Ejecting Self-Pity
Today marks the second half of 2024 and the third quarter of the year. More than that, it is the first of the month starting on a Monday. How perfect is that? (I wrote this before 12 AM.) Like most delusional folk, this gives me a great chance to reset my life the way I have been the past few weeks. My room, task management system, work schedule, gym schedule, therapy schedule, and personal CRM are essentially reset and rebooted. Something I horribly need to reset and strengthen is my mindset. I’d be lying if I said I was mentally strong. I can debilitate like a makahiya or a shame plant under pressure, and the last half year showed me it’s about damn time I address that. And yes, there are coaching and therapy, but there are also... workbooks. I’ve recently been trying out Amy Morin’s 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do one, and I gotta say it’s been much more helpful than I thought it would be. As I go through each chapter, I’d like to percolate the lessons it gives me. Today’s chapter: mentally strong people don’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves.
Right off the bat, I knew I was the type of person who participated in self-pity. I don’t think I deliberately do it, and I’d like to say I try not to overdo it (i.e., at one point, I do start actioning things), but I certainly ruminate on miserable circumstances and probably unintentionally use this to stay stuck on them. If I’m being honest with myself, self-pity has been a dear friend of mine for a while, and I’m trying to let go of them now, as it’s gotten me nowhere.
In this post, I’ll summarize this chapter with some personal reflections and add some action points for you, dear reader, to try. (I’d like to caveat that the advice is from Morin and that I endorse this workbook a lot!)
Lesson one:
Self-pity is voluntary.
We choose to pity ourselves. Perhaps, apart from being a coping mechanism, self-pity is a way we can avoid taking responsibility for our actions or circumstances or avoid our fear of failure. For instance, if we believe we are already at a disadvantage or have been wronged by circumstances, then it might seem less daunting not to try at all. Given this, we may continuously justify self-pity until we actually choose to address it. It’s like taking a difficult exam and spending the whole exam mourning and stressed, focusing on several unfair things (e.g., I’m not a natural-born genius, I didn’t study like my friends, the aircon is just too cold) versus just doing what we can to find the agency in us to solve what we could in the exam.
Here are some ways I’ve kept feeling sorry for myself in the past:
I’ve been dealing with repetitive strain injury (RSI) for a long time – sometimes, I mull over the pain and cry when I have to work long hours.
I have a disorganized attachment style – so I use this to reason out why it’s difficult for me to let go when people treat me badly and unfairly.
When a situation is out of my control, I start explaining to myself and others why it sucks that it’s out of my control and why it could be in my control instead of actually concretizing what is in my control.
Some thoughts I’ve had during these times revolved around feeling I was dealt with worse cards than people thought, that I was experiencing a unique situation that couldn’t be solved, or that I was misunderstood and no one really cared to understand. This led me to nothing but unproductivity: inaction, spite, misanthropy, and projection. Realizing this the past couple of months really hit me like a large tote bag with bricks. I was making a choice to stay stuck in misery.
Self-pity often feels like an automatic response to difficult circumstances, but it's important to recognize that it is, in fact, a choice. When we face challenges, we have the power to choose how we respond. When we decide to respond with self-pity, we essentially opt only to see ourselves as victims of our circumstances, believing our situation is uniquely insurmountable or that others do not understand or care about our struggles. This mindset leads to feelings of inaction, resentment, and isolation, as it directs our focus inward in a negative way.
If we can choose to pity ourselves, then we can also choose not to, i.e., reject it. (Even that thought already gives some level of fulfillment and empowerment!)
Sadness ≠ self-pity
Importantly, we must know that we can’t control our circumstances, and it’s normal and human to feel sad about them. Sadness does not have to be viewed as voluntary – it may be a helpful way to point out areas in our lives we truly value/valued because it shows us where we truly feel some kind of loss. Morin says that sadness can be a feeling that helps us honor something important that we may have lost or currently miss. Sadness might manifest in thoughts like, “I’m sad I got laid off from this cool org,” whereas self-pity would manifest in, “Ugh, now I’m never going to move forward and have proof of why I suck in the first place.” The difference between these thoughts is how helpful and healthy they may be – we can feel healthy sadness and tend to those feelings or stay stuck on self-pity. So, how do we start ejecting self-pity?
Find out your “feel-sorry-for-yourself” triggers and warning signs
Morin notes that everyone has different triggers leading to self-pity – it may be experiencing rejection, or dislike over a situation. We can also have warning signs (i.e., actions we may do) that signify we are probably actually self-pitying without being aware of it. My triggers can be encountering unexpected obstacles, getting my feelings hurt, being rejected or not being considered, or when I’m strongly nudged to do something I don’t actually want to do (and might be forcing myself to do it anyway). My warning signs (that might be similar to a lot of others’) include binge-watching Netflix, doom-scrolling, self-isolating to the extreme, or just plain insisting to myself or others that I’m just misunderstood. I certainly felt that the past weeks, and it took this workbook to really notice it (lol). I was saying to myself that my friends and family didn’t get what I was feeling or what I was going through at all, so I didn’t have to take any of their advice. At one point, though, I realized nothing I was doing was working. So, I tried to apply their advice like it was a religion I was trying to apply to my life but didn’t quite believe in yet. When I decided to start applying their advice, even while feeling this way, I actually started… Feeling better and really doing better. (Thanks, family and friends!)
Practice self-pity mental strength exercises
These are exercises Morin wrote in her book that have been helping me immensely:
Turn “BLUE” thoughts into true thoughts
When we spiral into self-pity, we can start noting what thoughts in our head are, in fact, untrue in order to respond to them with realistic statements that give us more agency over the situation. Untrue thoughts are narratives/framings we place on situations that only fuel self-pity. Gaining the ability to reframe these might be difficult when our nervous systems have been put into overdrive from a lot of unfortunate circumstances (e.g., fluctuating upbringing, being lied to/betrayed multiple times). However, I’ve been learning that sometimes disciplining ourselves to do this anyway might be the only way really to prevent ourselves from entering a self-pity trap.
Morin categorizes these untrue thoughts as “BLUE” thoughts:
Blaming everyone: not accepting accountability for your share of faults (it’s okay to place responsibility on others, and not to gaslight yourself about what happened; it’s important for growth as an individual to take into account what you might have done wrong)
Looking for bad news: focusing on just the negatives
Unhappy guessing: already forecasting negative probabilities
Exaggerating: making anything into a worst-case scenario and just making yourself feel worse
I thought sharing a table directly from her workbook on how to turn BLUE thoughts into true thoughts would be helpful:
Personally, a recent BLUE thought I’ve had was that everyone in a certain community hated me and was villainizing me. A true thought I’ve responded to with that is that I can have self-belief in my being a good person and that I can talk and reconnect with my friends in that community to gain a better perspective of that situation. I’ve since felt more accepted and at peace.
By turning blue into true, the hope is that with practice, we can naturally start thinking in true thoughts or simply know how to respond to BLUE thoughts with these true thought reframings.
Turn resistance thoughts into radical acceptance
Once you stop being in denial over unfortunate circumstances, you can start cultivating a willingness to take action. In the workbook, Morin writes about how different patients who needed to attend regular dialysis appointments treated their appointments and how this affected how they went about their appointments and their health outcomes, too. Those who expressed willingness to accept their illness and undergo the treatment were ready to attend these appointments and bring different materials that could make those appointments happier (e.g., books and movies). They treated what they knew to be good for them like a job, showed up for themselves, and faced less life-threatening complications.
Accepting your situation, learning about what’s good for you, and showing up for yourself with what’s good for you is practicing radical acceptance. The alternative is to resist reality and, therefore, never take action. Morin says that self-pity can barely co-exist with radical acceptance and vice-versa –– to really take action (which I’ve read somewhere is an antidote to anxiety), we must practice radical acceptance of the situation. This does not mean just letting things be. It’s accepting how things are in order to do something about it. Once, for example, we accept that we are stuck in traffic, we don’t need to just wallow in self-pity – we can call ahead, letting someone know we’re late and apologize, we can find a way to take a meeting in the car, we can reschedule the meeting, we can make sure we leave an hour and a half earlier instead (this is for those who get stuck in Manila traffic), or even figure out how we will change the traffic scheme of the Philippines forever…
Morin writes: “It’s an exercise in accepting things for what they are right now, fair or not… radical acceptance removes judgments and sticks to the facts. It prevents us from resisting the truth.”
I’d liken this advice to an infamous metaphor by Harvey Specter (one that Mike Ross just loved to repeat across the seasons):
“What are your choices when someone holds a gun to your head? You do what they say, or they shoot you, right? Wrong! You take the gun or pull out a bigger gun, or you call a bluff, or you do any of the other 146 other things.”
(Yes! I’ve been looking for a way to reference Suits and the handsome Gabriel Macht in this post)
Incorporate more gratitude in your life (and you can do so concretely!)
“Self-pity is about thinking, ‘I deserve better.’ Gratitude is about thinking, ‘I have more than I deserve.’”
Man, that hit. Morin writes that gratitude increases happiness, improves physical and mental health, and improves the quality of sleep; grateful people even tend to live longer. (I looked this up a bit; here’s a study on well-being and gratitude.) These are some creative ways she recommended incorporating gratitude in your life:
I particularly found creating a gratitude bulletin board really cool, as it can help us visualize our gratitude and lighten our room up.
I’ve been doing the five-minute journal more consistently and find that it helps me find the high-expected-value bits of happiness throughout my day. Other productivity gurus recommend doing morning pages, etc. In general, it might be helpful to develop a gratitude ritual that works for us and our routines.
Morin points out that maybe, if we find getting into gratitude might feel like a chore, or if it starts to get a little stale, then we can go about it in a different way. For instance, instead of simply thinking about what we’re grateful for, we can start feeling for what we’re grateful for. For example, instead of trying to think about how thankful we are for a person or an opportunity, we can think about how we feel about them. For instance, instead of just thinking, “I’m grateful for… my dad.” I can think about how sweet and kind it was for him to have gone through the airport, spotted a luggage store, and thought he wanted to get me a carry-on. How he lugged that throughout a foreign airport, a plane, and back to the house. How did that make me feel? Warm and fuzzy.
Do something that makes self-pity nearly impossible
Morin writes, “What can you do when you catch yourself feeling sorry for yourself?” There probably are some activities that are easy to do when we feel sorry for ourselves – for me, it might be what my family calls “going into my hole,” AKA – I don’t leave my room for more than – ten minutes a day? (Hehe.) Given this, there may actually be activities that can make it really difficult for self-pity to develop in us. I think about it like trying to think of self-pity as a bacteria, and when we know it’s there and replicating it, then we must try placing it in an environment where it cannot thrive. This might mean enacting our anti-self-pity disciplinary mechanism and forcing ourselves to do things that make it really difficult for self-pity to replicate. Some examples Morin gave:
Doing something kind for someone else
Visiting a friend or a family member (this is what I did when I did the workbook; it worked)
Doing something on your to-do list
Volunteering to help others
Exercise
Read a book
_________? (For me, it’s journaling!)
Note that it’s important to tailor activities that work for you.
Prevent self-pity
Morin proposes a simple formula to prevent self-pity, and it would require a level of self-awareness:
Note a time in the future you might be tempted to feel sorry for yourself
Plan something to do to prevent self-pity
If for example, winter might cause us to feel gloomier, or even the weekend, then we can already mitigate that by doing an activity that wards it off (cf above).
So, now we know we can respond to self-pity, reframe self-pity, ward off self-pity, and prevent self-pity. If we want to take it up a notch, we can create a plan to eject self-pity altogether (or as much as we can—we must be compassionate with ourselves; we’re only human!).
So, I leave this post asking you what Morin asked me:
What can you do to allow yourself to feel bad without slipping into self-pity?
What’s a concrete step you can take today? What’s a sign you’re spending less time self-pitying? What do you think your life will look like?
