Believe It Or Not: Feeling Sorry for Your Self is a Good Thing

“I don’t want to feel sorry for myself.” I so often hear clients tell me, when they are sad, discouraged or hurt. If they have sorrow for themselves, they will often next feel guilt or shame. Sometimes they will go on to have absolute contempt for themselves and call their sorrow for themselves having a “pity-party.”

When I ask them how they would feel if the same thing happened to a friend or a child who was hurt, sad, discouraged or distressed, there are two general responses.  Some people would feel compassion for the friend or child, but would feel guilty for feeling compassion for themselves. Anything ’selfish’ is bad for themselves. They apply kinder rules to others.

Other people would condemn the friend or child for feeling sorry. They judge the friend as selfish and negative. They also believe that acknowledging feelings “doesn’t do any good.” These people apply the same harsh rule to others that they apply to themselves.

So many limiting beliefs are embedded in the desire not to feel sorrow for oneself. Some of the beliefs may be:
1. It is “weak” to accept or have kind feelings towards a person not in a “powerful” state or feeling. “Vulnerability” is bad.
2. If one doesn’t condemn the vulnerable feelings, they will grow and grow. (The “Spare the rod, spoil the child” mentality.)
3. One may get “stuck” in the shameful feelings.
4. One will not be able to feel powerful again.
5. One is being “negative” and therefore “bad.”

But the irony is that anytime we condemn ourselves for how we are feeling, that is when we are weakening ourselves. The way to ’strength’ is to validate ourselves for how we are feeling. The root of the word ‘validate’ means to strengthen. To in-validate is to weaken.

To validate ourselves, we need to let ourselves know that it makes sense to feel however we feel. We need to let ourselves know that we can understand ourselves. This may take as little as a few seconds.

THEN, and only then, can we work at shifting and improving our state of mind.

There are so many ways we can work at regulating and adjusting our feelings. But shaming ourselves for how we feel only makes it take longer. So I say, have compassion for yourself. By all means work towards joy and zest.

I believe that in the words of the song, “There’s A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” So when you are feeling sad, first feel sorry for yourself.

Using Voice Recognition Software: Challenging Panic Inducing Voices

Peace At Last

A client I will call “Joanne” * described how recognizing her inner voices has helped rid herself of panic attacks. Perhaps her recognition will inspire others to separate themselves from the shaming and suppressing voices that we all experience from time to time.

“When something GOOD happened, I used to get panicky. I used to think- or again- hear the voice that would say, ‘Something bad is going to happen now!’ Then I would freak out.

“Once I recognized that voice and could see it was not really ME, I could ask it, ‘What makes you say that?’ Or ‘What do you think is going to happen? Death, famine? What?’ The voice was then stumped and I could see that it didn’t really know about something awful about to happen. it was not an omniscient being.  It didn’t even make any sense. What a relief. I feel so grateful.”

So my hope is that we all continue to upgrade our voice recognition software.

* Therapists change the name and other identifying information so that a client’s confidentiality can be maintained

Help For Stress In Times of Threatened Financial Security: Or When Life Sucks, Suck Back Your Life

Suck Back Your Power

We all need to feel as if we can predict and control our lives. So when something unpredictable or uncontrollable occurs, such as the threat of joblessness or stock market loses, we can feel powerless. Then the mere state of feeling powerless can trigger all the so-called “negative” affects (shame, distress, fear, anger, disgust, dissmell). And we can freak out.

Our society, and in fact all societies, mandate that we suppress, or at the very least, don’t show many of those “negative” emotional states. But what happens to the emotional energy when we suppress our emotions? The suppression causes a kind of emotional and physiological back-up. That back-up we call “stress.”

What can we do?

The first step is to acknowledge your real feelings. Don’t hide in the generality of “I’m stressed out.” One way to recognize the state of experienced powerlessness is when you are feeling intense rage. You can say to yourself, or another person, “I feel so helpless and I’m furious at feeling that way!”

The next step is to observe the situation and determine in what ways you can take your power back. We do have power over how we react to any of life’s scary events and states.

One way to regain power is to realize the things over which we do not have power. You can’t make someone hire you. You cannot make someone love you. You cannot make the Dow Jones Industrial Average go up. Focusing on the areas in which you do have power is restorative.

To take back your power involves  setting realistic expectations. If you are looking for a job, know that it most likely will not happen overnight. It may take months. Don’t demand something impossible of yourself.

Another way to regain your inner power is to make sure you separate yourself and disengage from any belief  (if you have it) that these life events mean that YOU are inadequate. Even if someone else is so threatened that they are blaming you, you can over time,  learn that YOU are not your job or your earning capacity. You can learn not to take inside and believe the evaluations, criticisms and rejections from others.

I don’t dismiss the pain, even anguish, that you may go through on the way to developing the skill of detaching your self- worth from external circumstances. But developing that ability may be an enourmous gift that later you will say was well worth the initial “stress.”