Do You Ever Feel Sorry for Yourself But Don’t Know How to Stop? (3 Steps to Feel Better)
Feeling sorry for yourself sucks: it’s disempowering, passive, and unproductive.
The way to stop feeling sorry for yourself is to look back to find the cause, and re-frame your thinking. Feeling sorry for yourself is a visceral experience. To connect mind and body, it’s best to do this process by hand: with pen and paper or your journal.
Step #1: “What am I feeling sorry about?”
Write about every detail of what you’re feeling.
- For this practice to work well, get specific and granular. Don’t hold anything back.
- Dive into the “woe is me” part of your story and each of the disempowering, yucky feelings and thoughts that are part of your experience.
Step #2: Reflect on events that lead to the feeling.
It’s time to re-trace your steps to this point.
- Describe the events, triggers, emotions, and thoughts that contributed to how you’re feeling.
- Go back in time to yesterday and the last few days: what events contributed to how you’re feeling?
- Do you feel positive or negative in relation to those events?
Step #3: Re-frame how you want to feel.
To stop feeling sorry for yourself, you need to re-frame your perceptions of these past events.
This is not about re-writing history or concocting a lie. You are re-framing your experience and feelings into positive learning experiences. This is the action step to improve how you’re feeling.
- Ask, “What can I do, right now, that will make me feel better about this situation?”
A gentle warning: This is not always easy.
Finding the positive in situations can be challenging — sometimes downright daunting.
But this isn’t about faking it. You need to find the truth of what’s good — the learning experience — in your situation. Even if you only improve how you’re feeling by a small amount, that’s a win.
What happened, is fixed. How you think and feel about it, is flexible.
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