Why It’s So Hard to Stop Comparing Your Grief 

“I think you need to leave your TFMR support group. You’re seeing too many other examples of grief and I don’t think it’s good for you.”

Those were the words my therapist said to me. She meant “stop comparing your grief to everyone else’s”, but she had it backwards. And they hurt more than I expected them to, coming from someone I trusted.

I was six months out from the end of my fertility journey. I had terminated a much-wanted pregnancy for medical reasons, and I was doing all the things you’re supposed to do. I was showing up to therapy. I was talking about it. I was processing, or at least trying to. And the one place that felt like it actually understood what I had been through, the one space where the people in it knew exactly what TFMR meant and didn’t need it explained, was that group.

She meant well. I want to be clear about that. She was, and is, a good therapist. But this was one of the most unhelpful things she said to me.

I talk about comparing your grief in more detail in this video, if you want to watch it alongside this post.

What I Was Actually Looking For

Here’s the thing she misread: I wasn’t comparing my grief to other people’s grief.

I was looking for my experience reflected back at me. Those are completely different things, and the difference matters.

When you’re in the middle of something as isolating as pregnancy loss, and specifically something as misunderstood as a termination for medical reasons, the loneliness of it is crushing. You don’t need someone to tell you your grief is worse or better than someone else’s. You need someone to say: yes, that. That’s real. I know what that feels like. You need a witness.

Every week someone joined that group and was required to write an introduction post. Tell their own story with as little or as much detail as they were comfortable with. It meant that I regularly saw the stories of people who had terminated pregnancies for the same diagnosis that I had had. I saw stories of people who were further along in their journey, sharing what was working and what wasn’t. I saw others who experienced similar triggers to me. I also saw the replies from admins to post, that gave me the answers and validation that I had to my own questions and experiences. Every day, I saw elements of my experience reflected in ways that made me feel seen and less alone. 

That’s not comparing your grief. That’s community. And there’s a world of difference.

The Picture We Carry In Before We Arrive

My mom had precipitous labours. Both times. Minimal pain, quick delivery, done. And for years she told me that the way birth was shown on TV was exaggerated, performed, put on for the cameras. That it wasn’t really like that.

I now know that for many people, it is exactly like that. Her experience was real, but it wasn’t universal. She reflected her version of birth onto all births, and I absorbed it as fact.

Grief works the same way.

We grow up watching grief on screen, hearing it described by people whose experience of it was completely different from ours, or reading about it in books that may have been entirely imagined. By the time we arrive at our own loss, most of us are carrying a picture of what grief is supposed to look like. And when our actual experience doesn’t match that picture, we panic.

So we go looking for something that does. That’s what those online groups are. They’re the real, messy, lived versions that nobody shows on the screen. And yes, sometimes reading them sends us spiralling. But the answer to that isn’t to leave. The answer is to be reminded that their experience is theirs, and yours is yours, and neither is wrong.

The Part Nobody Warned Me About: When Grief Gets a Diagnosis

I asked my therapist more than once whether I was doing grief right. Whether I was crying too much, or not enough. Whether the fact that I was still functioning, still showing up, still getting through my days, while other people were quitting jobs and walking out of marriages, meant something was wrong with me.

What I needed to hear was: yes, you’re doing it right. That grief looks different in every single person who carries it, and doing the work is exactly what right looks like.

What I got instead was a lens I hadn’t realised was there. Once grief becomes a diagnosis, and mine did, the whole system orients itself toward a cure. The sessions have an objective. The insurance has requirements. And whether anyone means it to happen or not, you start to be measured against a textbook version of what your grief should look like, and when it should be resolved.

I didn’t consider myself to be depressed at the time. There was some anxiety, a lot of sadness, but I felt I was still fully functional (probably also a societal bias there). My medical aid only covered two therapy sessions after my termination. If I wanted to continue having them pay for my sessions, I would need to have a clinical diagnosis of depression. An additional 12 sessions would be covered with a diagnosis. We paid a lot for medical aid, and my therapist made the suggestion. I was happy to take it in order to have the sessions covered. I didn’t know the consequences that would follow me for years. My life insurance put a “mental health related” waiver on my policy. 

Also now there was a focus on getting me “cured” within the sessions that were authorised. Twice a month for six months, and you need to be “fixed”, but grief doesn’t get fixed. It becomes integrated, and that distinction is important. I don’t think depression gets cured either – it get integrated and managed. But when paperwork is involved in an emotion, suddenly you have checkboxes to move through. 

That is its own kind of comparison. It’s not loss parent to loss parent. It’s loss parent comparing your grief to diagnostic criteria. And it’s just as corrosive, maybe more so, because it comes dressed as help.

What eventually shifted things for me wasn’t a cure. It was integration. Understanding that my losses are part of who I am now, not a problem to be resolved and filed away. That took different modalities to find. Coaching. Other kinds of support. Space to figure out what processing actually looked like for me, not for the textbook.

Why Comparing Your Grief Isn’t Actually the Problem

We stop sending people away from the spaces where they feel seen.

We stop telling people they’re seeing too much grief, as though grief were contagious and exposure is the problem. We remind them, loudly and often, that the experiences they’re reading about belong to those people. That they don’t need to measure themselves against them. That watching someone else fall apart doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong, and functioning through their own loss doesn’t mean they’re doing it right.

Your grief is not a deviation from the correct version.

There is no correct version.

And if you’ve ever sat in a therapy session asking whether you were grieving correctly, I want you to know what your therapist should have said: yes. You are. The fact that you’re doing the work, showing up, looking for language for what you’re carrying. That’s it. That’s what right looks like.

​​If you’ve read this and realised that what you’ve been craving is exactly that, someone to sit with your experience and tell you that yes, you’re doing this right, a Private Session with me might be exactly the space for that.

It’s a supported conversation for when grief gets specific. Book your session here.