The playing field wasn’t level to begin with: on childhood trauma and the fruitless comparison game.

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • April 15, 2018

LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: Childhood trauma changes your starting nervous system state so fundamentally that comparing your adult progress to someone without that history isn’t a fair or meaningful measure.

The Midnight Scorekeeper

Hana is at her laptop at 11 p.m., her chamomile tea gone cold in the mug her daughter painted, reading the same LinkedIn post for the third time. A former classmate. They graduated the same year, from the same university. He’s just been promoted to VP. He’s posting gratitude, tagging his mentor, a photo of himself beaming into a conference-room light. The comments are a wall of congratulations. And something in Hana tightens, hardens, turns inward.

Hana is a composite, a client I’ll call by that name, drawn from many years of sitting with driven women who describe some version of this exact night. So her details are invented, but the scene is true to hundreds of real ones. Why am I not there yet? What’s wrong with me? He has it so together. I’m so far behind.

She closes the laptop. She doesn’t sleep well. In the morning the thought is still there, quieter now but persistent, like a bruise she can’t stop pressing.

If this is familiar, stay with me. Because what I want to offer you isn’t a pep talk about gratitude or a list of ways to quit social media. I want to offer you something more fundamental: a different frame entirely. One that starts with a truth that rarely gets named out loud.

The playing field was never level to begin with.

If you grew up with childhood trauma, if your early years were shaped by emotional neglect, chronic instability, abuse, or any environment where safety and attunement weren’t reliably present, then comparing your progress to peers who didn’t carry that history isn’t just painful. It’s also unfair to you. And it’s physiologically and psychologically inaccurate.

This post is about why. And about what a more honest, more compassionate comparison might look like instead.

What Is the Comparison Game in Trauma Recovery?

Somewhere in nearly every driven woman I work with who carries a childhood trauma history, usually not far beneath the surface, is a quiet, relentless scorekeeper. Hana’s version of her tracks other people’s milestones. Who got promoted. Who married well. Who seems unburdened. Who got somewhere she hasn’t yet.

And the scorekeeper rarely stops to ask the one question that matters: but what were the starting conditions?

That’s the comparison game. And for women who grew up in homes where emotional safety wasn’t reliable, where they spent their developmental years managing chaos or walking on eggshells or taking care of the adults around them, this game is a setup. You can’t win a race that was never designed to be equal.

What makes this particular comparison so insidious is a mechanism psychologists call social comparison theory. It’s the innate human tendency, first mapped by Leon Festinger, PhD, the social psychologist who proposed it in 1954, to evaluate ourselves against others as a way of establishing self-worth and locating our place in the world. The drive is deeply wired. But it was built for comparison between people on roughly equal footing. When the comparison is structurally unequal, when one person grew up with reliable love and the other spent childhood in survival mode, the mechanism misfires. It hands down verdicts that feel like truth and are actually distortion.

What Is Childhood Trauma?

Childhood trauma is, in my experience, one of the most misunderstood terms in the clinical vocabulary. Many women I work with resist the word at first. “Trauma” feels like it belongs to someone else, someone whose experiences were obviously worse, more dramatic, more undeniably bad.

But trauma, by clinical definition, isn’t determined by the severity of an event in isolation. It’s determined by whether your available coping resources could metabolize what happened to you. A child without adequate emotional support is more vulnerable to being traumatized by events that a child with a secure, responsive caregiver might process more readily. The same event can produce very different outcomes depending on what surrounds it.

And childhood trauma isn’t only the events that are easy to name from the outside. It absolutely includes the acute, identifiable ones: an assault, a significant loss, a car accident. But it also includes the quieter, slower, more diffuse kind. The chronically unpredictable parent. The home where love felt conditional. The childhood spent managing a parent’s emotional state instead of developing your own. The persistent absence of attunement, of being truly seen, truly heard, truly known.

These complex, relational, sometimes invisible forms of trauma can have as profound a developmental impact as more visible events. Sometimes more, because they’re harder to name and therefore harder to begin healing. If you’ve ever wondered whether your history “counts,” I’d point you toward what I’ve written about why so many driven women struggle with that exact question.

What Does Trauma Do to the Developing Brain?

This isn’t just a matter of perspective or framing. The developmental impact of childhood trauma is measurable, documented, and profound. The research is unambiguous.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, spent decades documenting how traumatic experience is stored not just in memory but in the body. It’s the insight that grounds approaches like somatic therapy. In his foundational 2014 work, van der Kolk showed that childhood trauma, particularly when it happens inside relationships with caregivers, fundamentally reorganizes how the brain processes threat, regulates emotion, and forms a sense of self. The nervous system that develops under chronic threat is a different nervous system than the one that develops in relative safety. It isn’t weaker. It adapted to survive. But those adaptations come at a cost once the threat has passed and ordinary life is supposed to resume.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, is the researcher I keep coming back to on this next point. In her 1992 work she argued that complex trauma, the kind that happens repeatedly within relationships, especially in childhood, produces a distinct and profound set of effects that go beyond single-incident PTSD. Herman identified disruptions to a survivor’s sense of safety, self-concept, and capacity for trust that can persist well into adulthood. Her framework helped the whole field understand that the impact isn’t about individual events. It’s about what chronic relational injury does to a developing psyche over time.

Then there’s the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, one of the largest investigations of childhood trauma and adult outcomes ever conducted, led by Vincent Felitti, MD, and Robert Anda, MD, with Kaiser Permanente and the CDC. Their 1998 findings showed dose-dependent relationships between adverse childhood experiences and a wide range of adult health and life outcomes. More adversity in childhood correlated with more difficulty in adulthood: higher rates of depression and anxiety, more strained relationships, more chronic illness. The study handed us something invaluable. Hard, population-level evidence that what happens to you as a child shapes the architecture of your adult life (PMID: 9635069).

Here’s what that science makes plain. Two people who graduate from the same university, who look like they’re starting the same professional race, may be carrying profoundly different neurological, physiological, and psychological loads. One may have spent childhood in a stable home, encouraged to explore, fail safely, and return to secure attachment. The other may have spent those same years in chronic vigilance, her developing brain wired for threat-detection rather than for curiosity and risk. On paper they look like peers. In reality, they are not running the same race.

In my work with women who grew up in difficult or unstable homes, I see it over and over: the wounds of childhood quietly shape the lens through which they measure themselves against the world.

How Does the Comparison Game Show Up in Driven Women?

The comparison game shows up differently in driven women than the popular imagination expects. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s not usually a spiral of obvious self-pity. It’s quieter. And more dangerous, because it can wear the costume of motivation.

What I see consistently is that the comparison instinct in trauma survivors often presents as relentless striving. If she just gets further ahead, she tells herself, the inner unease will finally resolve. If she just closes the gap between herself and the people she measures against, the feeling of being fundamentally behind will lift. So she pushes harder. She takes on more. She sets higher bars and clears them and sets higher ones still. And the sense of being behind somehow never goes away.

That’s because the comparison game, for trauma survivors, is rarely actually about the other person. It’s about a wound that predates any comparison. A core belief, usually formed in childhood, that she is not enough. That something is missing in her. That she is behind in a way that feels fundamental rather than circumstantial.

There’s a particular cruelty in this for driven women, and it lives inside the very adaptations that made them capable of building impressive lives. The ambition, the discipline, the capacity to push through: these didn’t arise in a vacuum. For many of the women I work with, they arose specifically as responses to early environments that were unsafe, unpredictable, or emotionally withholding. Achievement became the mechanism for earning love, or safety, or the sense of being worth something. The drive to perform was inseparable from the wound that powered it.

And then those very achievements become the measuring stick. Because she’s succeeded by external metrics, the scorekeeper won’t give her credit for what she overcame to get there. Instead she compares her current position to someone who started with more. More stability, more attunement, more consistent support, more access, more bandwidth that wasn’t consumed by managing an unpredictable home. She sees only the outside picture, where they both are now, and concludes she’s behind. She never accounts for the weight she’s been carrying.

Let me stay with Hana, since her story shows this so clearly. By the time I’d been working with her a while, she’d graduated near the top of her class, built a consulting practice clients waited months for, and was described by everyone who knew her as formidably competent. She came in because she couldn’t stop measuring herself against that former classmate. “He’s just always been ahead of me,” Hana said, turning the cold mug in her hands. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

When we began mapping Hana’s early history, what surfaced was a childhood shaped by a mother with unmanaged anxiety and a father who was often gone. Hana had learned very young to be the reliable one. To anticipate everyone’s needs, to manage her own feelings quietly, to achieve in the ways that made the family feel better about itself. She’d spent her developmental years doing emotional labor her classmate almost certainly never had to do. That labor cost her. In energy, in bandwidth, in the simple developmental experience of being a child free to explore and fail and be uncertain without consequence. Sitting across from her, what I noticed was how automatically she translated other people’s ease into her own deficiency. The comparison was never equal. It never could have been. Seeing it through the lens of the relational trauma guide helped Hana name what she’d actually been up against.

The comparison game is also sharpest for driven women because their workplaces tend to reward the exact defenses trauma built. Hypervigilance reads as attention to detail. Difficulty delegating reads as high standards. The compulsive need to achieve reads as ambition. The workaholism that guards against intimacy reads as dedication. These women get rewarded for their adaptations, which makes it harder to recognize those adaptations as adaptations, and harder still to begin the work of healing. Because healing asks them to slow down, tolerate uncertainty, allow imperfection. And to a nervous system organized around performance as safety, those things can feel genuinely dangerous.

Can You Be Impressive and Still Be Healing?

Here’s the frame I return to again and again, because it does something neither toxic positivity nor relentless self-criticism can do. It holds both truths at once.

You can be genuinely accomplished and still be carrying wounds that haven’t fully healed. You can be ahead of where you started and still behind where you might have been with a different start.

You can be proud of yourself and still be grieving the childhood you deserved and didn’t get. You can be doing well and still need more support than it looks like from the outside.

The comparison game runs on either/or logic. Either I’m succeeding or I’m failing. Either I have a right to feel proud or a right to feel hurt. Either I’ve overcome my history or I’m still held by it. That logic is a product of the same black-and-white thinking trauma often installs, the all-or-nothing response that develops when a child’s world is fundamentally unpredictable.

But human lives, especially the lives of people healing from complex histories, don’t fit in either/or boxes. They’re both/and. Learning to say yes, and rather than yes, but is one of the central tasks of trauma-informed therapy.

When Hana could finally say, “I’m genuinely good at my work and I’m still healing from a childhood that taught me my worth was conditional on performance,” something shifted. The compulsive comparison lost some of its grip, because she was no longer using other people’s LinkedIn feeds as a referendum on whether she was fundamentally okay. She could hold the complexity. And complexity, as any good therapist will tell you, is where healing actually lives.

I want to be honest about the alternatives, because the usual framings tend to feel incomplete. The first is toxic positivity: “Stop comparing yourself! Count your blessings! You’ve come so far!” That’s true, and it misses something. The second is pure grievance: “You were wronged, the world is unfair, your success was harder won.” Also true, and it can become its own trap. A story that explains the wound without ever pointing toward healing.

The both/and I find most useful is this. Your childhood trauma cost you things that are real and worth grieving. The weight you’ve carried has been real. The starting conditions were genuinely different, and pretending otherwise is a form of gaslighting yourself. Hold that. Let it be true. And, at the same time, the work of healing is yours to do. Not because it’s your fault, but because you’re the one who has to live your life, and the comparison game, however understandable, is keeping you from actually inhabiting it.

The Both/And frame doesn’t erase grief. It doesn’t minimize what you’ve had to carry. It just stops requiring you to pretend you haven’t had to carry it. And for women who grew up in homes where that pretense was survival, where the right move was always to minimize, to cope, to keep going, being given permission to stop pretending is itself a real form of healing.

Why Was the Playing Field Never Level?

When I say the playing field was never level, I mean it in more than one direction. There’s the individual family level, the specific ways your early environment made becoming an adult harder and more costly than it should have been. This is the proverbial foundation beneath the proverbial house of life, the ground layer everything else gets built on. And there’s a broader structural level worth naming too, because it shapes which families have the resources to provide safety and attunement, and which ones are surviving on less than they need.

We live in a culture deeply invested in the mythology of the level playing field. The meritocracy narrative, the idea that success reflects individual effort and talent and that anyone who tries hard enough reaches the same outcomes, is one of the most powerful and most damaging stories in our collective imagination. Powerful because it’s partly true: individual effort does matter. Damaging because it’s incomplete: individual effort matters a great deal less when the conditions for that effort are radically unequal.

Childhood trauma is not randomly distributed across the population. The ACE data is clear that adverse childhood experiences cluster among people who experience poverty, housing instability, community violence, racial discrimination, and other structural stressors. Poverty is a form of chronic stress that dysregulates the nervous system. Systemic racism produces environments of chronic threat that shape bodies across generations. Immigration, displacement, and cultural dislocation change what parents can offer their children. So does gender-based violence, and the ambient low-grade threat many women carry simply by moving through the world under patriarchy. These are not individual pathologies. They’re structural realities that produce nervous-system responses entirely appropriate to the actual conditions. When we compare ourselves to people who lived with less structural stress, we’re, without realizing it, comparing ourselves to people who started with fundamentally different nervous-system baselines. That’s not a deficit in us. It’s a difference in conditions.

I want to say something about privilege too, because it complicates this in important ways. Some of the women I work with grew up in material comfort and emotional poverty. They’ve internalized a message, from culture, from family, sometimes from therapists who didn’t know better, that they shouldn’t need healing because they had advantages. The question of whether it counts as trauma if you were privileged is one I hear often, and it’s a painful one. My clinical answer: material advantage does not preclude relational trauma. You can grow up with every material resource and still have a nervous system organized around chronic threat if the emotional environment was unsafe. These are different dimensions, and collapsing them does everyone a disservice.

Consider Meera, another composite I’ll describe the same way, a portrait stitched from many women rather than any single client. Meera grew up in a household that looked, from the outside, like a success story: good schools, a comfortable home, parents who worked hard and provided. What the outside couldn’t see was a father whose approval arrived only with achievement and a mother too depleted to offer much softness. Meera learned that love was a wage you earned. Decades later, comparing herself to a colleague who seemed lighter, freer, less driven, she felt only her own lack. When we set her actual starting conditions beside the ones she was measuring against, the comparison came apart in her hands. Not because her colleague’s life was easy, but because it was different, and she’d been grading herself against a race that wasn’t hers.

The comparison game ignores all of this. It flattens complex, multidimensional differences in starting conditions into a single metric, where you are now, and draws conclusions from an incomplete picture. It’s not just psychologically inaccurate for trauma survivors. It’s structurally inaccurate. The peer who seems to have it together may have had advantages in parental health, economic stability, community, and cultural belonging that are simply invisible in a LinkedIn photo.

I’m not saying this to feed bitterness or to suggest that others’ achievements aren’t genuinely theirs. I’m saying it because the playing-field narrative, the one that whispers you could be there too if you were just better, is a lie. And it’s a lie trauma survivors are especially vulnerable to believing, because the shame that so often rides along with childhood trauma already has you half-convinced the problem is you.

It’s not you. It was never you. It was the conditions.

What Does a Fairer Comparison Look Like?

None of this means you have to stop caring about growth. You don’t have to stop being ambitious, or driven, or hungry for more. Those qualities, however they developed, are yours, and they’ve probably taken you places that deserve acknowledgment.

But there’s a more honest, more compassionate, and ultimately more useful comparison available. It’s the one almost never made in the midnight LinkedIn spiral: the comparison between who you are now and who you were before.

Where were you five years ago in your understanding of your own patterns? Your capacity for emotional regulation? Your ability to name what you need in a relationship? Your willingness to set a boundary, ask for help, or choose yourself when you’d previously defaulted to everyone else? If you’ve been doing any kind of healing work, in therapy, through books, through community, through sheer hard-won self-awareness, then that comparison is almost certainly kinder than the one you make while scrolling at midnight. And it’s the one that actually measures something real about your life.

This doesn’t mean bypassing the grief. Part of what makes the comparison game so painful for trauma survivors is that it’s often grief in disguise. Grief for the childhood that didn’t happen, for the developmental time that was lost, for starting conditions harder than they should have been. That grief is legitimate. It deserves space, not dismissal.

In session I often invite women to do something deceptively simple: write a list of what they’ve had to overcome that their comparison target hasn’t. Not as an exercise in resentment, but in accuracy. When Hana finally did this, she went quiet for a long moment, turning her pen over in her hand, and said, “I guess I never actually put it all in one place like that.” The comparing-to-others had made her invisible to herself. If you’re going to compare, and the pull to compare is deeply human and largely unavoidable, you might as well do it on a complete balance sheet rather than half of one. The work of going through hard times deserves that kind of witnessing, first from yourself.

The other piece of the path forward is getting support that’s actually calibrated to where you started from. Not generic productivity advice. Not a morning routine designed for someone whose nervous system came online in a fundamentally different context than yours did. Something that accounts for how your nervous system was shaped and meets you there. Something that treats the harder race you’ve run as information rather than excuse.

Practically, this work benefits enormously from a consistent witness. A good therapist, a trusted group, sometimes a steady journal practice. Any relational container where your actual story can be told and held in its full complexity, without collapsing it into a comparison or minimizing what it cost. The witness doesn’t remove the hardship. But hardship, once witnessed, has less power to define you. You begin to see yourself as the protagonist of your own story rather than a character perpetually measured against someone else’s. And from there, the question “why am I not where they are?” starts to give way to a more interesting one: what do I actually want, given who I actually am and where I actually started? That’s the question that moves a life forward.

That’s what trauma-informed therapy can offer, and it’s what the Fixing the Foundations^™ course was built to provide. It’s what I hope this post has offered, even in a small way. Not a pep talk, but a reframe. Not toxic positivity, but honest acknowledgment.

You were never behind. The playing field just wasn’t level. And really knowing that changes everything about what healing looks like, and what you owe yourself as you do it.

If anything here resonated, explore the free quiz to learn more about the specific childhood wound that may be shaping your patterns, or reach out through the connect page to start a conversation about what support might look like. You don’t have to figure this out alone. And you don’t have to keep running a race that was never designed for you.

The last time Hana and I spoke about the classmate, the LinkedIn post had lost its charge. She still had the mug her daughter painted on her desk, and she told me she’d caught herself, the night before, starting to open the app at 11 p.m. and then simply not doing it. Not out of willpower. Out of something quieter. “It just stopped feeling like a scoreboard,” she said. She’s not finished. She still compares, some nights. But the tea doesn’t go cold in her hands quite the way it used to.

You are not behind. You are in the middle of something. And that’s a very different thing.

Warmly, Annie

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz AM, Edwards V, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. Am J Prev Med. 1998;14(4):245-258. PMID: 9635069.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. PMID: 19795402.
3. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. PMID: 38198456.
4. Trauma-related shame as a mediator between childhood maltreatment and non-suicidal self-injury. 2023. PMID: 37312168.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.
• Perry, Bruce D., and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.

AI use: Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed, edited, and approved by Annie. See our Editorial Policy for details.

This content is psychoeducational in nature and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

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