TRANSCRIPT
I would like to analyze the subject of pity. I was raised in my childhood to consider pity a good quality. I was supposed to pity my parents in lots of different ways, and they liked that. And when I say pity, what it really means is I was supposed to feel sorry for them. I was supposed to feel sorry for other people who, in a way, were victims of life. My heart was supposed to break for them. In a way, I was supposed to lose myself, lose my strength, lose my integrity, and instead feel their feelings. And also to make them feel good. In a lot of ways, it was my job, by pitying my parents, to make them feel happy, to validate their victimhood in life.
Why was I expected to do this? Well, I think a big part of it is my parents were both people who were strongly full of self-pity. Self-pity meaning they felt sorry for themselves. They were living lives, in many ways, as victims. Yes, they had been victimized when they were children, but as they grew up, they took on the relationship with themselves as continuing to see themselves as victims. And by pitying them, I acknowledged, I validated them as being victims of life. Victims being people who could not heal, people who could not take the strength of becoming parents for their own internal selves, of engaging in their own healing processes.
By pitying them, at some level, I validated for them that they could never heal. They could never take control of their lives. They could never block their traumatizers from their past. They couldn’t put up boundaries with their own parents. They couldn’t work out their traumas. They couldn’t feel their buried, repressed feelings. And also, by pitying them, I let them off the hook for the traumas they were doing to me. The traumas that they were replicating on me, their own child. And by pitying them, I was telling them, “It’s okay, you have no choice but to do this. You are a victim of life. You have no free will. You can’t do anything to heal yourselves. You can’t really become strong and mature in your lives.”
My mom loved it when I pitied her. “Oh poor mom, you’re an alcoholic, but you can’t control yourself, and I love you anyways.” Mommy, I know you’re out of control, and you do bad things to me and to other people, and you’re self-destructive and don’t behave as a good mother, but I love you anyways. I feel so sorry for you, and my heart breaks for you. And she said, “I love you so much, Daniel, unconditionally. I love you more than anyone ever loved anyone ever, and it’s unconditional.” But it wasn’t unconditional. So much of the condition was that I had to feel sorry for her. I had to pity her.
The same went for my dad. Even when he was abusing me, I think of my dad tearing me down emotionally, hitting me, even dragging me out of the house, locking me outside. And then afterward, feeling a little twinge of shame, realizing that he had not just overreacted, but grossly overreacted. He had acted out his unresolved rage at his parents on a victim, on a true victim, a little boy named Daniel, who was his son. And sometimes he’d come in and come outside and let me in the house. This was cold, and I was shivering outside. I would come in, and then he’d say, “I do love you.” And I’d say, “Don’t worry, dad, I feel so bad that you acted that way.” And he’d cry sometimes. He said, “I love you unconditionally. You’re so compassionate and understanding.” But really, it wasn’t that I was compassionate. It was that I pitied him.
I pitied him because I had no choice. If I wanted my dad to love me unconditionally, the condition was that I had to pity him. I had no choice but to pity my mom. And my parents were people who pitied other people. They pitied people of minority races. They pitied people of unfortunate financial situations. They pitied trauma victims. They pitied homeless people. They gave money away. They donated money. They were kind and generous souls. But really, what I realized is all this pity they had, it wasn’t respectful.
And what I was trained to do, to pity other people, to give my money away to people who were less fortunate than I was, this wasn’t love. This wasn’t nurturing people to become real and healthy. This wasn’t becoming a role model of maturity, a role model of healing, a shining inspiration in life of becoming self-possessed on the journey to work out one’s traumas, to become a true, real, honest, ethical, self-actualized person—the path that I’m striving to be on now.
Instead, by pitying people, the message was, “You can never heal. You’re so pathetic, and I’m gonna share my good fortune with you. I, who just happen to be in a better position of life, a lucky, fortunate position. I, who actually am very similar to you in a lot of ways, and I’m a pathetic person on the inside because I can’t heal my traumas. But I am going to make myself feel good, a sense of self-esteem, which really isn’t self-esteem. It’s false self-esteem because it honors my false self.
Because by treating you with pity, by telling you, “Here, let me give you a little of this. Let me give you a little crocodile tears and maybe some money and maybe some food or whatever it is that I’m going to give you as an expression of my pity,” I’m sending you the message that you’re just as broken as I am, that you can never take responsibility for your life, that you can never turn your life around and heal, and that we’re all in this together in this miserable existence, and nobody’s going to heal, and there is no such thing as healing. And I don’t buy into that.
Also, what I saw is behind the scenes, after my parents pitied people, after they gave them this and that, and after they gave them pity, actually secretly, they despised these people. A lot of their surface love for these other people, these less fortunate people, less fortunate races, less fortunate ethnicities, and people in difficult financial situations, people with problems, people even with psychiatric problems—all this pity they gave, all this love, behind the scenes, they didn’t like these people.
And then I think of my grandmother, my mother’s mom, who made a lifestyle of being an object of pity. Her husband, my grandfather, was always having affairs with other women. Sometimes he’d bring the women right over to the house when my grandmother was out. He was probably having sex with these women in their bed, and my grandmother knew this, and she put up with it. And I always wondered, why didn’t she leave him? And later I brought it up. “Oh, I could never leave him. I love him so much. He can’t control himself. He just has a sexual appetite that’s too big.”
And I realize she pitied him, but more so, she liked it that he behaved this way because then she could become an object of pity for the whole wide world. She had all four of her children wrapped around her finger with pity. They would come, “Oh poor mom, poor grandma, she’s such a sad woman. She’s such a victim of life.” And they never broke away from her. And what she got was four little children who would do her bidding. Both of her sons became her surrogate husbands, and she loved that. And the glue which held their relationship together was pity.
And sometimes when she wasn’t getting enough pity from the external world, she would just fall into massive self-pity. And what she would do to further this self-pity was to drink massive amounts of alcohol. This is an old lady in her 70s, in her 80s, who would get hammered on alcohol, and she would become, “I feel so bad for myself. Life has been so unfair to me.” And she would cry and boo-hoo-hoo, “Please just hug me, hold me, Daniel.” And it’s like, ew.
When I grew up into my 20s and into my 30s, I thought, “This is disgusting. This is not what I want to be.” Instead, I started working out my traumas. I started looking in myself and realizing I don’t want to pity myself. Self-pity is a disgusting feeling. It’s like becoming a perennial victim of life. Instead, I want to work this stuff out. And yeah, there’s a lot of pain in there, and yeah, there’s a lot of grief and a lot of sorrow, but if…
I want to move through that. I have to bring it up. I have to analyze it fundamentally. I have to grieve my losses. And so I made a lifestyle of it, really, starting in my early 20s. Really making a lifestyle of bringing up my pain. And I learned something really interesting: that when I was crying in grief about my losses, this wasn’t crying. These weren’t tears of self-pity. These were tears of grief. It was very, very different.
But so often, the outside world, especially my family system—and I’ll use my grandmother as a perfect example—they didn’t know the difference because they’d never grieved. All they knew is they saw crying. They saw crying as wallowing in self-pity. Many people, therapists even, when they see someone grieving, they panic. Oh, you have severe depression! You have to take pills! Get away from these feelings! Bury them! Push them down! Let’s talk about the here and now. Let’s stop with the feelings. You’re over-feeling. You’re crossing boundaries. You’re making me uncomfortable. I saw that many, many times in therapists that I have, and I’ve certainly seen no lack of therapists around me when I was a therapist myself who treated their clients that way. They much preferred to pity their clients.
Well, what happened to me when I, early on, especially when I started being very open about my grieving process, about my traumas, how I’d been misused and violated, and I was bringing up grief to actually integrate myself, to connect myself with who I was—not that I wanted to stay in that state forever. And actually, over the long haul, not that I did stay in that state forever. I don’t grieve nearly as much as I used to because so much of my traumas are already grieved.
But what I saw is when I was grieving, those people who lived in self-pity, who wanted to maintain their relationship with me, they pitied me. My grandmother, “Oh, Daniel, I feel so sad for what you go through. I just go home and cry about it.” And my mother would say, “Oh, Daniel, I feel so sad that you’re in such pain. I pray for you all the time. I hope that you can find peace and happiness.” And I realized they were not wanting me to grieve. They were just wanting to pity me.
And I realized outside in the world, there are a lot of people who use that as a mechanism to bond with other people. They see someone else having a feeling that’s called negative, especially negative feelings—negative feelings like sadness, unhappiness, frustration, confusion in life—and they home right in on it and they say, “Oh, I feel so bad for you.” And I know there are a lot of therapists who do this. They bond with their clients by pitying them. And there are a lot of people out there who like being pitied. They’ll pay big money to therapists every week, twice a week, even just to pity them. There’s no healing in it. There’s no movement. There’s no evolution on a personal level. But they don’t care because they like to be pitied. And some therapists like to do this. They like to get paid to pity people. And they want other people to pity them. Sometimes therapists who make a living pitying their clients actually themselves go to a therapist who pities them.
Well, what I realized when people started pitying me, and when I realized their way of gaining intimacy with me was to pity me, it made me feel gross. It made me want to vomit. Yeah, this is disgusting. And I would say to people, “Stop it! Don’t pity me! You’re not being respectful.” And I realized they weren’t being respectful. They were crossing my boundaries. They were kind of wanting to climb inside of me and become a victim with me in a way that I didn’t want to be a victim. And I’m like, “Get out! Stop pitying me! Respect my process!”
I’m like, “What am I supposed to say? I feel so bad for you?” I’m like, “Don’t feel bad for me! I’m grieving! You should say you’re lucky that you can grieve! How fortunate are you that you can grieve, that you can look at what happened to you? You can actually work it out!” But then I realized that I was preaching to people who had no idea what I was talking about. They had no personal conception of grieving. All they knew was crying was wallowing in self-pity, and they liked that better than when I was grieving.
When they started figuring out that another side of my grief process was actually holding my traumatizers responsible—not that I expected my traumatizers to change because they never would, they never could, because they were still stuck in their own self-pity process—when these people who pitied me realized that there was another side of my grief process, that was to reclaim my anger. My anger being a vital part of retaining my boundaries. My anger, which I wasn’t allowed as a little boy when I was being traumatized because my parents didn’t like my anger.
When these people who pitied me realized I had anger and I said, “Ah! Get out of my life! Get out of my emotional inner circle! Don’t pity me! That’s disgusting! Stop it! You’re being disrespectful!” they were shocked. They felt overwhelmed. But really what it was is I think it reminded them of how they were self-pitying in their own internal world and how they were living a really false, duplicitous existence. They were deluding themselves to think that it was good to self-pity, and by extension, it was good to pity me. And I was calling out their charade. I was calling out the lie of their existence.
I was really saying, by saying, “Stop pitying me! Don’t do this! Get out of my inner world! Stop treating me this way! It’s disrespectful!” What I was really saying—and I didn’t realize it at the time—what I was really saying to them is, “Grow up! Stop pitying yourself! Take responsibility for your own existence! Follow my example! If you want to be close to me, heal your own stuff! Deal with your own stuff! Look at your traumas! Get away from the people who harmed you! Acknowledge the harm that you’ve done to others!”
And to me, that’s another thing. All these people who live in pity—my parents, who were going around always pitying the unfortunate in the world, pitying people who didn’t have the good luck that they had, didn’t have the money, the education, pitying people in other countries and war-torn countries—what I realized is they weren’t taking responsibility for the actual harm that they directly caused their own child. And that was very interesting to me, that they were much more comfortable feeling sorry for people who they had no responsibility for having harmed. And they were trying to help these people, and yet here they had a child who himself was growing, getting to know himself, getting to figure out what had happened.
And when I even, at first, without even any anger, was just saying, “You know, I remembered, Mom, that you did some really weird, perverse things to me. What was your reason for doing that? Do you even remember what you did?” Or talking to my dad and saying, “You know, when I was 12 and you smacked me in the face and dragged me outside and yelled at me and said, ‘You’re an animal! Go outside and you can only come in when you become human again!’ I said, ‘Do you remember that, Dad? Why’d you…'”
Well, then I thought, “Oh, they didn’t like me. They hated me.” That reminded them of how troubled they were, how confused they were. And if they really had been able to acknowledge it, they would have had to look at and ask the question of, “Why did I do that to my son? My son who really fundamentally did nothing wrong? Why did I actually victimize him?” And then they would have had to look at how abused they were as children. They would have had to engage in the healing process, and they couldn’t do that. Instead, they were committed to a lifestyle of self-pity and, by extension, pitying the less fortunate. And in that way, maintaining the traumatized, non-healing, non-growing status quo of their own selves, of the family system, and of the world in general.