You feel lonely and depressed. When you look inside you find an aching heart and a lack of hope and optimism for the days ahead.
But instead of treating yourself with kindness and love and nourishing your wounded spirit you are angry for feeling this way and have little patience when you stumble or fall on life’s journey. You fail to show compassion to yourself.
Now consider how you would react if a close friend or stranger confided their innermost feelings of angst to you, how sympathetic and compassionate you would be and how keen to ease their load.
Alison McGeown, a psychotherapist and counsellor working locally, says self compassion involves treating yourself with the same love and kindness as you would treat others who are suffering.
“Compassion, which literally means ‘to suffer with’, is a quality most of us would aspire to develop within ourselves and admire in others. However what about the quality of self-compassion? I find it very interesting that we can relate to the most tender, hurt, and lonely parts of ourselves with such rejection and prejudice. Whereas, if we met someone else who was suffering in a similar way, for example with depression, and this person confided in us about his/her experience our response usually would be one full of compassion and tenderness.”
Less nurturing
People are less nurturing and harsher with themselves than they are with other people with women being shown to have less self-compassion than men, she says.
“All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, experience difficulty in our lives and encounter periods of time when we struggle with how we relate to ourselves as we try to cope with what life throws our way. A recurring theme I see as a psychotherapist is how difficult it is for us to accept any part of ourselves that we perceive as being weak or imperfect.
“Clients come to therapy with various forms of distress around their life circumstances. They communicate many difficulties, such as feelings of depression, loneliness, anger, shame and anxiety. These are the parts that the client wants to change or ‘fix’ and very often the client’s relationship to this part of themselves is one of judgement and rejection, even disgust.”
The first step towards fostering a more self-compassionate relationship is self-awareness, she says. When we judge ourselves harshly for our failings - in the belief that self-flagellation will somehow bring change and improvement - we actually force the very patterns we are trying to change out of our awareness.
“By giving compassion to ourselves, however, we provide the emotional safety needed to allow the patterns to surface without fear of self-condemnation. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all parts of ourselves, including those unwanted parts, all those imperfections that we don’t even want to look at. Rather than pushing them away we give whatever arises all the space in the world to be there. This increase in self-awareness, along with a compassionate attitude, allows any patterns that no longer serve us to be reassessed.”
Own suffering
Self-compassion means being touched by our own suffering in the same way the suffering of others impacts on us. It also means we desire wellbeing for ourselves like we desire it for others.
“In a state of self-compassion we don’t ignore or repress our own pain, but stop, give ourselves time and actually recognise it. We feel compelled to help heal our own pain. When we fail or make mistakes self-compassion means we keep a kind attitude towards ourselves rather than being harshly critical. We accept our limitations and imperfections rather than harshly judging them. We come to see our personal experience in light of the common human experience. Instead of feeling isolated and separate from others we realise that others feel what we are feeling, it is all part of being human. Therefore, self-compassionate people feel kindness and compassion for themselves because they are human beings.”
Research has shown that an increase in self-compassion is associated with decreases in self-criticism, depression, anxiety, rumination, and neurotic perfectionism and increased life satisfaction, social connectedness and emotional intelligence.
“Further studies say it predicts enhanced psychological health over time in the forms of happiness and optimism, a more positive general mood, increased reflective wisdom, increased personal initiative and also curiosity and exploration.”
Self-compassion has been compared with the more widely acclaimed concept of self-esteem, she explains.
Separateness
“The latter is often based on evaluations of competence and self worth assessing how I may be ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others creating a sense of separateness. Self-compassion, on the other hand, has been shown to promote many of the same benefits as self esteem but with one major difference in that self-compassion fosters connection between self and others.
“Self-compassion is also more stable and does not fluctuate like self-esteem. With self-compassion one sees oneself consistently as a human being worthy of kindness and compassion. In contrast to self-esteem, self-compassion is not based on self-evaluations or set standards. People feel kindness and compassion for themselves because they are human beings. With self-compassion you don’t have to feel better than others to feel good about yourself. In fact we can cope better with failures by having access to a warm, supportive sense of self and others.”
Having compassion for ourselves helps to counteract destructive self-critical tendencies and we become less judgemental about personal failings, according to the psychotherapist.
“Instead we begin to see ourselves as human beings and therefore limited and imperfect. By giving compassion to oneself one feels cared for, secure and connected. This leads to greater capacity for intimacy with the self and with others and more adaptability in coping with life. With self-compassion we become kinder, and deal with emotions with greater clarity and balance. It motivates change when change is possible, not out of a need to improve our sense of self worth, but because we desire well-being for ourselves.”
Personal difficulty
As a result of early experiences we can internalise an ability to be self-reassuring and soothing in times of personal difficulty or we can learn to act out our frustration with rage at self.
“Parents who foster self-compassion in their children offer encouragement and comfort, especially in times of disappointment. Letting children know that others too experience the same painful thoughts and feelings place them in the context of the larger human experience. This helps children avoid developing harsh self-criticisms, feeling isolated or over identifying with their experience.
“In a society where achievement is often set above all other things and fear of failure is a most potent force that drives self criticism which can spiral into depression and rejection of self, self-compassion is a powerful antidote. It can allow us to accept ourselves as human and in accepting our flaws allow ourselves room to breathe and love ourselves, whatever life throws our way. As Oscar Wilde put it: ‘It’s not the perfect but the imperfect that is in need of our love.’”
