Posted 4/13/2013 by hhill
This is a perfect companion piece to yesterday's entry about the wonderful Ring Theory. Surely this describes a woman who was unfamiliar with those suggestions! From Joyce Wadler in the
New York Times comes this essay about responses to others' problems--as in, my suffering/accident/loss/illness was worse than yours. I often hear this concern described as an issue in some support groups--that is, it can seem as though there is a hierarchy of breast cancer misery, and a woman who needs less treatment than others may be made to feel that she shouldn't complain. I truly hope that no one ever feels that way in one of my groups; I am on alert for such a sequence of feelings, and I think I manage it satisfactorily. Of course some of us need more treatment than others or longer treatment or have even scarier diagnoses, but we are all in this together.
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