Have the Pity Party!

Hey, Cadre family doctor Kerry here. I received some rather upsetting news this week and instead of feeling the feels from the news, I went straight to fix it mode, straight to problem solving. I am an expert strategist, problem solver. When you throw something at me, I am going to figure out how to make it work. And that's what I did for the next 24 hours. And I was drained. I was mentally, emotionally drained. And then over the course of the next few days, it felt like I just kind of couldn't get above water.

Like I'd come up for air and it just would kind of, like, drag me back down. And I'm like, am I just, like, seriously battling with depression here? Like, I know the weather has been really icky and maybe I'm having some seasonal effective stuff, like, I don't know what's going on, but I just do not feel like myself. And then a series of events occurred that basically knocked me on my b***. And it was one thing after another that just didn't go well, didn't go my way. I got more upsetting news. I had a really unfortunate thing happen, a lot of financial strain all at once.

And on top of all of it, I had, like, bronchitis for the entire week. And I'm, like, so sick and I'm not seeing a human being. I'm not going anywhere and I'm just sitting in isolation. But my mood, I just keep telling myself I'm a life coach. I know that it's not good to stay down. It's not good to stay in a place of just depression and sulking and pitying myself, and I'm just not going to do it. So every time I would slump back down, I would then pull myself out of it and say, no, I am bigger than this.

My God is bigger than this. And go to my happy place. In my mind, for me, that looks like meditation, spending time with God and just pulling myself out of it until the day that all of this stuff then just continued to pile and I got to the place of complete breakdown. Complete breakdown. I am sobbing in the car, can't even see the road in front of me and just losing my freaking mind, to be honest, guys. And then, then I lost it on a salesperson at a store and just couldn't. I just, like, started crying and I was so frustrated and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I am literally having a mental breakdown today.

Then I did what I only knew what to do in that moment was for me, cry out to God and say, you know what? I'm angry about this. I am p***** off about this. This isn't fair. And I want to pity myself, and I want to stay in a place of pity. And then I heard God say, okay, now we're getting somewhere. And then I reached out to a friend who said, you know what? It's okay. It's okay to have a pity party. Like, it's okay to feel icky. It's okay to feel sucky and just sit in that for a little while. And then it dawned on me.

The same thing I tell my clients I wasn't doing. I never actually embraced the opportunity to have my own pity party, because what I was doing throughout this course of pulling myself out of those emotions was invalidating my own emotions and saying, you know what? You're not gonna feel that way, because that's. That's, you know, not the truth about who you are. All this stuff, your situation, like, you're gonna come through this. And I was giving myself these pep talks, these motivational talks.

But in doing that, I was invalidating my emotions. And we are creatures with emotions, good and bad. We have a whole range of emotions as humans. And so what I was doing is I was basically saying, like, you're not allowed to feel sad. You're not allowed to feel grief. You're not allowed to feel the effects of the news that you received. And it was very detrimental because it went through a course of days to the point where I finally broke down and my emotions flooded me. They just flooded me. So I couldn't even cope anymore.

And then I just said, you know what? I'm gonna take the whole day and have a pity party, and I'm gonna be okay with that, and I'm just gonna do whatever I need to do. Within an hour, my brain switched. Something went off, and it was kind of like I finally released all of it. I cried enough, and I just had released it all. And then the next day, I had was pure joy. Like, I could. I could see again. I could see the grass green. I could see the blooming flowers. I could hear the birds chirping. It's like this weight had been lifted off my head because I actually was allowed to process the emotions and feel the icky feelings.

So I just want to encourage you today, whatever place you're in, you definitely don't want to stay in a place of self pity. That's not healthy, but you kind of have to go there sometimes. You have to allow yourself to get to that kind of low point to flood the emotions through you and actually kind of wash them out and then pick yourself up and say, okay, now we're not going to go back there, and we're going to stay in a place of victory and stay in a place of looking at the positives and making sure that my mind is set on gratitude.

And I'm not going to go back to that pity party. But let yourself go there if you need to. And I just want to encourage you that it's safe and it's okay to do that as long as you have a defined amount of time that you do that for. And then you say, okay, now I'm done with it, now that I've let those emotions wash through me. So I hope this was helpful and inspiring for you guys today. God bless. Bye.