Many people feel sorry for themselves and they seek the healing elsewhere. They want to tell other people how bad they are feeling, etc. so that they can feel healed from their compassion, because compassion, whether it comes from within ourselves or from someone else, is a very healing thing. So if we can learn how to give ourselves compassion, we don't have to feel so sorry for ourselves.
A lot of the times people are seeking attention by feeling sorry for themselves. They realize life is Dukkha and they want to express it to somebody else. What they're seeking at that time is an understanding from that other person, rather than understanding their own capacities within themselves to end their suffering. Sometimes it gets to a point where they've indulged it so much that they can't seem to get out of it, they feel they need more and more feelings of suffering, that they need to feel sorry for themselves, and they become overwhelmed by it.
A lot of people are just expressing their feelings of inability to cope and their non-belief in their inner capacities to deal with it. So we have to try to see when we do this in ourselves and understand that we do have the capacity to feel compassion for ourselves at this time. We don't need to seek others to feel compassion for us. We don't need to explain how difficult life is, because most people do know that life is difficult. We want to get ourselves into the bigger mind. When we're lost in feeling sorry for ourselves, there are so many thoughts of self, and me, and mine, that our mind becomes small. We are craving pleasure and fearing the opposite of that.
When our mind is so small and caught up in self, the smallest problems become huge and overwhelming. So we're stuck in this shrunken state of mind which, yes, the smallest problems seem huge. We want to get out of this shrunken state, this is why we do the D/D method, to get to that bigger mind, to get to that compassion within. Then the mind becomes unselfish and the biggest problems become small.
So it's a matter of perception, coming from the selfish mind. The selfish mind really does believe sometimes that our suffering is so big, because it doesn't have the power of the Unselfish Emotions to make the mind bigger.