Love yourself, they say.

But what if we haven’t a clue about healthy love actually is? On top of that, ask any ten people to define love and you’ll get ten different responses back. Love is a lot like ‘spirituality’: when we try to define love, we don’t find its limits but instead our own.

Compassion, however, seems to have a more grounded meaning, because we normally understand it to mean something like empathy in action. We tend to feel empathy yet show compassion. It is an action of connection, in which we show concern and demonstrate our empathy for the suffering of another.

So what does it look like to show compassion for oneself? We could start with what happens when it is absent.

I always felt a strange sense of relief and satisfaction when someone would tell me, “You’re too hard on yourself.” I’d reply, “Ya, I guess so.”, but I’d think, strangely enough, “Thank you.” They were showing compassion, but in hearing their words, I’d feel mildly satisfied. Why is that?

I’ve come to learn that my ego was getting fed—hearing “you’re too hard on yourself” affirmed a core aspect of my identity. Ego requires constant and regular feeding and it doesn’t like change. That’s because ego is not who we are; it is who we think we are. All egos are fragile projections of the conversations between our conscious and unconscious minds. My ego response would be “Yes, I have been too hard on myself. This is how I am” But I would not stop and question why I’m hard on myself. I would just carry on.

I would also think about drinking. Nothing is harder on a person suffering from alcoholism than to drink. In the mind of the alcoholic, however, drinking one’s burdens away is the solution to all of life’s problems.

In the summer of 2022, I was about a year dry (I can’t say sober because I was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt). I was bereft of all purpose in life, had no connections with people, and living as a shut-in. It was the bottom of a nine-year slide. I was bound-up with unresolved grief and completely lost. I reached out for help and eventually made my way to a counsellor. During our sessions my counsellor suggested that I look at the practise of self-compassion. I obtained a copy of Kristen Neff’s Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind.

Learning about self-compassion opened me up to a new and timely understanding. I discovered that my tendency to be hard on myself is not an innate trait of who I am. It was formed by the situation of my development and upbringing and perpetuated over the years through my negatively critical inner dialogue. I tended to surround myself with people who would, either overtly or unconsciously, confirm my feelings of worthlessness. (Martyrs and persecutors tend to find each other in a crowd.) A key reason why I have pushed everyone away for so many years was because I wanted out of the control drama. But all of this was conditioned and not my true nature. I learned that I can change it.

Neff notes that “the best way to counteract self-criticism, therefore, is to understand it, have compassion for it, and then replace it with a kinder response.” (33)

I might say to myself, “I’ve made a mess of my life—I have no partner, no children, no career, and no prospect of securing my retirement.” That’s a pretty harsh self-critique, even if it is partly true. But perhaps this is a good case in which it’s better to be kind than right. My statement contains a lot of despair and hopelessness, for sure, but it erases the fact that I suffer from addiction—a condition over which I have no power. So, this ‘mess’ was caused by active addiction and mental health problems, not just because of my choices. That can become my understanding of this self-criticism.

Now, I can choose to have compassion for that despair. I am suffering because of grief over things that might have been had I not been troubled with addiction. A compassionate response is to accept my powerlessness over addiction. It is a kindness to self when I accept this fact. Addiction has controlled my life, against my will. It has robbed me of hopes and dreams. I am not alone in this suffering, however, everyone I meet in my recovery groups share the same struggle and pain. Self-compassion begins with kindness and then move to shared humanity. Neff explains a situation that is all too familiar for most of us:

“Feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It seems like a vicious cycle: the more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel… we often irrationally feel that the rest of the world is happily employed while it’s only me sitting at home watching reruns all day” (54).

Getting out to recovery group meetings breaks that cycle of isolation and despair. I need to treat this as something more than simply a thought experiment. The kinder response needs to involve some sort of action on my part. I cannot ‘think’ my way out of self-criticism; my rational mind is not enough to make me happy (and it does not know this!).

Writing is an action I take to respond with kindness. Almost every time I write here, I learn something new about myself. I can also look at the words tumbling onto the page and witness the act of me being kinder to myself. I can remind myself that what I am suffering is part of my experience of being human, and others share the same suffering. I may feel alone, but I am not alone. Getting out and into a place where I can experience common humanity through shared experience is very helpful. As an addict, I’m very lucky to have meetings available when I need that connection.

Self-compassion begins with kindness to oneself, and then turning toward the experience of common humanity. There is a third piece in Neff’s view of self-compassion, and that is mindfulness. I have written about pure awareness, and mindfulness is the act of taking a some deep breaths and observing our thoughts. We become the observer of our own thinking, and in doing so we stop over-identifying with our internal drama. We slip away from attachment to the past and turn away from anxiety about the future. We direct our focus to the present moment, observe our thoughts, how and where we might be holding tension in our body, and we breathe through it all, training our mind to remain in the present. Mindfulness is a practice, but even those doing it for the very first time can see results from start.

Mindfulness practice won’t remove pain, but it does interrupt our over-identification with our personal drama. This helps to stop needless suffering. Without taking action, I get so caught-up in my own personal drama that it seems to be reality—as opposed to just my perception of reality. When we take a moment to become aware of our thoughts and feelings, we take seat apart form them. We occupy a space of pure awareness that observes our thoughts and feelings without judgement. I like to call this my higher-self, that part of me that is connected to my soul.

But the goal is not to try to become some sort of guru. It’s about about coming to understand how we get attached to stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s about seeing how we attach to these stories, even though they may cause us harm. When I get caught in these dramas, and then I become aware of what I’m doing, my instinctive response is to resist. But what we resist persists!

With mindfulness… “we can see that different thoughts and emotions arise and pass away, and we can decide which are worth paying attention to and which are not….Mindfulness provides us with the opportunity to respond rather than simply react. (Neff 77, 78).

Self-compassion is a wonderful practice for anyone who finds that they spend far too much time (which is any amount of time!) beating themselves up. It is a simple process for complicated people.

We observe self-criticism and try to understand it.

We respond with self-kindness.

We remember that what we’re going through is part of being a human being.

We stop, breathe, and observe, giving ourselves opportunity to shape future moments into a gentle place without suffering. We may still hurt, but we need not suffer needlessly.

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References

Neff, Kristen. 2011. Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. New York: Harper Collins.