I deserve your sympathy and I expect to see it.
I deserve your sympathy but I can’t control it so I don’t think about it.
I don’t care if anyone feels sorry for me or not.
I dont need anyone’s sympathy.
I actively reject your sympathy, because it makes me feel like shit and I don’t like feeling like shit.
This is my party, man!!
Add to this mental calculation the claim often made by codependent people wherein they tell someone else “you deserve the worlds pity, and if you don’t get it you should feel righteous anger.”
Is that helpful on any level?
My take is that shit happens. There are true victims in this world, true infathomable horrors and countless mindless petty cruelties. These are valid claims.
But in the same sense you would not leave your front door wide open in a bad neighborhood, why would you allow your internal world to be dominated by what others do and say? It’s unhealthy, and largely unnecessary. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something, usually short term comfort at the cost of long term self esteem. And the profit they derive is the active avoidance of their own failures and shortcomings as human beings, combined with an unwarranted inflation in their subjective sense of self worth.