Episode #7: When You Feel Sorry For Yourself

Do you sometimes feel sorry for yourself when life doesn't go the way you planned, or when you face challenges, difficulties, or disappointments? If you do, it's totally fine. You can choose to feel sorry for yourself anytime you want to. But, if you don't really like the feeling of self-pity, you can actually choose connection, gratitude, and hope instead--even when you are going through hard things. Tune into this week's episode and I'll show you how. 

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 7, when you feel sorry for yourself.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, how's it going? I'm so happy to be talking to you today. I love thought work.

I love helping people examine their thoughts and then purposely choose new ones that they want to think. Today, we're going to explore the feeling of self-pity. Remember, we have millions of thoughts we can choose to think any day, any time, and when we think a thought, it creates a feeling.

Our feelings drive our actions or inactions, which produce results in our lives. Minute by minute, hour by hour, we are creating our life experience by the thoughts that we choose to think. Let's take a look today at the thoughts we choose that create the feeling of being sorry for ourselves and see if those are ones you want to think or not.

Let's start just with some awareness. When do you tend to feel sorry for yourself? What are the situations that bring that feeling up for you? For most people, it's usually when life doesn't go the way they planned or envisioned. When there are obstacles, challenges, difficulties, disappointments, a lot of times we feel sorry for ourselves when we imagine in our minds that what we're dealing with is harder and more challenging than what other people are dealing with.

For me, I notice sometimes I choose to feel sorry for myself when I am doing things that have to do with being type one diabetic. Recently, I was up in the night from 12.45 AM to 5.15, dealing with two failed continuous glucose monitor sensors. I'm on the phone with customer service.

I'm poking in the sensors. I'm doing finger pricks to try to calibrate. And I'm thinking like, my life is so hard.

Other people don't have to deal with this, right? Poor me. I'm the only person in the universe talking with diabetes technology customer support at 3 AM instead of sleeping. Sometimes we feel sorry for ourselves when we're sick.

I remember when my kids were really little and I would get sick. And sometimes I would think things like, this is unfair. Other people can call into work when they're sick and be excused from their responsibilities.

But I still have to take care of these kids, even though I feel terrible, you know, poor me. Maybe you feel sorry for yourself when it rains on your vacation, or when you don't succeed at something you tried to do, or when your kids get into trouble or come home late, or your spouse doesn't help clean or do chores the way you want them to. The list goes on and on.

You look in the mirror, feel sorry for yourself because you aren't prettier. You look in your bank account and feel sorry for yourself that you don't have more money. You look at someone else's house or car or kids or spouse and feel sorry for yourself that you don't have what they have.

Right. It's kind of interesting, isn't it? So what is it for you? Now let's explore why, why do we sometimes reach for self-pity? I like to imagine that I'm the boss inside of my brain, that I can hire thoughts to do certain jobs for me. It's like, if I really want to complete a project, I might hire a thought like I'm not going to give up.

And that will create a feeling of being determined. And that thought and that feeling will fuel me to keep trying until I get my project done. So that thought I'm not going to give up would be useful to me.

In that case, I might hire it to help me do that job. Or if I'm mad at someone for something they did, I can hire a thought like they don't deserve my forgiveness to create a feeling of justified. And then I would have an excuse to carry around for why I'm off the hook for being expected to love that person.

If my objective is to hold a grudge for the rest of my life, I could hire that thought. They don't deserve my forgiveness to help me hold that grudge. And on the other hand, if my ultimate goal is to be a follower of Christ and practice forgiveness, then this thought they don't deserve my forgiveness wouldn't help me achieve that objective.

So your thoughts are kind of like employees in your brain. They create feelings which produce actions or inactions. And so you can hire thoughts to do a certain job.

So let's look at When you are feeling sorry for yourself, what job did you hire it to do? You know what I mean? Usually we hire self-pity because we feel bad and we want to feel better. We want to feel less bad. So if I'm facing a challenge, feeling a little overwhelmed, disappointed, maybe tired, discouraged, like think about how funny this is.

I know let's add self-pity that will help us feel better. Like if you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous because adding self-pity on top layers on helplessness and powerlessness and a feeling of inferiority that other people have better luck and easier lives. So when I'm facing challenges, feeling sorry for myself actually doesn't help me feel better.

It helps me feel worse. So here's the truth. You can feel sorry for yourself.

Anytime you want, you have full permission, but I want to invite you to consider. If you are feeling sorry for yourself, what job did I hire this self-pity to do? If you hired it to help you feel better, just look at it for a minute. How well is it doing that job, right? Give it a little performance evaluation.

And if you're like me and you conclude that self-pity actually makes you feel worse and not better when you're up against hard things, then maybe it's time to have a little meeting with self-pity and say, Hey, I hired you to help me feel better, but it turns out I actually feel worse when you come around. So I think I'm going to start limiting your hours and I'm going to find some thoughts and feelings that will do a better job of helping me feel better when I face challenges. So when you are going through something challenging, you have a buffet of options of what you can choose to think.

And of course, those thoughts are going to create feelings, right? So if you want to feel lonely, you can think, I'm the only one who has to deal with this problem. No one understands what I'm going through. If you want to feel deprived, you can think, poor me, my life is so hard.

It's not supposed to be this hard. If you want to feel inferior and jealous, you can think other people are smarter, prettier, luckier, and more successful than I am. It's just not fair.

There's lots of other options. Those are just a few, but I will tell you personally, I don't actually want to feel lonely or deprived or inferior when I'm already facing something that is challenging. So here's what you can do.

If your brain offers you those thoughts, when the going gets tough, you can do a little bit of self coaching and start poking holes in the thoughts that create self pity. So here's what I have found. They're usually distorted or untrue in some way.

They seem true, but if you actually take a closer look, you can kind of see that that argument doesn't hold water. Right? So let's go back to that up in the middle of the night, troubleshooting my diabetes glucose sensors situation. My brain in the middle of the night offered me lots of thoughts.

And one of them was, Oh, I'm the only one who has to deal with this. And it felt really true to me at 3.00 AM. Right? But then I was like, wait, hang on.

Let's just poke holes in this a little bit. Is that actually true? Like no one else in my immediate family has type one diabetes or an insulin pump. So it's true if I'm talking about just the people in this house, but like, let's zoom out a little bit.

My neighbor down the street has an adult daughter who's type one. So if we go just a few houses down, it's already not really true. If we zoom out a little further, like I know dozens of people who have diabetes and wear insulin pumps and glucose sensors.

So that's not really true. And actually there are over 8 million people in the world who have type one diabetes. So I'm definitely not the only one who has to deal with it.

And then it can be kind of funny, like, Oh, that's funny brain that you want to give me that thought, but it's not actually true. And once I started doing that, I was like, well, I feel less lonely already. Right.

And actually grateful that I'm not the only one. The truth is there are enough people who have insulin pumps and glucose sensors that they have a 24 hour helpline because I'm definitely not the only one who sometimes needs help in the middle of the night. The fact that I'm on hold with somebody in the middle of the night means I can't be the only one.

So then I was like, wow, that's cool. That Dexcom pays people to be available, to help people round the clock, any time of day. So the further I could zoom out, the more I could see what's actually true.

And I found thoughts that felt a lot better. My brain also offered me the thought, my life is so hard, like poor me. But as I started to really think about that, I started to poke holes in it.

Right. Like, is that true? Poor me. Like I'm deprived of the good, happy, easy life that I was meant to have because I have a chronic health condition.

Like, is that true? I was thinking like, do bodybuilders go to the gym and say, oh, I have to lift such heavy weights. Poor me. Or do they go? Yeah, let's go up and wait today.

I want to get stronger. So if your brain is offering you this thought, my life is so hard. Poor me.

Like, let's look at what's true and what's not true. Like, yes, this is hard or challenging is a word I like better for a lot of reasons. So that part's true.

Like this is requiring high levels of emotional, mental, and physical energy, right? Whatever your situation is. Or in my case that night, it was like, in order to stay awake and to stay patient and to navigate the situation and to keep trying like that was requiring high levels of energy, but poor me, like, why, why do I decide that that's a terrible thing? Cause like, yeah, in this moment, I'd really like to be sleeping. But if I zoom out a little bit, the overall purpose of my life is to get spiritually stronger, to develop attributes of humility and courage and patience and compassion.

And if I was just doing one pound little bicep curls all day long, I wouldn't develop those qualities. So poor me, like, is it really true? I look back on 20 plus years of having diabetes and it can really be a pain to have high blood sugar and low blood sugar at all the wrong times and have your insertion site get clogged with blood or the cannula gets kinked and the pump doesn't deliver insulin or your sensor loses signal or your battery won't charge or the app won't connect or you're on hold with insurance or the pharmacy or the pump company or the sensor company or whoever to try to figure things out. But my husband's business partner shared a phrase that he loves for when you are pushed to the limit of your abilities and capacity as a leader, as a parent, as a person, when you're asked to do more than you can actually yet do, if you face it and you show up with humility and persistence, here's what happens.

Here's the phrase, your balloon expands. Don't you love that? Like you feel your capacity to handle challenging situations grow as you deal with things that are hard. I love that idea that your balloon expands.

And so what I was thinking about in the middle of the night, I was like, you know what? Diabetes has expanded my balloon so many times and I feel it expanding right now. So poor me, like no, rich me. I am rich in opportunities to expand my capacity to do hard things.

Like we don't need to feel sorry for me because I'm growing. I'm learning. My balloon's expanding.

So how about you? What are the challenging experiences that ultimately help your balloon expand? And how do you want to feel as you face those hard things? If you notice that you start to feel sorry for yourself, I want to encourage you to gently challenge some of the thoughts that you're believing. Can we think of the CTFAR model when we put self-pity on the feeling line, that emotion tends to lead us on the action line to withdraw from others, to imagine that everyone else in the world is at a party with no problems or challenges that we didn't get invited to. And when we feel sorry for ourselves, we usually don't reach out to connect or share with others because we believe that no one will understand.

Whereas if we can zoom out a little bit and believe that there are other people who have faced what we are dealing with, believe that God is always with us and wants to help, it feels so much better than being sorry for ourselves. We can take a difficult situation and layer feelings of self-pity on top, which usually comes with anger and bitterness and self-doubt. Or we can take a difficult situation and layer onto it a firm belief that we are never actually alone, that we are growing and learning as we lean into the challenge.

And that belief creates feelings of connection, gratitude, hope, and a sense of purpose. And ultimately we get to choose. So I don't feel sorry for you that your capacity is expanding as you do hard things.

I don't feel sorry for you that you are developing humility and patience and faith and compassion as you face the difficulties and discouragements of life. But I am cheering you on as your balloon expands. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.