29/09/2026
Jane Ibude, MS|Mental Health Nutrition & Advocacy Thank you dear for the tag.
Yes, ACEs- Adverse Childhood Experiences and Childhood Trauma, unprocessed grief and bereavement can.
The way people desire good things or envy those who have good things, that’s same way some people envy those who experience adversity and wish they can have that too.
Yes, it’s weird and that’s why it calls for concern that a person has such a strong desire.
📌 They may have learned to associate pain with creative productivity. For instance, of this person has repeatedly produced their best writing during periods of heartbreak, loneliness, grief, rejection, depression, or emotional turm0il, the brain can begin forming an association:
Pain- emotional intensity- insight- words - beautiful writing- satisfaction.
Eventually the person may begin to want the condition that precedes the creative reward.
So they romanticise their own emotional suffering as a creative resource.
📌 They may not actually envy the grief- they any envy the creative access they think grief provides.
📌 There maybe an element of benign envy.
Envy isn’t automatically malicious.
Contemporary research distinguishes forms of envy and one influential model describes envy as containing a painful comparison component that can lead either toward benign envy- wanting something another person has and feeling motivated to obtain it- or malicious envy.
In this case, the object of envy isn’t necessarily “I wish my friend were suffering instead of me.”
Rather it could be “I wish I had whatever emotional depth my friend’s experience seems to have given them.”
📌 Identity Crisis: There maybe an identity issue: “I am a writer when I am hurting.”
Some writers gradually develop an identity in which suffering becomes part of their creative identity.
📌 It could point to frequent, intense exposure to adversity over a long period, conditioning or obsession.
Sometimes people who strongly desire other people’s experiences of grief are actually carrying their own unprocessed grief.
Whatever the exact root cause of this is, they would need to be in therapy to process this and discover the root cause, get professional intervention and healing pathways.
