it sounds like an attempt to take what happened to Dean and that was actually a coherent emotional arc that Jensen played and just say "Sam had it worse."

It's such childish, lazy one-upsmanship, and I lay that at Sera Gamble's feet. She keeps wanting to bring Sam to the forefront by making him look stronger than Dean or making him look more deserving of sympathy but it's not working. A while back I did a scene-by-scene breakdown of her "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and on closer analysis Sam comes off even worse than he did on first viewing...but then at the end of that ep, she basically had Dean apologizing to Sam and sympathizing with the "agony" he'd endured while Dean was dead...and none of it made a lick of sense.