Learn about the importance of self-pity, which is defined as “sadness about your own problems.” Understand how your ability and willingness to grieve helps you process your pain and heal your trauma. “The Healing Power of Self-Pity” was a TEDx talk I delivered on September 19th, 2020 at TEDx Marietta Square virtually. There, I shared how acknowledging and allowing my feelings with genuine self-compassion enabled me to alleviate my suicidal depression, befriend myself, face my deepest and darkest memories of abuse, and heal my trauma. This article will explain how to grieve and how to heal yourself.
In the video below, I talk about how to ditch toxic positivity and become authentic. I explain how to heal yourself by acknowledging and processing your trauma from abuse, neglect, and other adversity. I share how to be your own best friend by liberating yourself from the deadly trap of the happiness illusion and becoming fully human.
How to heal yourself emotionally became my topic of interest in 2014 when I was first in addiction recovery. However, I wasn’t ready to face my childhood trauma. There was too much, and I had not yet developed the skills to keep myself grounded in my safe present, so remembering trauma caused flashbacks and carried me back into my traumatic past.
In 2017, I was ready to learn how to heal trauma from childhood and from my later years. I was finally prepared to learn how to grieve. It was after I was already diagnosed with Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD). That was the time when God gave me a breakthrough: healing trauma requires grieving your pain and loss. Grief requires you to feel sad about your own problems (self-pity) and be your own best friend. I finally did it.
Learning how to grieve implies that you will allow yourself to experience self-compassion and treat yourself as you would treat a hurting friend, which means feeling sad about your own problems and being fully human, without pretending to be happy all the time. Pretending requires you to hide from your self, and that causes your psyche to split, which leads to dissociation.
Your life starts feeling surreal to you. You begin feeling as if you were observing someone else living your life, as if you weren’t actually your self. That leads to addictions, mental illnesses, and even suicide. My ministry is dedicated to helping alleviate suicide among women globally by sharing hope in Christ. Jesus was fully God and fully human. He had 100% of hope available to Him, yet He also wept from grief.
Knowing that Jesus felt grief and wept helped me grieve my loss and pain, as well as learn how to genuinely weep. After I went through the process of grief, I was able to experience the healing power of self-pity. God called me to share this message with you to offer you comfort and help you learn how to grieve and how to heal yourself.
Here I also share my self-pity poem.
“The Healing Power of Self-Pity” Talk
Choose happiness! Hold your head up high and don’t you ever let them see you cry! These performance demands are imposed on us by our Instagrammed, photoshopped culture. I chose happiness all the time, despite the tremendous adversity in my life, and it worked. Until it didn’t. Today, I would like to share with you how I ditched toxic positivity and became fully human by discovering and experiencing the healing power of self-pity.
Did you know that suicide is the second leading cause of death in America for ages 10 to 34? At 34, I contemplated killing myself. What saved me from suicide? Self-pity.
Cambridge Dictionary defines self-pity as sadness about your own problems. I never allowed myself to feel sadness. I chose happiness and coped with life’s emotional pain by becoming a goal-minded high achiever. In fact, on the day I was planning my suicide, the waitress who served me lunch said I looked sophisticated, projected confidence, and appeared to have my life together. I responded with thanks, opened my journal, and wrote the following:
“I feel like I just need to die. It sucks to be alive. My life sucks and it sucks to be me.”
Anna szabo
My life was falling apart: divorce, job loss, betrayal by friends, and financial struggles. Those troubles were not the first season of adversity for me. Born out of wedlock during the crush of the USSR, raised on welfare by a single mom with mental health issues, I was told that would never amount to anything.
My mom taught me that I was ugly, stupid, worthless, and a mistake. She revealed to me how she went to abort me. She persuaded me that I didn’t deserve to live. She looked me straight in the eye and yelled: “I hate you and I just want you dead!” Read my essay called “Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.” I attempted suicide twice as a child. All I knew about my father was that he was in jail and that I was an unwanted accident. I felt confused about who I was and why I was even born…
There was so much pain in my life! But I was never allowed to feel. Instead, I was forced to perform and achieve perfection. So, performance, perfection, and toxic positivity became my addiction.
In our small Soviet condo full of alcoholic relatives, I endured emotional abuse and physical violence. I was raped twice. I experienced teen pregnancy. I suffered a miscarriage at 17.
In the midst of it all, I chose happiness and held my head up high, focusing on achieving my goals. I graduated with high honors from several universities in Russia. I also found a perfect husband, in America, through an online matchmaking agency. Yes, I am a mail-ordered bride. In 2008, I emigrated from Russia to America to live my happily-ever-after with my American Prince Charming.
He beat the life out of me. Read an article about my domestic violence story. I was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter for victims of domestic violence in 2009. I became homeless in a foreign country without speaking the language. Life was very hard for me but I chose happiness and held my head up high, focusing on achieving my goals.
Within 18 months, I taught myself English listening to Frank Sinatra and was accepted to GA state university in 2011. I graduated with an MBA and a 3.74 GPA in 2013 and published a book called “Turn Your Dreams and Wants Into Achievable SMART Goals!” which was recognized by International Book Awards and Indie Excellence Awards. I hoped that adversity was in the past…
In 2015, a Godly man, who worked at the mega-church I attended, began courting me for marriage. He was so perfect that, after each date, I wrote him a gratitude letter, a collection of which turned into a gratitude book, which I gave him as a wedding gift. Four months after our wedding, my perfect Christian husband … filed for divorce saying he wasn’t interested in me anymore and wanted to be an IronMan instead and compete in Kona. He called his bicycle “My other wife I cheat on you with” and I felt deceived, disoriented, devalued, discarded, and depressed. Read an article about my story of narcissistic relationship abuse.
While contemplating suicide, I came across a lecture on depression by Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. It explained that after about 5 major setbacks in life, adversity becomes too much, and that’s when people choose to escape emotional pain by suicide. The lecture also explained that depression is known as self-aggression, which is anger against self. Anger is known as unprocessed grief. So, it’s unresolved sadness.
I had experienced more than five setbacks in my life. So, on the inside, I resented my addiction to performance, perfection, and toxic positivity, but on the outside, I felt pressured to choose happiness all the time. I was in conflict with myself. Me, myself, and I did not see eye-to-eye. I was tired of being trapped in the happiness illusion. That‘s why I was depressed and suicidal. My self-aggression resulted from decades of accumulated and compounded unprocessed grief.
I realized that, to be friends with myself, to stop depression, self-aggression, and suicidal ideation, I had to ditch the unreasonable demands of our culture, escape the deadly trap of toxic positivity, acknowledge my emotional pain, allow myself to be sad about my own problems, and become fully human by experiencing the healing power of self-pity. My breakthrough resulted in a letter to myself, which is this poem.
Every 12.3 min an American dies by suicide. What if we taught people how to cope with life’s emotional pain by leveraging the healing power of self-pity? Everyone’s life sometimes rocks and sometimes sucks. Yet, life is worth living.
As a Christian coach, I help women see themselves the way God sees them. And I have a dream: one day, you will become comfortable being uncomfortable, spending quiet time in the presence of your feelings, acknowledging your emotional pain, experiencing sadness about your own problems, and processing your grief through genuine tears.
Let’s be fully human! Let’s ditch toxic positivity! Let’s liberate ourselves from the deadly trap of the happiness illusion! Let’s teach self-pity as a coping tool in schools and in the workplace! Help alleviate suicide in my neighborhood and our world.
Thank you.
“The Healing Power of Self-Pity” Poem
"The Healing Power of Self-Pity" #PoemsFromGod Do you know how to feel sadness and grieve appropriately? Like sitting down with your sad thoughts and allowing yourself to cry And writing heartfelt entries in your journal openly, Even if you aren’t with yourself eye-to-eye? Have you tried pouring your heart out And sharing your genuine sadness with God, Being open and vulnerable, even if in doubt, Facing yourself, who you really are, though it sounds odd? Please take the time to be still and feel uncomfortable. Please make it your priority to focus your mind On the important intention of being vulnerable, So you can that special place of humanness within yourself find. You deserve self-pity, self-empathy, and self-compassion. You’ve experienced a lot of pain, take some time to genuinely grieve. Ditch the culture-imposed maniac happiness, it’s time to set your own fashion! This is the era where you your own kindness and friendship receive. Self-pity will feel odd at first. It's normal. It is a skill like learning to ride a bike. Keep feeling, keep grieving; self-pity is very informal. This is how you get to be friends with yourself and finally yourself like. 9/24/17 © Anna Szabo, JD, MBA
“The Healing Power of Self-Pity” Story
I am on a mission! My mission is to share with the high-achieving, performance-focused women like me that grief is an essential part of emotional life and mental health. The purpose of life is not to be happy all the time but to understand oneself and one’s life journey, to grow and evolve in a relationship with God, to wholeheartedly and not superficially connect with other beings on earth, and to experience genuine joy as well as the peace of God that passes all understanding.
Life is a human journey of learning and growing. To learn and grow, we must be fully human. To be fully human, we must allow ourselves to feel emotions. Feeling emotions requires that we experience grief and sadness. Experiencing grief and sadness allows us to heal from pain and trauma. Not healing from pain and trauma requires us to cope with our own painful memories using denial to hide from our own conscience. Hiding from ourselves by denying what we know, what we’ve seen, and what we’ve been through leads to various addictions, violent crime, and unnecessary suicide. Grief allows us to process our painful past.
That is why a process of genuine grieving (self-pity) is the key to mental health, emotional wellbeing, spiritual clarity, and self-understanding. I am here to testify how grief allowed me to heal.
I was raised by a cruel and violent narcissistic mother who hated and abused me in every way imaginable. She had an inflated sense of self-importance, lack of empathy, and two faces. She appeared to others as someone different than who she actually was with me behind closed doors. She molested me when I was little and then tortured and tormented me for many years. At 25, I left Russia and moved to America. I had never seen my mother again. However, I went on to marry and divorce three times, and each time, I was trapped in an abusive relationship.
On my journey of narcissistic abuse recovery, I realized that toxic positivity and happiness illusion had to be left behind and that I had to become fully human, allowing myself to feel. It took several years.
Finally, in 2020, I became able to tolerate remembering my painful memories, which allowed me to process my traumatic past. To experience healing, I had to learn how to be my own best friend, how to listen to my self with the same compassion I offer to my BFF, how to comfort my self with empathy instead of toxic denial and positive pep-talks, and how to grieve my pain and loss by experiencing genuine sadness about my own problems. Self-pity has been a life-changing skill for me. It allowed me to recover from addictions, to better understand and accept who I am, and to make peace with whatever is instead of waiting for a happily-ever-after. I love my life in the here and in the now. I pray to Jesus that you may also experience the healing power of self-pity. If you do, share your story to give God all the honor and glory!
Thank you for reading.
God bless…
Anna Szabo is the founder of Online Discipleship For Women, a Christian ministry committed to helping alleviate suicide among women globally by sharing hope in Christ. Anna teaches how to create a joyful life by embracing God’s word based on her six pillars of joyful living: faith, food, fitness, finances, felicity, and fortitude. She is a Christian speaker, YouTuber, artist, poet, and blogger who created 2,000,000 words of Gospel-focused content to encourage and empower you. Donate to show your support.
