Self Pity

As I usually tell you guys , emotions created in this world are useful . They teach us an important lesson , they grab our attention . Some uncomfortable emotions are very useful in this way because they're a part of the contrast of life , but self-pity is not one of them . This emotion will single-handedly rob you of your goals , visions and dreams .

When you're in a state of negative , memorized emotions , it's very hard to see the reality of your emotional state . A memorized emotion is a state where you experience an emotion frequently and you feel it so often that your brain gets trained to create it over and over again .

The neural pathways that create the emotion are well ingrained , so , despite of the circumstance or the stimulus , the brain gets wired to create self-pity , which is a memorized emotion . Since previously we might have never redirected our mind to snap out of it , the mental muscle of the thought that create self-pity become very strong .

Such is the science behind all memorized emotions and , unfortunately , most of our memorized emotions are negative . Imagine a life where you're living memorized emotions of joy , excitement , adventure . Of course that's possible , and we have to deprogram negative memorized emotions one by one , self-pity being one of them .

All of the thoughts that create self-pity appear factual just because of the fact that they happen so frequently . Again , all negative emotions are created to grab our attention . So you might ask if this pain is good for me or not , and if the answer is yes , you find out . Why is this pain good for me ? What am I learning here ?

And I get asked this question frequently Is pain good for me overall ? And I will say , of course , if it helps you stay away from injury and destruction , like if you had a hand on a hot stove , how long would you want to keep it there until you realize that it's going to hurt you ? Hopefully your answer will be a second or even a fraction of a second .

After that , you'll want to remove it because you felt the pain and you don't want your hand to get burned . But in case of memorized emotions , we keep the hand on the stove for a very long period of time and it burns and we don't know how to remove it If you want to find out why self-pity might have showed up .

What is the benefit of self-pity and what was it trying to grab your attention towards ? It might have been some sort of corrective action that needed to take place . Emotions like self-pity get ingrained into our bodies and our brains . Neurons get well insulated , which means we develop very strong mental muscles . That produces self-pity very efficiently .

A distinction I want to make is that you might be able to intellectually recognize self-pity in somebody else or maybe in yourself for a moment in time , but to actually see it happen within you day in and day out and be able to separate it from yourself becomes very difficult . Especially if you're going through this now .

You might have a tendency of dismissing it quickly in the judgment of it , and you will not have the time to recognize it because just this recognition will be uncomfortable . But the self-pity itself , on the other hand , will feel very comfortable and familiar and that will seem factual .

There's a great overlap between self-pity and depression , especially in the medical society , and rightly so . Some people that are suffering from depression present with feelings like they can never be happy , which is why they cannot see the joy in themselves or they think they don't even deserve the joy , in which cases antidepressants are appropriate .

But many times it happens that people get medicated because of exogenous causes of depression , which leads to continuous self-pity . So let me take a little time describing the difference between endogenous and exogenous depression . This differentiation was first made by Abu Zayd al-Balqi , polymath and scholar of the golden age of Islam .

He wrote great works on psychology which are currently being translated by Muslim scholars , and we found out that he was the first ones to distinguish between endogenous and exogenous depression , which can be defined as internal cause of depression versus an external cause .

Endogenous depression , or internal cause of depression , can have genetic causes where there is a neurochemical imbalance which cannot be fixed without medication . Diagnoses associated with this type of depression is like major depressive disorder or MDD .

Exogenous depression , on the other hand , is defined as something that was triggered after an external event took place , like a death of a loved one or extenuating difficult circumstances . Abu Zaid al-Balqi distinguished between the two by saying that some depression comes from within us and the other one is reactive to the outside stimulus .

So why am I talking to you about scientific definitions of depression in this podcast , which is related to self-pity ?

And that's because self-pity is the most prominent symptom of depression , and if I am to make a blanket statement that you can change your thoughts to come out of self-pity , I don't want anybody to misconstrue it as that I am not recognizing difficulties related to genetic depression .

I've said it many times before all of this work is for clients and patients to develop insight , and if that is difficult because there is an ingrained neurochemical imbalance , then medications are the way to go until they find a more balanced and appropriate insight into life .

And if self-pity continues to show up even with medications , then with life coaching we can totally work through it with the methods I describe in this podcast .

I also want to point out that we have a very prescription-happy healthcare profession where an easiest way to satisfy a patient is to write a prescription and write a pill that's supposed to provide a quick fix . This type of medicine is also very commonly practiced .

Again , every modality has a time and a place and if you are one of those people who benefits from medications and are appropriately given medications , I don't want you to think that I'm leaving you out of the discussion . If you need medications , please seek professional help .

So reactive depression , as Abu Zaid al-Balqi puts , it is depression that happens because of stimulus outside of us our environment , our circumstances , our relationships , our financial situation .

If we don't learn how to deal with it in a healthy manner , and if we stand there and dampen the effect of it with medications , that way , we never learn how to deal with it in a healthy manner .

And if we stand there and dampen the effect of it with medications , that way , we never learn how to manage our mind around sadness , sorrow or feeling sorry for ourselves .

We never learn how to allow for these uncomfortable emotions , in which case the initial uncomfortable emotion that came to protect us and warn us about something turns into a memorized self-pity and indulgent emotion , which can take the shape of depression .

So I don't have a magic wand to tell you you do or you don't need medication , and this podcast , again , is not about medical advice . But if you think you'll benefit from medication again , please seek professional medical help .

In the end , the message I want to bring across is that medications should not be used as a substitute for learning a coping mechanism or how to deal with a difficult situation or difficult emotions in your life , and coaching should not be used as a substitute for medications , if that's what you truly need .

There are a lot of clients out there that are stuck in a negative downward spiral of self-pity which might have started as a brief episode of sadness or feeling sorry for yourself .

All of that gets compounded because of the judgment , of the sadness and the unhappiness , and clients never really realizing if they were to stay with the negative emotion or the discomfort within their bodies long enough . With curiosity they could actually help digest the emotion .

If you observe an emotion like an uninvested observer out of pure curiosity , the emotion literally disintegrates within you . But never having learned that skill and on top of that having judgment for feeling unhappy and having easy access to medications , creates layers and layers of underlying sadness until you're left with a big ball of self-pity .

If you feel anxious and you feel sorry for yourself for feeling the anxiety , that's another layer of self-pity . If you feel anxious and you feel sorry for yourself for feeling the anxiety , that's another layer of self-pity that you've just added .

If you feel upset for feeling anxious all the time and then you feel sorry for yourself , that's another layer of judgment on top of the many other layers . This way we keep adding layers upon layers of self-pity and judgment and other unrelated negative emotions .

Whenever you're feeling a negative emotion , you can take command of your mind and forcefully redirect it away from it . It will help you from spiraling into self-pity . And if you can break that chain of feeling bad about feeling bad , then at least you'll keep things from spiraling out of control . It's one thing that you're feeling anxiety or frustration of control .

It's one thing that you're feeling anxiety or frustration or upset . It's another thing that you're feeling sorry for yourself about all of them on top of it . Utilizing the formula CTFAR in this case would look like you examining your anxiety as a circumstance and figuring out what thoughts you're having about it .

Most of the time , if you're creating self-pity about having anxiety , your thoughts would be of judgment , Judgment of the initial negative emotion . This compounding effect is absolutely unnecessary and , in my opinion , adds to 90% of the negative emotion that we experience on a daily basis .

Just noticing anxiety and not being in judgment of it can help shed so much weight off of you . Self-pity also very commonly comes from comparing yourself to others , and it looks like a very subtle conversation with yourself how you compare yourself to somebody else and tell yourself she seems to have it all figured out .

She seems to get her results from her actions . She knows what she's doing . She seems confident . These comparison type of thoughts are very subtle and will add layers of unnecessary self-pity . All of this process can be intercepted by you just observing these thoughts of comparison .

I see a lot of self-pity in my weight loss clients because when they don't see the weight come off , then there is a whole self-pity party , because that is usually the very first reflective emotion In which case I get to help clients do a whole bunch of self-reflective exercises and help them understand that , since they didn't reach their weight loss goal , they

immediately went to self-pity and it's possible that their weight loss journey did not match somebody else's journey , but it did teach you what you were supposed to learn about managing your mind , which is , if you don't get your results , you don't have to resort to beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself .

This meta skill of managing your mind is the real lesson here . Weight loss will come in its own good time . Maybe in cases like this , you will need to create resolve or determination as an emotion in order to continue your weight loss journey until you get the result you want . But if you fall back into self-pity and feeling sorry and despair .

Then of course , you're going to put the weight back on because you're going to eat to buffer the effects of the self-pity that you've just created for yourself . Even for me , when I'm trying to create something that's halfway more challenging than I thought it would be , self-pity creeps in so subtly I have to be extremely vigilant .

So the cycle can look something like this we work hard in hopes of some results . If we don't see the results , we fall into self-pity , which ensures that we don't take any action , which absolutely ensures we never get our results . That self-pity pretty much seals the deals . In these cases , you are guaranteed to not get any results .

At this point , if you're still not convinced that you're in self-pity just be aware that this is a very sneaky emotion and you don't even know that you're feeling it you might just think to yourself I just feel bad about the situation .

Again , there might be some times where you want to quit your actions towards a result that you decided and this you do out of awareness and intention either to change course or after an evaluation process when you realize what you're doing is not working this type of changing course or evaluation or reconsidering of your action . You will never do out of self-pity .

If you imagine self-pity as a fuel , as feelings are the fuel to all of our actions . Self-pity will only fuel inaction , quitting and giving up , and not out of awareness but out of despair . You will not be choosing consciously to give up . The self-pity will be doing it for you .

If you're even having a hard time following through with your decisions and you might not see that as a consequence of self-pity and you might just be blaming that things are not happening .

But just be curious if there's a component of self-pity there , because if you quit you will be feeling sorry for quitting , but instead what the brain offers is it hides the self-pity and suggests that the world is rigged against you .

It doesn't let you identify self-pity because then it would have to face the discomfort of having to admit to being an imperfect human being and then you will have to get to cleaning up that mess . A lot of times these sentences sound like this poor me , can you believe this happened to me ? Why and how does it always happen to me ?

Self-pity thrives in learned helplessness . But luckily , since as it is learned , it can be unlearned through neuroplasticity , through modifying the pathways of your brain by changing one thought at a time .

If you're still having difficulty getting in touch with self-pity with yourself , try imagining how horrible it feels when somebody else feels sorry for you and see if you can reproduce the same feeling with some conscious thoughts .

Try and learn the sensations of your body and pay exquisite attention to them and label them , and over time you will learn to label them when your brain is creating them at a later time , and instead of thinking that life owes you something , the business should start working immediately . Other people should be helpful to you .

All of this type of thinking will create self-pity and it needs to change immediately . When you feel sorry for yourself for having conflicts , discord and differences , the tendency of self-pity will be to label the world that it should be a harmonious place . There should be no differences among people . But that's not how life is , we are told .

That's not how human beings are created , we are told . We are created differently so we can learn from each other . When we stop believing how life should be and if life is supposed to be easy , then we can create dedication towards a result we actually want .

Imagine you're going for a master's or a PhD program . You're not going to think it's going to be easy . You're going to prepare for classes that are challenging . You're going to expect it to be challenging . Then why do you expect life to be easy ? While going towards your PhD , you're going to have to learn different material .

You're not going to know it initially . You're going to have to learn different material . You're not going to know it initially . You're going to make mistakes . You're going to have to work hard and dedicate time and effort and brain energy towards it . Well , for some of you it might come easy , but for most of us it doesn't .

But in either case , in examples like this , when we anticipate something to be hard , we prepare to work hard . When you anticipate life to be easy , self-pity makes it really easy to think that things should not be the way they are .

If you think of life as a curriculum that's supposed to be difficult and you're learning your way through it , you're learning from it and with it . This way , you would be able to avoid self-pity and you will not quit halfway while doing your hard work . You cannot be feeling sorry for yourself and working hard at the same time . Those are mutually exclusive .

You might be suppressing self-pity and then working hard , which just makes the work even harder . Resistance to any emotion makes it much bigger , because what ends up happening is that people suppress the self-pity and work hard against it , which exponentially increases the amount of work you have to do .

The same time , life presents obstacles and your brain is trying to fight an internal fight , trying to suppress self-pity and tell yourself I'm working hard to overcome this . This is a lot of mental strain . This is a lot of background noise . It will drain you of your energy and your power that you can otherwise use to do just the hard work .

Be onto yourself if you're secretly believing that life should be easy . Who said life should be easy ? There's nobody on the planet whose life is easy , no matter what they posted on Instagram . And if somebody actually makes life look easy , it's because in the background , they're working really hard to manage their mind around their challenges .

Now let me speak to some religious expectations and when it comes to self-pity and learned helplessness , it is not in itself a sin to feel that emotion . It's not even a sin to have passing thoughts that push us towards self pity .

But , as I've said before , repeated thoughts that create learned helplessness are considered an action Once a thought pops in your brain from a shaitan's whisper that my life should be different . It should not be like this . It should not have turned out like this . I should have different friends , different family , different circumstance .

If a thought like this pops up in your head , you are not held accountable for an initial whispering , but if you leave it unchecked and the thought keeps repeating , stopping that thought is under your control and that is something you will be held accountable for , because if you don't stop it in its tracks , it will repeat itself until it starts to appear factual ,

and these factual , appearing judgmental thoughts will seem like it's not your fault , but it will kind of be your fault because you let it go this far . If it is happening to you , just take the responsibility of observing your thoughts and releasing them into the falsehood they are .

The actions here that we will be responsible for is that we did not dismantle this judgment-based belief system . Your life should not be different . It should be exactly the way it is , because that's how it is . Why fight reality ? Allah SWT has given you exactly what was intended . Why should the plan be any different ? It should be exactly the way it is .

Period . The initial popping thought will turn into a constant engagement of a dialogue , and it will turn into learned helplessness and self-pity if we don't redirect our mind , which is under our capability . No emotions are ever a sin , but you can be held responsible for a memorized emotion .

Also , on another hand , religion is not to be used to create toxic positivity , where you're forcing yourself to believe positive thoughts that are just simply not believable to you . I mean , you cannot go from life is unfair to everything is fine and peachy and life has been created for me and this is good for me .

If you don't believe it in that moment , you don't have to force yourself to believe it . Toxic positivity has been shown to carry the same risk factors to coronary disease as chronic stress . Religious teachings are not to be used to shove positive thoughts down your throats , because that can be extremely detrimental .

It's not supposed to feel forceful when you're trying to believe something . If it is not available for you that this life is good for me , then don't believe it .

But in that case , are you able to at least keep an open mind that you're willing to see how this reality could be good for you , or at the very least admit to yourself that you're willing to see how this reality could be good for you or at the very least , admit to yourself that you're actually currently unable to see the good in this situation .

This will at least open the door of being able to see any possibility of good in the future at a later time . Notice how this line of thinking feels slightly better than the whole world is rigged against me , but it is not a complete 180 degree turn from the original thought .

I am willing to believe there might be something good in this for me , but I'm not quite there yet .

If you're willing to say that I'm yet to see how this is good for me , how this was meant for me , all of this might be more available to you and thus make a much more difference than trying to believe this might be more available to you and thus make a much more difference than trying to believe something that is unavailable to you .

Decide what you want to believe and practice with small increments , small thoughts that feel slightly better than before , and to get there you might want to create any sliver of excitement , joy , dedication , motivation , anything that leads you to a small effort or a small action .

Any incremental improvement in your thoughts will clean up all the judgment and the memorized emotion of self-pity , if not immediately , then definitely over time . Keep taking small action steps . Keep noticing the subtle differences where you feel better within your body . You don't have to force yourself to believe an extremely positive thought .

Don't let religion be a license to create toxic positivity . That is not what Islam is for . Whether you immediately believe a positive thought or you're taking small steps to get there and giving yourself room and grace , in either case , ask for forgiveness , because no method is perfect .

We collectively , as a human species , are wired to overlook our mistakes , so when we don't know when we're making mistakes , it is within our capacity to continue to ask for forgiveness and always ask for Allah's protection and ask for protection from self-pity . Make strong decisions today about what you don't want to feel anymore and work hard to release them .

I decided a long time ago for myself that I was never going to feel self-pity or sorry for myself . A second spent in self-pity is a second too much for me . Time is too valuable to create unnecessary emotions , and that , of course , coupled with the power of prayer and Dara .

In our religion , we're told to compare ourselves to somebody who is better than us in their righteousness or in their good deeds and their faith . Then , at another hand , we're also told that whenever we're in despair , we should look at people who have less than us .

If we can't find anything good in our lives , at least we can focus on the fact that I can walk or that I have clean water . We can focus on the fact that I can walk or that I have clean water . This type of teaching might seem contradictory at face value , but there is an extreme depth to it . Islam is teaching us flexibility of thought .

Compare upwards when it serves you and when it helps you to reach your spiritual , financial or fitness goals . Don't compare upwards when you feel jealous or inadequate or less than the other person . There is no thought police that's monitoring . What are you using your thoughts for ? You can upward or downward compare however it serves you .

Maybe it helps you to downward compare when you're having a hard time You're not finding shoes that are matching with your outfit , but at least you have shoes . Some people don't even have feet . You are allowed to compare yourself to others in a way that serves you , the way it helps you eliminate your self-pity .

There is no contradiction in the teachings of Islam . It actually just creates a lot of freedom of thought . Any way you can create feelings that lead to constructive action , to gratitude , that leads to creating a value of faith rather than disbelief . Any of these methods are encouraged .

With that , I thank Allah , subhanahu wa ta'ala , every day for having this beautiful design and for giving us our intelligence to create these beautiful emotions . I thank Allah for giving us insight into our memorized emotions . I seek protection against indulgent emotions out of negligence of the inner self .

I ask Allah SWT for His help in being able to recognize when I am in despair or self-pity and I'm not understanding it and I'm just not seeing it . I seek Allah's guidance . If we are on a path that is not optimal for us , that he redirects us and he guides us on the right path .

I ask strength against negative memorized emotions that feel good just by the token of familiarity . O Allah , protect us against the whispers of shaitan and guide us towards the right path . I seek Allah's forgiveness and protection against the emotions like self-pity . Please keep me in your duas . I will talk to you guys next time .