The Healing Power of Self-Pity
By: Anna Szabo
Tags: Christian Living, Self Improvement, Healing, Self Love, Self Help

“The Healing Power of Self-Pity” Talk

Choose happiness! Hold your head up high and don’t you ever let them see you cry! These performance demands are imposed on us by our Instagrammed, photoshopped culture. I chose happiness all the time, despite the tremendous adversity in my life, and it worked. Until it didn’t. Today, I would like to share with you how I ditched toxic positivity and became fully human by discovering and experiencing the healing power of self-pity.

Did you know that suicide is the second leading cause of death in America for ages 10 to 34? At 34, I contemplated killing myself. What saved me from suicide? Self-pity.

Cambridge Dictionary defines self-pity as sadness about your own problems. I never allowed myself to feel sadness. I chose happiness and coped with life’s emotional pain by becoming a goal-minded high achiever. In fact, on the day I was planning my suicide, the waitress who served me lunch said I looked sophisticated, projected confidence, and appeared to have my life together. I responded with thanks, opened my journal, and wrote the following:

“I feel like I just need to die. It sucks to be alive. My life sucks and it sucks to be me.” Anna Szabo

My life was falling apart: divorce, job loss, betrayal by friends, and financial struggles. Those troubles were not the first season of adversity for me. Born out of wedlock during the crush of the USSR, raised on welfare by a single mom with mental health issues, I was told that would never amount to anything.

My mom taught me that I was ugly, stupid, worthless, and a mistake. She revealed to me how she went to abort me. She persuaded me that I didn’t deserve to live. She looked me straight in the eye and yelled: “I hate you and I just want you dead!” Read my essay called “Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.” I attempted suicide twice as a child. All I knew about my father was that he was in jail and that I was an unwanted accident. I felt confused about who I was and why I was even born…

There was so much pain in my life! But I was never allowed to feel. Instead, I was forced to perform and achieve perfection. So, performance, perfection, and toxic positivity became my addiction.

In our small Soviet condo full of alcoholic relatives, I endured emotional abuse and physical violence. I was raped twice. I experienced teen pregnancy. I suffered a miscarriage at 17.

In the midst of it all, I chose happiness and held my head up high, focusing on achieving my goals. I graduated with high honors from several universities in Russia. I also found a perfect husband, in America, through an online matchmaking agency. Yes, I am a mail-ordered bride. In 2008, I emigrated from Russia to America to live my happily-ever-after with my American Prince Charming.

He beat the life out of me. Read an article about my domestic violence story. I was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter for victims of domestic violence in 2009. I became homeless in a foreign country without speaking the language. Life was very hard for me but I chose happiness and held my head up high, focusing on achieving my goals.

Within 18 months, I taught myself English listening to Frank Sinatra and was accepted to GA state university in 2011. I graduated with an MBA and a 3.74 GPA in 2013 and published a book called “Turn Your Dreams and Wants Into Achievable SMART Goals!” which was recognized by International Book Awards and Indie Excellence Awards. I hoped that adversity was in the past…

In 2015, a Godly man, who worked at the mega-church I attended, began courting me for marriage. He was so perfect that, after each date, I wrote him a gratitude letter, a collection of which turned into a gratitude book, which I gave him as a wedding gift. Four months after our wedding, my perfect Christian husband … filed for divorce saying he wasn’t interested in me anymore and wanted to be an IronMan instead and compete in Kona. He called his bicycle “My other wife I cheat on you with” and I felt deceived, disoriented, devalued, discarded, and depressed. Read an article about my story of narcissistic relationship abuse.

While contemplating suicide, I came across a lecture on depression by Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. It explained that after about 5 major setbacks in life, adversity becomes too much, and that’s when people choose to escape emotional pain by suicide. The lecture also explained that depression is known as self-aggression, which is anger against self. Anger is known as unprocessed grief. So, it’s unresolved sadness.

I had experienced more than five setbacks in my life. So, on the inside, I resented my addiction to performance, perfection, and toxic positivity, but on the outside, I felt pressured to choose happiness all the time. I was in conflict with myself. Me, myself, and I did not see eye-to-eye. I was tired of being trapped in the happiness illusion. That‘s why I was depressed and suicidal. My self-aggression resulted from decades of accumulated and compounded unprocessed grief.

I realized that, to be friends with myself, to stop depression, self-aggression, and suicidal ideation, I had to ditch the unreasonable demands of our culture, escape the deadly trap of toxic positivity, acknowledge my emotional pain, allow myself to be sad about my own problems, and become fully human by experiencing the healing power of self-pity. My breakthrough resulted in a letter to myself, which is this poem.

Every 12.3 min an American dies by suicide. What if we taught people how to cope with life’s emotional pain by leveraging the healing power of self-pity? Everyone’s life sometimes rocks and sometimes sucks. Yet, life is worth living.

As a Christian coach, I help women see themselves the way God sees them. And I have a dream: one day, you will become comfortable being uncomfortable, spending quiet time in the presence of your feelings, acknowledging your emotional pain, experiencing sadness about your own problems, and processing your grief through genuine tears.

Let’s be fully human! Let’s ditch toxic positivity! Let’s liberate ourselves from the deadly trap of the happiness illusion! Let’s teach self-pity as a coping tool in schools and in the workplace! Help alleviate suicide in my neighborhood and our world.

Thank you.