Seven years.

I’ve been seeing my therapist for seven years. Actually it’s officially seven years this month. (Cheers, doc!) (I actually never call her that, but in the interest of maintaining confidentiality and privacy, that nickname will do.)

Seven years, she’s been hearing me try to downplay my trauma by saying it could have been worse, noting all the ways other people surely have suffered more than I have. Seven years now, she’s gently (and sometimes less gently) reminded me that it isn’t a contest, it isn’t about comparison. That yes, others might deal with traumatic experiences more intense than mine, but that doesn’t mean my experiences should be minimized. It doesn’t make my pain less substantial.

Seven years of this oft revisited discussion, and yet only this past week did she phrase the corrective thought in words that hit me like a sledgehammer to the face (but in a good way!).

It could have been worse, I said. And she replied, yes — but it also could have been better.

OH! I shouted, like this epiphany had solved one of the world’s great calculus equations or something.

It could have been worse. But it also could have been better.

It could have been better!

My friends. Insert mind-blown emoji here. In a way, it feels silly to have such a profound reaction to such a simple perspective shift. But, it’s actually earth-shattering for a significant reason.

“It could have been worse” is a dismissive statement. Someone offers a sympathetic response when they hear what we’ve been through, and we say that with a shrug, almost intolerant of compassion directed our way, because we don’t know what to do with that. It’s better to shift our focus away from our own pain and onto someone else’s, so we don’t have to sit with it too long and really think about it. That statement is avoidance at its best, somehow morphed into publicly accepted rote dialogue about personal experiences.

“It could have been better” is a whole other ballgame. It’s validating. It’s acknowledging that an experience was challenging, was problematic. It doesn’t require that we offer further details, but it doesn’t ignore that those details exist either. By saying this, we embrace the truth of our pain rather than denying it houseroom. Saying it could have been better means that it was real.

Just because I carry pain very well does not mean it isn’t heavy.

“It could have been better,” my therapist told me.

“Well, yeah, but it could have been wo-…you know what, yeah, it could have been better!” I replied, pivoting in the middle of dismissing my pain for the umpteenth time to allow myself long-denied validation.

A single word in the sentence has changed, but it is really no small thing. Victims of narcissistic abuse spend an interminable amount of time minimizing or ignoring their own feelings and needs in lieu of the narcissist’s. The success of a narcissist’s manipulation is reliant on crafting the worldview of their victim so that it serves them accordingly. They will gaslight the fuck out of their victims, doing anything they have to in order to ensure that only the narcissist’s version of things is perceived, only their stories are to be believed. Only the narcissist’s world is real; the victim’s pain and trauma is not, cannot, be real because that takes sympathy and support and attention away from the narcissist. They make you question every single thought of your own that might deviate from the alignment with theirs that they crave and expect. Survivors who’ve escaped this nightmarish world of funhouse mirrors spend years trying to parse out fact from fiction, and will continue to try to reduce their own suffering to mere atomic particles even when there’s no one parasitically benefiting from that anymore.

To be told that my childhood, my upbringing, my experiences, my life, could have been better was a five word sentence and every inch the revelation it felt like. Because if it could have been better…

If it could have been better…dear G-d…that means it was real.