Stepping out of Comparison into Curiosity

by Stephanie Peirolo, CSJP-A

Image by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay.

We can’t be truly open to another person’s grief unless we have metabolized our own. To be effective partners in healing for others, we need to be engaged in the healing process ourselves. Not finished with it, not done, because some griefs may never be processed or complete in the way that society expects. But if we are engaged with our woundedness, we can be more helpful to others who are wounded.

I see people fall into the comparison trap, especially older white women like me. When faced with coworkers experiencing grief or challenges that we have not experienced or may not understand, we can compare it to our own untended wounds. Why is this woman at work so concerned with a war on the other side of the world? Doesn’t she understand what I had to put up with when I was starting out?

This is human nature. An old friend and I both had very tough experiences as young mothers. We experienced financial insecurity, difficult spouses. I became a single mother when my two children were still toddlers, working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

We could look at the experiences of our now grown children and focus only on the fact that they are fortunate to have financial security and supportive spouses, good careers, and the opportunity to travel and play. We could stop there.

My friend and I have been able to process and metabolize much of our grief around our experience as young mothers, often in long phone conversations over the ensuing three decades. Because of that, we can get curious about what our children experience that we did not. Today, parents are bringing children into a world with impending climate disasters, a lack of bodily autonomy for girls and women in many of the United States, and the financial challenges of buying even a modest home, paying for childcare, saving for retirement when social security is threatened or college when a year’s tuition can be more than what we older people paid for our houses. Parents today have navigated a pandemic and face an epidemic of school shootings and gun violence and a drug abuse crisis. It is very different to have a family now than it was in the eighties and nineties. And we can’t have empathy for those differences and the fear and grief they may cause unless we have the space to get curious about what they experience that we did not.

Curiosity requires humility, admitting that we can’t know another’s experience. It doesn’t mean that our experience is any less valid or important. It is just different. In a society that encourages conflict and division, in a social media universe that seems like the Outrage Olympics, stepping out of comparison into curiosity is deeply countercultural.

Making assumptions about the validity of another’s grief or pain in reference to our own can be harmful to everyone involved. Everyone’s suffering matters, hurts, and deserves to be healed, and we each have a deep need for our stories to be heard, honored, held. Rejecting another’s story because you don’t think it “qualifies” is harmful.

Image by Wolfgang Eckert from Pixabay.

Most adults understand how challenging it must be for a young person to practice active shooter drills at school, to sit through lockdowns, or maybe even experience gun violence firsthand. But are we always mindful of the other ways in which young people are impacted by social media, the climate crisis, and evolving gender identities? For those who experienced childhood or adolescence as enjoyable and free, it may take work to understand the freedoms we experienced may not be available to youth today. Really listening to young people, traveling with them into the worlds of online gaming, social media or even skincare videos on YouTube with curiosity might help us better understand what it is like to be young now and make us more compassionate for what younger generations are facing.

Our culture is unkind to people who are grieving, with little or no corporate bereavement leave and very little tolerance for those of us who grieve in years and not weeks or months, which can short-circuit the grief process. I understand why many of us put off the deep work of tending to our old wounds. We might think, “Why dredge that up?” People who help other people as caregivers, first responders, medical professionals, or parents, often have trouble stopping and caring for themselves, their old wounds. But buried pain or trauma has a way of working to the surface. It may show up as illness, physical pain. Or it may obscure our understanding, placing trauma goggles over our perception of something in the here and now that echoes a traumatic experience we had in the past. There’s a reason that therapists and psychiatrists go through therapy themselves, so they can understand the myriad ways in which we transfer our emotions onto others, or which trauma goggles we might need to remove to be truly present to another.

It’s counterintuitive, but the more time I spend tending my grief and healing my old wounds, the more available I am to others who may be suffering. When I am clear about my hurt and honor it, I step out of that cultural march to competition and into a place of compassion. I’m no longer afraid of my grief, which means I’m not afraid of yours. I don’t push away my difficult emotions, which means I can make space for yours. When old narratives or comparisons come up, which they do, I think of it as a spiritual practice to reframe those narratives, and step into the nonviolence of non-judgment, compassion and acceptance.

This article appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Living Peace.