Death to Self-Pity: Rebuilding after the Pain

Self-Pity is defined as excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness over one’s own troubles.

Resiliency is the capacity to recover quickly from hardships or traumatic events (remember my last blog). Your ability to bounce back after a massive blow to your life is the measuring tool for how resilient you are as a person. This will also be the measuring stick of how successful you are in your career, relationships, and life.

Throughout this life, we will experience deafening jolts to our minds, bodies, and souls. These moments define us. As we process the pain, we begin the journey of rebuilding, restoring, and overcoming the plight that seemingly crushed us without warning.

This is not an overnight process – it is lengthy in time frame, spanning days to weeks to months depending on what you experienced. But here is the truth about this beautiful word, “resiliency”. It starts before you ever get knocked out of the fight that we call, life. It starts in everyday moments that shape us at our core.

Our daily habits create our futures. When we experience a hard loss, it is tempting to wallow to long in the pool named – Self Pity. If we choose to swim in this deep end long enough, we will drown. If on a daily basis you tend to lean towards others owing you something or your mental state is such that you have zero ability to resist the victim mentality – you could be in danger of self-sabotaging your entire life to the trap of entitlement, called Self-Pity.

These two words play together in tandem. Resiliency is the remedy for the poison that is Self-Pity. Now, that said, sometimes it is necessary to feel the sadness that comes when life is unfair.  Sometimes we must sit in the uncomfortable to grieve wholly in a healthy way. Do not confuse grieving a loss or a pain with Self-Pity. They are not the same. Life isn’t fair – that is why we must choose to sharpen our tools in our toolbox to combat the temptations that come with this unfair life.

When hardship comes, and it will, actively decide to choose grieving wholly without feeling sorry for yourself. This is NO easy task! Trust me, I KNOW.

But, after you accept the truth that:

·       life is hard

·       it is hard for every person on this planet, we are all struggling with something

·       no one owes you anything

·       it is in fact, YOU who owe this world. Your talents, love, kindness, friendship ect,

then you will be set free from the enemy that seeks to rob you of every good gift.

Have you known someone so wrapped up in Self-Pity their life is in ruins? This person is always the victim; unable to be successful in any capacity because of everyone else or because someone at some point in their life wounded them. How miserable a life to always have a reason for why you can’t get out of your own way!

Mental strength takes active practice. We must sit with ourselves in quiet. We must judge our own actions and thoughts – are they producing the vibrant, healthy, successful life that we want? It is far easier to take a massive hit to our wellbeing and be bitter about its unjustness but, we aren’t made for easy! We have a great capacity to endure, overcome, and rebuild after devastating loss.

Rebuilding starts with saying NO to self-pity and YES to grieving in healthy ways that enable us to overcome the obstacle or crisis (therapy is an excellent tool to strengthen our minds and help us heal as we rebuild). So, after its all over with, we are better, stronger, kinder, more gracious people. When we take the initiative to get our own house in order, when we accept the hurt, when we allow ourselves to use suffering as a tool to become better, that is when we can attain and maintain success.

Success looks like a lot of different things to us all but as a general rule, we all want healthy happy loving relationships, we want to be good at our jobs, we want to have good community, we want to do great things that mean something.

If you choose to put to death Self-Pity in your life you will become more than a conqueror. Your ability to endure hardship will benefit every aspect of your life. When the season of laughter and peace has come – it will be that much more enjoyable because you have learned from the season of sorrow. Do not drag out the season of sorrow your entire life!

Say goodbye to, Self-Pity, today. Say hello to Resilience.  

Keep fighting the fight, friends. God has great things in store for you!

“Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.” - Eckhart Tolle