I’m talking about the way we respond to someone who is dealing with pretty much anything.

If person A expresses that they are seriously, deeply, clinically depressed and person B says “we all get the blues”, that’s a dismissal of what person A has expressed, reducing their own direct, lived experience to common generalities rather than meeting them where they are.

Plug any personal issue into that equation and the effect is similar.

“You’re dealing with _______? Yeah we all deal with that to some degree.”

It reduces their situation to a pissing contest where we’re all the same, as though even similar basic circumstances can’t lead to wildly different challenges, outcomes, experiences.