Self-pity

 

A little therapy brain-teaser. My 16-year-old client is self-aware and honest enough to say that she knows she is stuck in her sad, tearful depression partly because “I feel sorry for myself.” Her parents are entirely self-absorbed. Nineteen years ago, I wrote an article for The Primal Psycho­therapy Page* that included this sentence:

Most of my clients sit in a chair, though I encourage them to move around, to swing, to yell, to feel self-pity, to throw stuffed animals, to rip tissue boxes, to dilate their soul.

So I have no problem with feeling sorry for oneself. I believe society and the world are ugly to stigmatize that emotional state, espe­cially in children. It is a valid feeling, a truer one, cer­tainly, than its suppres­sion. It is likely to form when no one else is respecting the person. But this leaves us with a conundrum: Though it is destruc­tive to advise or cajole someone to reject self-pity, it feels wrong to encourage it. Especially in children who, in it, may fall down the well of sickness and lostness, lacking the kinds of countervailing supports that adults have.

Here, I require you to kill your objection to this reflexive feeling. If a person can be proud of himself for an accomplishment, rather than merely appreciating the accom­plish­ment as if it were an objective fact in the world detached from himself, then it is equally human to feel self-sorrow. It is our neurotic, repres­sive culture that has con­vinced us to “move on,” to produce without spirit, to “man up” for the sake of business.

I believe the solution is to empathize, truly empathize with your client, put yourself in her place, tell her it is valid to feel sorry for herself. And to continue to try to peel the film of solipsism from her parents’ minds, so that they can finally see her and hear her and feel her. And when that fails, to work to create a richer relationship with her. Depth therapy is ultimately repar­ent­ing. That, too, will mostly fail, but it’s where we are going when we help the client deal with dependency loss.

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* http://primal-page.com/challeng.htm.