Grief is never wrong, only our relationships to grief. This is true of all emotions.
"your loss is terrible and only you can understand fully how deep the pain is; savour it and integrate it in your person- it will take years to recover and will eventually become a part of you"
or would you rather say
"hey, I understand, but it's not such a big deal after all- happened to me as well, you won't care in a year".
The first seems to me the way to encourage everlasting trauma. And it seems the common approach today, as a way to show respect for other people's suffering.
“That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.”
Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly.
When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.
There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune.
If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).
This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.
In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.
While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).
Acknowledging someone's emotion gives them permission to feel it, and eventually let it go. Dismissing someone's emotion is denying them the permission to feel it, and let it go. Feelings we don't allow to be felt are never released.
This is true of PTSD at one bound, and the anxiety someone can feel day-to-day, over what seems like absolutely nothing to the casual observer, at the other.
I think the keyword here is "common". Negative experiences become especially bad when they're perceived as unique, extraordinary. Framing them as normal facts of life helps dealing with them (think of support groups: they reframe personal experiences that might feel uniquely terrible into normal experiences inside the group).
Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible. A support group doesn't make a condition more or less common. A support group makes you less alone, which is another way of saying you feel your emotions are validated and youre relationship to your emotion changes in that group. Some people need a support group to change their relationship to an emotion.
> Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible.
There is a saying in Italy: "a shared misfortune is half a joy".
There's a recognized therapeutic value in literature. Reading novels doesn't validate your emotions- reading is unidirectional, there is nobody telling you "I understand you" from the pages of a novel. But you get in contact with characters who suffer, confront problems, overcome them or succumb to them. You can see their inner life, and recognize a commonality of human experience.
Conversely, social media are notorious for making people depressed: it can be as unidirectional as reading, but since people tend to show only the positive aspects of their life, it can make you feel your own life is especially bad.