Let me give an example of my brother pretending not to understand. Before I went no contact with him and blocked him on Facebook, my husband came down with pneumonia right around the same time I had a pretty nasty cold. On Facebook, I used this real-life situation as an analogy. My cold still needed treatment, even though it wasn't as serious as my husband's pneumonia. We were both sick, and both needed to take care of ourselves (and each other). Ignoring my own symptoms and insisting I'm not sick, just because he is sicker, wouldn't have done him any good. Likewise, we shouldn't compare trauma. We need not pretend we haven't suffered, just because we know about somebody who went through something worse.

My exact post:

"Telling people they shouldn't feel traumatized because something worse happened to somebody else is like telling them they shouldn't take medicine for that cold, because somebody else has pneumonia." ----Me

Several friends responded and indicated they got exactly what I meant, but my brother instead tried to steer the conversation in another direction. He wanted to talk about people who only THINK they have pneumonia, until they meet somebody with REAL pneumonia..... Yeah. By the same analogy, he was saying our childhood wasn't abusive because other people had it worse. He just wanted me not to talk about the abuse. That's why he pretended not to get my point.