Self-pity - a distorted version of reality

Willow catkin by Ally Matson

Willow is the flower remedy to help us shift the feelings of self-pity and resentment which we can all experience from time to time.

The word ‘resentment’ means ‘to feel again’. When we are resentful we re-live the emotion which upset us and stoke the embers of self-pity and injustice into a new flame of bitterness and ‘poor me’. Willow is for those times when we are in the ‘me versus them’ mood. ‘They’ always have it so good, everything is easy for them, whereas I am always the one who suffers, I’m always the last one to be considered.  The anger we aim at others can also be a way of avoiding anger at ourselves.

When we feel sorry for ourselves, we have chosen a version of reality to fit our feelings. Paget Kagy (@pagetkagy) says on her Instagram page that life is like Netflix – we can choose any programme to watch and even while we are watching it, all the other programmes still exist, running concurrently in the ether rather than in front of us. When we choose the programme that shows us as the long-suffering martyr, we can take Willow and come to realise that life is whatever reality we wish to enact: we can select the programme for love, laughter, self-fulfilment, hope – or the opposites.

Even quantum physics supports this way of perceiving reality. It finds that past outcomes are only fixed when decisions are made in the present. This echoes what Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been."

When we are suffering from self-pity, we wallow in the story. The initial causative emotion may have passed some time ago but we keep replaying the story of who made us unhappy, what they said, or what they did or didn’t do, that felt unfair and undeserved. That story rumination is unhealthy. Taking Willow helps to ground us so that, having felt the feelings which caused us misery, we rise up from that mire, see the mud for what it was – something to learn from – and grow upwards into a bright, new day.

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More about Willow and the other 37 remedies in my new book Space to Reflect,  here