Self-pity

In an article in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explores “How Anxiety Became Content.” He reveals that this new “genre” on social media is surging. The TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than six billion views and over 5,500 podcasts have the word “trauma” in their title. Thompson suggests that our consumption of such material may be backfiring. He writes:

Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California, said that for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. Saxbe said, “I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique. That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.”

On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.

She went on to say, “I’m very pro-therapy. ... But we may have overcorrected from an era when mental health was shameful to talk about to an era when some vulnerable people surround themselves with conversations and media about anxiety and depression. This makes them more vigilant about symptoms and problems, which makes them more likely to problematize normal daily stress. In turn this makes them move toward a (mindset) where they think there is always something wrong with them that needs their attention, which causes them to pull back from social engagement, which causes even more distress and anxiety.”

Before serving as a Methodist minister from 2000 to 2010 near Nashville, Tennessee, John M. Eades spent two decades as a therapist counseling drug and alcohol addicts. But his professional expertise did not prevent his descent into compulsive gambling.

His downfall began when some friends pestered him into accompanying them to a casino. Although Eades had never been a gambler, the urge to play the slot machines that was sparked that night escalated into daily casino visits.

"I went every afternoon after work and stayed until late, and I'd go every weekend," recalls Eades, 68. Missing church was no concern. At the time, Eades only attended sporadically.

Within two years, he had maxed out 17 credit cards and amassed $245,000 in gambling debts. One night, driving home from the casino, Eades decided to kill himself. He pulled over at a rest stop and reached into the glove compartment for his .357 Magnum. The gun was gone. Upon reaching home, Eades hugged his wife, Karen, and thanked her for saving his life by hiding the weapon. But he was in for another surprise.

"I didn't take the gun to save your life," Karen told him. "I sold it so we could pay the electric bill."

Soon, the economic strain became too much for Karen. She swallowed an entire bottle of pills in front of her husband. After getting his wife's stomach pumped at a hospital, Eades tried to escape his own depression by going off to gamble.

Later, in a drastic step to remove temptation, Eades moved to a Tennessee town 300 miles away from the nearest casino. He agreed to Karen's request that they attend church regularly. Yet Eades secretly started stashing money in his car trunk for a planned trip to a Mississippi casino.

Another suicide attempt, this time by his 27-year-old daughter, Ginger, over a failed relationship, finally prompted Eades to change …. He opened his car trunk and gave the $600 he had saved for gambling to his wife.

Today Eades is in recovery and marvels at the power the addiction had over his life. "When you're in an addiction and you look back, it's just like you were an insane person," says Eades …. "You cannot believe the things you did."

Eades says there can be no removal of addictive desires or recovery without God's intervention. He also credits Karen, his wife of 48 years.

"When you're [an addict] you really want people to leave you alone so you can feel sorry for yourself and keep [up your addiction]," Eades says. "It's very important to have [someone] who loves you enough to stay with you through it."

Heather Bermingham writes in an article "No Dad to Call":

My youth group was hundreds of miles from home on a mission trip in New Orleans. We were piled in the van on the way back to the motel when someone yelled out, "I get the pay phone first!"

"Why?" another kid asked. "Who do you need to call?"

"It's Father's Day, dork!" came the reply.

Father's Day. I hadn't thought about that in years. As everyone scrambled for coins and planned out a calling schedule, I stared blankly out the window of the van.

My dad had died from a heart attack when I was 4, and I remembered so little about him. As for Father's Day, it was a holiday I had pretty much pushed out of my mind—until today.

Back at the motel, I wandered around by myself while everyone else scurried for the phones. I felt so sad, and so alone. Sure, I had my mom and my three brothers. But who was I supposed to call today? As the day went on, my sorrow turned into anger. Why did I have to be left out of today's celebration? Why couldn't God have taken someone else, some bad parent? My dad was a good guy. He loved his wife and kids. And just before he died, he had committed his life to Christ. He could have been doing great things for God—if God hadn't taken him away. Away from me.

I thought about all the things I'd missed. I never had a dad to cheer for me at softball games. I had to find a substitute for father-daughter events. By the time the sun set on that Father's Day, I was convinced I had been wronged in a horrible, unforgivable way.

In the days that followed, we spent our mornings putting on a Bible school for the local kids. Then in the afternoon, we volunteered at a youth center. I was still feeling sad and angry, but I kept my feelings to myself, convinced no one would understand anyway.

Working with the little kids during the day wasn't so bad. In fact, there were times it was a lot of fun. But at our nightly Bible study, I tuned out. As my friends shared special moments of each day, lessons God had taught them, I crossed my arms and mentally blocked out their voices. I wasn't in the mood for happy God-talk. I just wanted this mission trip to be over.

And it almost was. With just a few days left, I found myself at the youth center, helping 6-year-old Devin with his craft for the day. By that time we all had our favorite kids. Devin was mine. He had been given a few cruel nicknames by the other kids at the center—"Devin Devil" was the most popular—and it wasn't hard to understand why. He was loud, defiant, and angry. He wore a constant frown. I loved trying to make him laugh, and every once in a while he'd drop the tough guy act just long enough for me to see there was a pretty sweet kid in there somewhere.

"Not quite so much glue," I advised as Devin squeezed what seemed to be half the bottle onto his construction paper. He scowled at me, but put the bottle down. He picked through the pieces of colored tissue paper that were piled in the middle of the table. "Are you gonna be here for a long time, Heather?" he asked suddenly. His words and face were emotionless—he was playing it cool.

"Not really. Just for a few more days," I told him.

"Oh." For a second, he actually looked disappointed. "What do you have to leave for, anyway?"

"I don't live here. I live in Alabama. I have to go home."

"I don't ever want to go home," Devin declared fiercely.

"Why not?"

He picked up a piece of tissue and smooshed it down. "Because no one there loves me." His voice had lost all emotion again.

That was not the answer I was expecting. And I was shocked at the way he said it—like it was no big deal.

"Devin, that's not true."

"Is too."

I started to argue but stopped, remembering what David, the youth center director, had told us. These kids did not lead easy lives. Most were from broken homes. Some were being raised by grandparents because their parents were in jail or had abandoned them. A lot of them saw drug use every day. Who was I to tell Devin that everything was really just fine at his house?

"There are lots of people here who love you," I finally said. "And God loves you an awful lot, too."

He shrugged. He stuck a few more pieces of tissue paper down and then held up his creation. "Look—I made a stained glass window." He grinned from ear to ear. I'd never seen him do that.

"Great job, Dev."

He grabbed a marker, and I watched as he carefully wrote his name across the top of his paper, his knuckles turning white from the effort. And suddenly, I felt terribly ashamed. I had spent so much time that week pouting about what I didn't have that I'd completely forgotten about all the really good things in my life. I was going home to a house full of people who loved me. So maybe one of them wasn't my dad. Right then, my family was looking pretty great.

A couple days later I said goodbye to Devin. He gave me a big hug, looked a little sad, but said he'd only "probably" miss me.

It's been a few years since then, and I still think about Devin.

I pray that someday he'll feel secure in someone's love.

I still think about my dad too, and sometimes it makes me sad to think of all I've missed. But when those moods come, I try to remember Devin and his difficult life. No matter how much I may think I'm missing, there's surely someone out there who would consider me very blessed.

Mark Labberton writes in Leadership journal:

In a very difficult season when finances were tight, I was driving a dilapidated car that had been donated to the church. It had lots of problems, including a ceiling lining that drooped down and grazed my head every time the broken shock absorbers launched me from the seat toward the roof. The car began to speak to me. It said, "Failure." Why couldn't I get my life together? I was getting older every year, I had a family, this car was humiliating, and I felt like a failure.

This continued for months until the day I took the car to the airport to pick up my nieces. It was a very hot day, the air-conditioning in the car didn't work (surprise), so all four windows were down. Only later did I realize vinyl flakes from the sun-scorched dashboard were being blown into the backseat and covering my sweet nieces.

That day, still without the funds to buy a second car, we leased a new car. It was wonderful! No flakes, no droopy ceiling lining, no broken shocks. I was thrilled until the day this car also began to talk. Its message was also just one word: "Fraud." I was no more put together, no more successful with this new car than with the scuzzy borrowed one. It just looked better. I was a fake.

My life swings between voices calling "failure" and "fraud." The key is not listening to either. I'm not as bad as my critics accuse me of being, but I'm not as good as I've led some to believe. And right there, in the truth somewhere in between, is where we hear the voice of God. He still says to me, and to everyone called to follow Jesus, "I want you and I will use you."

A recently discovered draft of Napoleon Bonaparte's will was sold at auction in Paris for $149,505(U.S.).

One month before his death, a bedridden Napoleon, in exile on the island of St. Helena, dictated his will. In the draft, Napoleon expressed that he forgave his enemies, the English. But those lines were scratched out and did not appear in the final version. The scratched out lines included the words: "As a Christian, I forgive them."

In the final copy Napoleon wrote: "I die prematurely, assassinated by the English oligarchy."

William Frey, retired Episcopal bishop from Colorado, told the following story in a message on the power of God at work in us:

When I was a younger man, I volunteered to read to a degree student named John who was blind. One day I asked him, "How did you lose your sight?"

"A chemical explosion," John said, "at the age of thirteen."

"How did that make you feel?" I asked.

"Life was over. I felt helpless. I hated God," John responded. "For the first six months I did nothing to improve my lot in life. I would eat all my meals alone in my room. One day my father entered my room and said, 'John, winter's coming and the storm windows need to be up—that's your job. I want those hung by the time I get back this evening or else!'

"Then he turned, walked out of the room and slammed the door. I got so angry. I thought Who does he think I am? I'm blind! I was so angry I decided to do it. I felt my way to the garage, found the windows, located the necessary tools, found the ladder, all the while muttering under my breath, 'I'll show them. I'll fall, then they'll have a blind and paralyzed son!'"

John continued, "I got the windows up. I found out later that never at any moment was my father more than four or five feet away from my side."

On June 17, 1966, two black men strode into the Lafayette Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and shot three people to death. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a celebrated black boxer, and an acquaintance were falsely charged and wrongly convicted of the murders in a highly publicized and racially charged trial. The fiercely outspoken boxer maintained his claims of innocence and became his own jailhouse lawyer. After serving nineteen years, Carter was released.

As a free man, Carter reflected on how he has responded to injustice in his life.

The question invariably arises, it has before and it will again: "Rubin, are you bitter?" And in answer to that I will say, "After all that's been said and done—the fact that the most productive years of my life, between the ages of twenty-nine and fifty, have been stolen; the fact that I was deprived of seeing my children grow up—wouldn't you think I would have a right to be bitter? Wouldn't anyone under those circumstances have a right to be bitter? In fact, it would be very easy to be bitter. But that has never been my nature, or my lot, to do things the easy way. If I have learned nothing else in my life, I've learned that bitterness only consumes the vessel that contains it. And for me to permit bitterness to control or to infect my life in any way whatsoever would be to allow those who imprisoned me to take even more than the 22 years they've already taken. Now that would make me an accomplice to their crime.

President Dwight Eisenhower described his mother as a smart and saintly lady. "Often in this job I've wished I could consult her. But she is in heaven. However, many times I have felt I knew what she would say."

One night in their farm home, Mrs. Eisenhower was playing a card game with her boys. "Now, don't get me wrong," said the former president, "it was not with those cards that have kings, queens, jacks, and spades on them. Mother was too straitlaced for that." President Eisenhower said the game they were playing was called Flinch.

"Anyway, Mother was the dealer, and she dealt me a very bad hand. I began to complain. Mother said, 'Boys, put down your cards. I want to say something, particularly to Dwight. You are in a game in your home with your mother and brothers who love you. But out in the world you will be dealt bad hands without love. Here is some advice for you boys. Take those bad hands without complaining and play them out. Ask God to help you, and you will win the important game called life." The president added, "I've tried to follow that wise advice always."

I can honestly say I never said, "Why me?" There are two ways you can react to something like this. you can say, "Why me, God? Why me?" Or you can do an about-face and run to God and cling to him for your security and your hope. That's what I did.

Sympathy is demeaning. Jesus never gave people sympathy. He wept with those who wept; He laughed with those who laughed. But He never said, "Oh, you poor thing. Isn't it awful?" We are not to encourage people who are feeling sorry for themselves. Rather, we are to help them examine the possibilities for changing their situation or their attitude.

The attractiveness of pity and the ugliness of self-pity are unarguable. Yet we live in a society in which self-pity far exceeds pity. The excessively popular genre of literature, the celebrity autobiography, that smotheres us in self-pitying subjectivism is the unpleasant evidence that we may be the most self-pitying populace in all of human history. Feeling sorry for yourself has been developed into an art form. The whining and sniveling that wiser generations ridiculed with satire is given best-seller status among us.

The attractiveness of pity and the ugliness of self-pity are unarguable. Yet we live in a society in which self-pity far exceeds pity. The excessively popular genre of literature, the celebrity autobiography, that smothers us in self-pitying subjectivism is the unpleasant evidence that we may be the most self-pitying populace in all of human history. Feeling sorry for yourself has been developed into an art form. The whining and sniveling that wiser generations ridiculed with satire is given best-seller status among us.

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble. Pity is the capacity to enter into the pain of another in order to do something about it; self-pity is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality. Pity discovers the need in others for love and healing and then fashions speech and action that bring strength; self-pity reduces the universe to a personal wound that is displayed as proof of significance. Pity is adrenaline for acts of mercy; self-pity is a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.