There's no hierarchy of pain

From "Maybe you should talk to someone"

Suffering shouldn't be ranked because pain is not a contest. Pain is pain. By diminishing your problems, you were judging yourself and everyone else whose problems you had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can't get through your pain by diminishing it. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing. Often what seems like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

Everyone with a heartbeat is afraid of getting hurt in relationships. Even in the best possible relationship, you're going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you're human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, and your closest friend - and they will hurt you - because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

What was so great about loving intimacy was that there was room for repair, this process is called rupture and repair. If you had parents who acknowledge their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, then ruptures won't feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn't come with loving repairs it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn't work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. 

It's not ideal opening yourself up like this, putting your shield down, but if you want the rewards of an intimate relationship there's no way around it.

Adapted from "Maybe you should talk to someone" by Lori Gottlieb

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