Welcome to the Trauma Olympics

The competition begins with “Who had the worst childhood.”

Mental health is beginning to feel like a competition.

I don’t mean mental health is a fight. At least, not in the way you would think. I’m not afraid to discuss my mental health struggles or fighting with negative stigma about my disease(s). Nor am I referring to fighting against my actual mental health issues, although that is also a constant battle.

No, the competition seems to come from within the mental health community, from others who I expected would be standing by my side and who instead seem to be standing in opposition.

Perhaps it began in rehab. While we shared our stories in group therapy sessions, there arose a definite feeling that to land in rehab your life had to be bad. But not just any kind of bad, bad enough. You had to have f*cked up your life, but make sure you f*cked it up enough. I felt a very palpable sense of one-up-manship in those conversations about how bad we had it and how much we had f*cked up our lives.

Or, rather, a one-down-manship. A fight for the bottom of the pile.

Then there was me. I still had a job, money in the bank, relationships with my family (even though those were steeped in narcissistic abuse, but that’s another story). I had just come out of a divorce, but the divorce hadn’t happened because of my substance abuse. And there my substance abuse itself. The only thing I’d been “abusing” is alcohol. I hadn’t gone off the rails with cocaine, or benzos, or heroine, or, or, or . . . My actions while drunk were (relatively) tame. I spent the majority of my drinking at home as a housewife, secretly drinking to blackout at the end of every day when my husband wasn’t paying attention. Nothing illegal, nothing scandalous.

I almost felt as if I didn’t belong, that I had to go out and start doing crazier stuff to earn my spot in rehab. But when they talked about their experiences with substance abuse, I saw myself perfectly reflected. So, I just stayed quiet as the “Who Has It Worst” competitions raged on.

The next time I felt the Trauma Olympics kick in was when I tried to relate to my siblings about our mutual experiences growing up in a toxic household. I am the oldest of five kids, with three step-siblings thrown in the mix. Instead of having one unified childhood, we ended up with eight different experiences, all as unique as if we had grown up in separate countries. This difference caught me off guard once when I tried to bring up a specific memory with my sister. To my surprise and consternation, instead of sympathizing with me and joining me in mutual grief about the memory, she barked out, “You’re not the only one who had it bad. Why do you keep talking about it?”

I put this down to the fact that she is the middle child, and the stereotype of “middle child personality type.” Middle children, supposedly, think they had things worse off than anyone else.

But this minimization of my experiences kept happening to me.

I couldn’t relate to immigrant experiences because I wasn’t an immigrant. Even though I moved almost yearly growing up and was constantly trying to change myself to fit in at new schools, new neighborhoods, new states. As immigrants discussed their feelings of alienation and attempts at adjusting to new cultures, I felt in my heart that they were describing what I had experienced. But I, being a white middle class woman, couldn’t claim that particular trial.

I couldn’t claim the trial of living in poverty, either, even though I did from birth until my twenties. As an adult, I made “too much” money. I graduated from a suburban high school (even though I was only at that school for my senior year), I went to college, and I owned a house.

My depression wasn’t “bad enough,” my chronic pain didn’t “debilitate me enough,” my hypomania wasn’t “crazy enough,” and my childhood abuse wasn’t “traumatic enough,” to warrant any specific diagnoses or care.

For those like me, who live in what I would like to call the Neutral Zone, I want to say,

I see you. I hear you. I know what it’s like to be unable to live a full healthy life but also be unable to claim a life riddled with debilitating and extreme trials.

And to everyone else I would like to say,

Can we stop playing this game?

Can we please stop the competition? Can we please stop comparing our traumas, as if their impact can be measured with a ruler or a bathroom scale?

Let’s put an end to the Trauma Olympics. There’s no gold medal for the person who had it the worst. There’s no silver or bronze medal for the people who didn’t quite have it “bad enough.” We are holding a civil war in the fight against mental health, while the real war is outside our walls.

The real war is politics that quantify who will and will not receive aide.

The real war is stigma against people speaking out about their personal, daily, lived experiences.

The real war is health care that refuses to treat mental health in the same realm as physical health.

The war is not the person next to you in the fight whose experiences you view as “worse” or “better” than yours. While we’re racing each other to the bottom, those outside our ranks are ensuring we all remain there.

I own a house. I have a (relatively) stable life. I was able to get a degree, maintain jobs, and hold a career for almost twenty years. AT THE SAME TIME, I have spent decades battling with chronic pain and fatigue. I have had days when it is a constant mental and physical effort to put one foot in front of the other. I go through periods of suicidal depression and breath-taking anxiety, yet if you look at my life from the outside you would never know.

It’s not about having it bad enough. My daily fight against my own brain and body is not worse or better than others’. And I shouldn’t have to fight against my own for a spot in recovery. It’s not a zero-sum game. There’s room on this podium for everyone.