
