Maybe it's the way you tell them. With engineers, a little explicitness goes a long way, and will generally be accepted - unless you're being patronising and telling them something they already know. So try saying "I'm not saying this to gain any sympathy or anything like that, but I had a similar experience, which was... and what it taught me / how it made me stronger was..." I mean that's kind of a stilted template, but you get the general idea.

Now, this might lead to a bunfight about whether those situations were similar, in your colleagues' opinions - but then at least you'd have brought out into the open where your colleagues weren't thinking along the same lines as you - which might not always be what you expected!