self pity and clean grief

 Because of my previous experience of allowing selp pity to drag me down,  after I lost my son, I decided not to allow those thoughts of self pity intrude and make me maudlin.

 

There is a fine line between self-pity, and being kind to yourself as you grieve. Self-pity is a selfish emotion and will lead to destructive rather than constructive thoughts and actions.  It's one thing to validate and accept suffering and loss, but if you allow thoughts to centre on feeling sorry for yourself, you so easily descend the steps to the dungeon of self-indulgence.  All sorts of things breed down there;  resentment and blame; envy of people who haven't suffered as you have;  despair, depression; bitterness.  Self-pity can be very disabling; it keeps you in your present trouble.

These things are not in the interests of your best emotional health.  It's very hard to trudge back up out of this mire into the sunshine of effective and positive emotions. 

 

You have to deal with thoughts of anger, hurt, betrayal, sorrow.  And they arise because you have suffered something which has affected you deeply;  to not feel these things would not be "normal". You have to learn to know when you are concentrating too much on the hurt, and not enough on looking to the future. You can't deny the feelings, but there comes a time when you have to accept what's happened and decide to let it go.  You may have to decide this quite a few times;  let the negative stuff go, a little more each time.

My son drove an old 1976 Holden Kingswood.  It's a very distinctive vehicle with a distinctive sound - a V8 engine. After he died, it came back to me on the back of a truck and sat in my front yard for months.  He loved that car.  Every time I came home after being out, I would round the corner, see the car and pretend for a nano-second that he had come to visit. Eventually the car was taken by his girlfriend (still don't know what she did with it!).  But every time I would see a similar car in the street, I would think of Ben and the grief would come back.  I continued to do this for years after he died.  But after a while, I realized that I had made this car a trigger for grief which was not quite natural.  I had made it a habit;  I was slipping into self-pity and being maudlin;  the grief was no longer just a natural occurence;  I had made it contrived and was perpetuating the lovely memory of my son and his beloved car, until it was no longer about treading a journey of natural grief, but about self-pitying neurosis.

Keep your grief clean.  Don't milk it for attention;  don't squander emotional energy on self-pity. Learn to know when it's time to let go whatever it is that has happened to you.  God bless.