He lives in a corner of the Hundred Acre Wood described on the map as "Eeyore's Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad". Sometimes he goes around with his own personal black cloud raining on him. We're talking, of course, about the donkey in Winnie the Pooh.
Eeyore sees life through a lens of gloom. He expects to be disappointed. He feels sorry for himself.
Cheering him up is a near-impossible task. When told Christopher Robin is having a party he speculates: “I suppose they will be sending me down the odd bits which got trodden on. Kind and Thoughtful. Not at all, don’t mention it.”
I was in touch with my Eeyore side recently when I went around feeling sorry for myself for a few days because I had one of those autumn “doses” that have been afflicting people. I sat there miserably at my desk staring at a screen and telling myself I was in no condition to do anything except sniffle.
Fortunately, I realised that the feelings of gloom were worse than the actual infection. I could, in fact, do a great deal if I gave up whining.
I thought of sportspeople who appear to shrug off illnesses and injuries. In all likelihood, they don’t really shrug them off at all: they just don’t waste time and energy feeling sorry for themselves.
That's why they seem to perform miracles of resilience to get themselves back onto the field of play while some of us would still be wrapped up in our misery, watching reruns of Friends.
During that bout of infection I discovered a shadowy sense in my mind that I was under an obligation to feel sorry for myself. It was like a toxic psychological vow: “When things go wrong I promise to feel really, really bad even if I don’t have to.”
Bad mood
That sense of obligation even urged me to go around in a bad mood as the condition got better. But I also noticed that whenever I reminded myself not to feel sorry for myself, I brightened up. I had lifted a burden off my shoulders.
Some people bring this feeling- sorry-for-themselves habit to such a fine art that other people start to avoid them. You give them sympathy because you can sense their misery, but after a time you grow tired.
You wish that they could figure out how to accept the ups and downs of life and get on with things.
Cruel? No. The longer you live, the more you see people who adapt to feeling sorry for themselves so well that they may as well have hoisted a big bag of rocks onto their shoulders to haul around for their entire lives. To want them to be free of that is far from cruel.
And it becomes all too easy for people to treat them in accordance with their glum view of life. When Winnie the Pooh gave Eeyore an empty honey jar for his birthday, to put things into, it was a sadly suitable present for a donkey who reckoned he wouldn’t get much anyway and and that whatever he got wouldn’t really make much difference.
What’s the technique for stepping outside of feeling sorry for yourself?
The only one that I have found so far is to spot myself doing it when I’m doing it and to remind myself that I don’t want to do it.
That seems to work well enough to make a positive difference to the quality of my days.
Of course I relapse, but the better I get at spotting it, the more I’m able to step out from under my personal rain cloud.
So what you need to do is develop a sort of “feeling sorry” radar and deploy it in your life. Every time you find you’ve slipped into that Eeyore state, ask yourself: But what if I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself?
It’s worth a try: time to put down that bag of rocks.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com