According to abbreviationfinder.org, the concept of commiseration, which comes from the Latin word commiseratio, is used to refer to mercy or pity that is experienced in the face of a person’s discomfort or pain. Commiseration, therefore, is linked to the sadness that an individual feels when representing the evil that a third party suffered or is suffering.
For example: “The man observed with compassion the child who begged for alms at the church door”, “I cannot understand how the suffering of the elderly does not generate compassion for certain people”, “The relatives of the accused sought the compassion of the court, but they were unsuccessful. “
Commiseration is related to empathy. When one subject sympathizes with another, pity arises. This is because you understand the pain of others as it is projected and can assume how you would feel if you were in the same situation. Commiseration can give way to solidarity and generate some action that helps the person who is suffering to feel relief.
If someone feels sorry for himself, he speaks of self – pity. This feeling arises from pessimism and selfishness. Those who are pessimistic think that misfortune rules their life: that is why they feel sorry for their bad fortune. On the other hand, self-pity is selfish because the person concentrates excessively on his own problems and does not pay attention to the fact that, around him, other people may also be suffering. This peculiarity makes various religions consider self-pity as a sin or an ethical fault.
Self-pity can be taken as an attitude that arises from selfishness, but it can also be understood as a response to fear, as a form of defense against certain threats that the subject perceives. In itself, someone who thinks he is haunted by bad luck lives with fear on a daily basis. As if this were not enough, this condition is often accompanied by deep self-contempt: the individual does not consider himself worthy of good things.
Getting through a stage of self-pity first requires a lack of protection from responsible adults during childhood. It is from a series of internal deficiencies that the subject becomes convinced that if they have not wanted it, it is because they did not deserve it and that, therefore, their lack of luck is normal. The people around you may feel that your attitude is selfish because you tend to spend much of your time thinking about your own problems and fearing those to come, but in reality this is because the situation consumes you.
The concept of commiseration, on the other hand, is well seen by religions, and in fact it is one of the fundamental steps to become a person of good according to most of the precepts. When we feel pain and sorrow for the suffering or misfortune of another person, we also manage to get in touch with our own humanity, with what makes us living beings.
To understand others is to understand ourselves, it is to see the pain of others as our own, based on the fact that we are all the same and can suffer in the same way, enjoy in the same way, because barriers are only cultural creations and not they respond to our true essence.
This particular degree of compassion appears in a large number of fictional stories, ranging from literature to popular music, although it can be presented in many different ways. Like any other feeling, not all people experience it in the same way, or else the description we offer of it is different from what others do.