The Psychology of Self Injustice

Are you working yourself to death?

"Some people just really like to feel sorry for themselves," that's the way it can really seem and it's hard not to believe otherwise.  Not that I don't ever feel sorry for myself, because I do, but to a point.  I let myself feel what I'm feeling and then I move on to greener pastures.

You see, everything works out in the end.  It does.  That is once you realize that some things are out of your control and you decide to act upon that fact.  When you stay in a rut of worry and sorry, especially if it's because of a boss, it only perpetuates the cycle and the "everything works out" part is all that much farther away and you become depressed and stressed if it's not really what you want.  

That said, and this may be confusing to some that it can actually be both ways, some people do enjoy their worry and their sorry while they are hating their worry and sorry and the situation that brought them to those two things. This oxymoron of emotion comes partially from habit, but it is one that allows for them to place blame on everyone but themselves if something doesn't work out because, "See all that I am doing... and still?  See how I am sacrificing? And see how wrong and terrible my boss is?"  So much blame is put on them already that it is a release and a relief to act and react in this way.

Now to be fair, a boss can easily take away your livelihood. In an instant. The economy has nothing to do with this fact.  And if you are devoting all and more than you have for years at a time, you can become too depressed and too tired to make life changing decisions and new goals for yourself.  If you have a family to support, it's even harder to get out of the hamster wheel that a job tends to exercise its employees on.  Unfortunately, in these last few years the economy does have everything to do with the fact that people no longer have the opportunity to simply switch out of a bad job or at least one with better pay.  And most of us are not one of the lucky few that work for a company of good morals, values, and ethics.  I mean the human kind not the Christian kind (though some are one and the same). 

And not all of us are lucky enough to be in a job we love.  If we are working in a field we love, but the politics or higher ups of that job are terrible, the hours are terrible, and the benefits are terrible, the work we love is at risk of being, if it already isn't, work that we can no longer stand. 

A lot can come from this terrible cesspool that we've found ourselves in.  Our family and family life suffers.  We expect more out of them. We begin to mistrust them as we do our own selves and our own job security.  We can't deal with the normal issues that come with a family, yet we are doing "all of this" for them.  We begin to compare the one in charge of our home with the one in charge of our work.  We blame those we do just because we can, like our boss does to us.  Time becomes a blur.  We realize what we are doing, but we can't stop the cycle, at least not for long.  The longer we are in this mess, the more the cesspool becomes quicksand.  We can't understand why our significant other is not solving our problems, because surely they can see what is happening to us.  

And we continue with our worry and our feelings of being sorry for ourselves because it's the only thing that seems to comfort us.  So in this sense, yes, you can be completely right in saying that "Some people just really like to feel sorry for themselves."  

But try as one might to offer up a bit of the life that could be, offer moments of being in the moment without worrying or sorry feelings, the only way that the person in question can accept any offerings, is if that is exactly what they do, accept those offerings. 

We are the only person that can take ourselves off the hamster wheel.  We are the only ones that can make the true sacrifices that benefit those who really matter in the end, our family and those who were with us the best that they could be through it all.