At any given moment we have a choice to either feel sorry for ourselves or to flip the switch and empower ourselves. It’s very easy to feel sorry for ourselves. It’s a self protection mechanism which makes us feel good for a moment and then gets us back on the same track of blaming other people and things for our misfortune.
You see as women we have been conditioned to feel sorry for ourselves. A lot of us have been made to believe sacrificing and suffering is something to take pride in. In fact so much so, that some of us even compete with who is worse off than the other. Whose suffering is more terrible? This pity party we put ourselves through is not just draining our energy and building bitterness and resentment among other things, but also keeping us STUCK from moving forward. It’s one of the worst forms of self-sabotage.
A lot of us don’t even know we do this – play victim – as it’s become such a natural part of us to complain and say/think “poor me”. We do it in our daily lives, from morning to night, so unconscious about it and of course as a mechanism to feel good about ourselves because we’ve been made to believe “suffering is noble”.
Here are a few examples of how we put ourselves in self-pity mode in our daily lives and how we can change it around.
1- Your baby troubled you all night long and you didn’t get the sleep you desperately needed. You wake up groggy, feeling sorry for yourself and dreading the day ahead. NOTE: this is the natural response the majority of us have to such situations. But did you know you can choose to think differently?
You can really change the quality of your day if instead you think about how much you love your little one and how blessed you are to have him in your life. Every minute spent with him is precious; even if that means missing out on your much needed rest. You are empowering yourself by these thoughts and breaking the chain of feeling sorry for yourself.
2- You feel mistreated by a colleague. You can’t stop thinking how unfair life is to you and how badly you are being treated. You keep telling yourself how much better you are than him/her and how terrible he/she is because he/she is the persecutor and you are the victim. Yes it might feel good for a moment to be the victim but you will remain stuck in the same place if you entertain such thoughts all the time. How can you empower yourself instead? By not playing the role of a victim. Remember that you as well as your colleague are both humans and imperfect. You may have made mistakes and might have mistreated someone (intentionally or unintentionally) else in the past too.
These are just a few ways of empowering your thoughts and you could come up with many others. I used to be a master at feeling sorry for myself, with ‘poor me’ thoughts running through my head all day! I worked at changing my beliefs about suffering and sacrifice, and consciously stopping myself and flipping my thoughts to more empowering ones. The energy around us shifts when start choosing to empower our thoughts instead of choosing self-pity. Believe me, so many doors open up when you leave the pity party and actually empower yourself to feel good! I challenge you to start today and try to flip self-pity to a thought that makes you feel good and empowers you without making you ‘poor you’.