Verified by 
Key points
- Self-pity is a universal emotion, resulting from the fact that life is inevitably full of heartache and disappointment.
- "Feeling sorry for ourselves" is socially frowned upon and leads to feeling bad about ourselves, our lives, and the people around us.
- When self-pity strikes, the most common way we react is to reprimand ourselves for it, which doesn't always work well.
- Self-compassion—treating ourselves kindly, understanding our own flaws and faults with less judgment—works better.
It sucks to be broke / and unemployed / and turning thirty-three. / It sucks to be me.
So sings Brian, one of the main characters of the Tony Award-winning musical “Avenue Q.” Who doesn’t feel this way sometimes? Most of us, I suspect, feel this way far more often than we care to admit.
Self-pity may be the least-liked emotion of all. What emotion is more universally looked down upon than “wallowing in self-pity”? Yet some self-pity is close to inevitable.
Why? Because life is only partly in our control. Things go wrong, sometimes tragically, more often in minor but nonetheless nerve-jangling ways. Things do not turn out the way we thought they would, and unless we’re obscenely rich and powerful, we’re stuck having to cope with the less-than-ideal consequences. This is probably a good thing, because those who can pawn off all unpleasant consequences onto others never fully mature. But typically, it’s no fun.
Why We Experience Self-Pity
Day by day, hour by hour, even minute by minute, we attempt to move through our lives maintaining a certain level of predictability to our experiences and the fulfillment of our needs. Buddhist philosophy regards this as the root cause of suffering, but it’s also simply what we do as human beings. We all strive, consciously and unconsciously, to build a life that meets enough of our expectations and gets enough of our needs met so that stuff makes sense and we feel at least “okay” most of the time.
Accomplishing this isn’t easy. Life is challenging, and one aspect of becoming an adult is accepting responsibility for our own lives and happiness. That’s why most of us are somewhat allergic to self-pity. It’s healthy. We accept that we can’t expect everything to come easily.
But then something painful and disruptive happens to us, something we couldn’t control or prevent or didn’t see coming. All sorts of people and circumstances, past and present, seem to stand in the way of us getting what we want and need. This triggers great pain and distress, whether physical or emotional. But the wordless, visceral experience of pain and distress is only the start of what we call “self-pity.” Our minds are storytelling and meaning-making machines, and when we get that feeling that everything has gone wrong, our cognitive brain kicks in and tells us that whatever happened is unfair and unjust, that it shouldn’t have happened, and that powerful forces—maybe the entire world, or even Fate itself!—was or is aligned against us. We’re powerless to stop it, and no one can help or even understand.
That’s self-pity. It’s a very lonely feeling! At that moment, we feel like we have no resources, either within ourselves or outside of us. Self-pity is closely related to shame, which is the feeling that we either are or have done something so bad that we’re unacceptable to others. Because we’re meaning-makers, the question "Why have things gone so wrong?" gets answered consciously or not by some version of either "Something out there really doesn’t like me," or "I don’t fit in to this world. I don’t belong."
The Antidote: Self-Compassion
So, what can you do about it? When that woe-is-me feeling hits, many, if not most, of us immediately begin to scold ourselves. Sometimes we do it harshly, telling ourselves to cut it out! Stop pitying yourself! Other times it's milder. Is there a person who’s never on a Monday morning said to their sorry selves something like this: Come on. Stop complaining. No point in complaining anyway?
This is a perfectly normal and often valid way of dealing with these feelings. But it doesn’t always work well. When it doesn’t, there’s a better approach.
A major antidote to self-pity is self-compassion. In fact, if you’re truly feeling self-acceptance and self-compassion, it’s well-nigh impossible to feel self-pity.
It’s an odd quirk of human nature that scolding ourselves for doing something we don’t like feels “natural,” but deliberately giving ourselves compassion feels “weird.” But try it. When you’re struggling or stressed, instead of getting tougher on yourself, see if you can take a moment to relax your shoulders, breathe, and sympathetically tell yourself, “This really is a tough time I’m going through.” Then notice how your body relaxes a little bit and your breathing gets easier.
People fear that self-compassion means “coddling” themselves, that it will make them “soft,” less able to meet hard challenges. But there’s no contradiction between self-compassion and challenging yourself. In fact, with self-compassion you can squarely face your mistakes and weaknesses, accept them and work on them. That’s much harder to do without self-compassion.
Practicing Self-Compassion
Whenever you view yourself through the eyes of self-compassion, you become, in a psychological sense, two separate and distinct versions of yourself: a “you” that’s giving compassion and a “you” that’s receiving it.
If you’re going through a particularly painful “woe-is-me” moment, there’s a very powerful practice you can use to take this aspect of self-compassion to a higher level. Specifically, you can be compassionate to the part of yourself that’s going through all that pain and suffering.
Rather than either getting caught in the bad feeling or trying to “rise above” it, you can recognize that you are more than the intensely distressing feelings and thoughts demanding your attention at the moment. They’re not all of who you are; after all, you haven’t always felt this awful way. You have a more permanent Self—like the way the sun can be hidden behind clouds—and you can use that Self to acknowledge, accept, and give compassion to the distressed part of you without getting totally caught in all the distress.
Here’s how:
To start, bring your awareness to the feeling of distress you’re having inside, without running through your mind the whole “story” of how it happened, why it happened, whose fault it is, what you could have done differently, etc.
Next, try to imagine the part of you that’s “carrying” all those woe-is-me feelings as a part of you—maybe a big part of you—but not all of you. If it helps, you can imagine that part of you sitting in front of you.
Then, acknowledge to yourself and this part of you that whatever is so distressing does suck. Sometimes the nicest and most supportive thing a person can say to someone going through a tough time is a heartfelt, “Wow, that really sucks.” For this moment, don’t cajole or argue with yourself to get out of the bald, naked crumminess of the situation that your inner distress is feeling. Don’t tense up against yourself. Stay relaxed, open, and tender to your own inner hurting self. You might even want to put a hand over your heart to comfort yourself.
You may notice it’s not easy to be tender to yourself. That’s okay. Just notice that and do the best you can. You may feel it would be better if you had someone else listening, caring, and comforting you this way. That’s okay too, but for this moment, you become this person. And yes, you can!
Just make sure that, as you give yourself this support, you separate feelings from statements about the way things really are. A genuinely sympathetic “You feel alone, like everyone’s against you,” can feel very supportive. But, “you feel bad because everyone hates you,” as if that’s indisputably true, will probably make you feel worse. When connecting with yourself, always check to see if what you’re saying is helping or hurting.
If you stay tender to your inner hurting self, you will feel better, less self-rejecting or self-pitying, more flexible and able to problem-solve, and more self-accepting and open to others. See if you can now reach out to others from this more open place. For whatever has happened to you, whatever slings and arrows you’ve endured, are simply part of the human condition, which you share as a member of the human race.
It’s a basic law of the universe that there are more ways for things to go wrong than there are for things to go right. For vulnerable and defenseless creatures like ourselves, it’s probably a miracle for many of us that we don’t have more things go wrong.
So when things go wrong—a little bit, or a whole, whole lot—see if you can avoid all the traps that are created in the mind, all the thoughts like, "This shouldn’t have happened," or, "This shouldn’t bother me," or, "I should have been able to see this coming and prevent it," or, perhaps worst, I"I deserve this." See if, instead, you can give yourself a very affirming and empathic "Yep, this really does suck!"
Then, stop for a moment and take that in. Take in this validating message from yourself to yourself that you are an imperfect and fallible human being who does not, at this moment, feel strong or capable or in control of your life—and that’s totally and completely okay. Notice how that makes you feel in your body. Do you relax a little? Feel a slight sense of relief? Does it bring a feeling of softness, of (bearable) sadness? Or even, perhaps, make you smile a little sheepishly at yourself?
Whatever it is, let yourself absorb this feeling for a few breaths. Then, when you’re ready, square your shoulders—and keep going.
