What is Self-Compassion?

Self-compassion is treating yourself with the same kindness and caring that you would show to a good friend. The research shows us that being high in self-compassion is associated with wellbeing in a variety of ways.  self-compassion has three components:

●      Mindfulness of suffering without overidentification. That is, being aware of the difficult emotions you are feeling, without being too caught up in them and overwhelmed by them.

●      Recognising that your experience is part of Common Humanity. This means you realise that your hardship is a normal part of what it is to be human and that many other people may have similar experiences. This is not intended to negate your experience but to put it in perspective and help you feel connected to others rather than isolated from them, because feeling isolated makes suffering worse.

●      Acting with Self-Kindness rather than self-criticism in difficult moments. Self-Criticism amplifies suffering.

Self-compassion has traditionally been represented as a way we relate to ourselves internally. This Tender Self-Compassion is characterised as manifesting the three aspects of self-compassionas Loving, Connected, Presence and is about accepting ourselves the way we are.

Self-Compassion and the external world

In “Fierce Self-Compassion”, Neff (2021) unpacks how we can use self-compassion in our interactions with our outer environment to help us take action to manage our suffering. This is described as manifesting in three ways:

●      Protecting ourselves from harm by drawing boundaries and being able to say no to things when we need to. The three components of self-compassion are manifested in this mode as Brave, Empowered, Clarity.

●      Providing for ourselves and being able to take action to meet our needs. This is expressed as Fulfilling, Balanced, Authenticity.

●      Motivating ourselves to change. Learning and growing, facing up to the things that we do that are bad for us and our world and working to change these through love not fear. The elements of self-compassion show up here as Encouraging, Wise, Vision.

What does this mean in practice?

This makes sense when you think about the compassion we show to our children, pets or other vulnerable beings we care for. We accept and love them for who they are no matter the mistakes they make (tender self-compassion). We also want to protect them, which means that, for example, we don’t just let them have the whole packet of sweets, because we know it is bad for them (protective fierce self-compassion). Likewise, we work that extra shift to provide the money to pay for the school/vet trip that we know they want to go on and will be important and useful for them (providing fierce self-compassion). Also, there are times when we have to encourage our loved ones to do things that are hard, but necessary for them to develop, such as sending them off on their first day at college (motivating fierce self-compassion).

As with the difficulties we sometimes have in showing kindness and acceptance to ourselves, we also sometimes neglect harnessing the energy we use to protect, provide for and motivate others, when it comes to our own needs. Neff uses the metaphor of a fierce mother bear looking after her cubs to embody fierce self-compassion, which I find helpful. I know that I don’t always fight for myself in the same way as I would for my children and maybe that is not OK. Think about it, do you bring the same qualities of empowerment, encouragement and vision to addressing your own problems as you do to those of the people you love? Or are your own issues always at the bottom of your list and a target for self-criticism? Whilst it is also important to consider the needs of others a lack of internal (tender) and/or external (fierce) self-compassion can leave us burnt out and unable to support the people and environment around us in the way we would like to. This brings us to the question of balance.

The Yin and Yang of self-compassion

One of the key points of Neff’s book is that we need to be able to balance our inner healing, based in tender self-compassion, with our fierce compassion for outer change if we are to create a caring force to allow us to develop our authentic self and flourish in life. Some authors prefer the terms inner compassion and inter compassion (to self/other).

Others talk about the flow of compassion from self to others, others to self and within the self. I think the overall point is that we need to highlight our connectedness. Self, other, gender, sexual orientation, community, race, nation, ecosphere, planet, universe; we all have needs and experience suffering and the drive to balance these within and between systems at all levels is complex and nuanced. It is necessary to do so for the survival and growth of our world and neglecting this balance at an individual level is a poor foundation for progress. The research supports the notion that we are more resilient when we have self-compassion. If we cannot address our own issues, how can we make a better world for the people we love (and those we don’t too)? As I see it, this comes back to two central tenets of positive psychology. The first intervention is ourself and the tension in the dialectics is where the solutions might be found.

Developing Fierce self-compassion

I would encourage you to reflect on these ideas in relation to your own life and see if the concept of fierce self-compassion might help you with the challenges you face. More information can be found at https://self-compassion.org/. In particular, Neff has created motivating, protective and providing versions of her (tender) self-compassion break, which can be found on the website. These are short meditations of about 7-8 minutes which are aimed at helping you develop these fierce self-compassion skills and can be easily used in real-time when you are practised at them. If you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you’ll know that the original (tender) self-compassion break is one of my go-to practices for coping with life’s difficulties and I’m finding the new versions equally useful when I need to stand up for (and to) myself.

Reference: Neff, K. (2021). Fierce Self-Compassion, Penguin Life.

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‘We Are The Positive Psychology People’

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When we think of the word failure, we do not think of well-being but the opposite. We live in a world where we worship success and achievement. We are conditioned to strive to constantly be better, thinner, more beautiful, richer, more successful, more perfect. Somehow, even if we think we don’t buy into this, we do have a model in our minds eye of what “success” looks like. Hand in hand with this model is our inevitable comparison of how we measure up. No one can be the best at everything so we all fall short in some ways, we all fail. This is part of the human condition.

The plus side of failure

Our ability to evaluate our current situation and envisage a desired different outcome allows us the chance to change. The striving to be different that comes from perceived failure provides the motivation to change. Being able to imagine what success looks like allows us to set goals for improvement. Research shows us that setting goals means we are more likely to be successful especially if we are able to break these goals down into small achievable steps. However, change is rarely a smooth road. The failures or setbacks we experience along the way and how we understand and respond to these are an important stepping stone to progress. Seeing failure as learning “another way that doesn’t work” is helpful and more likely to lead to an ultimate positive outcome. Using setbacks as a trigger to revisit our expectancies and strategies employed is healthy. Our ability to reflect on what went well and what didn’t and how things might be done differently, is a strength that allows us to grow. Accepting failure and reframing it positively as a growth experience that allows us to progress fuels hope and builds resilience. If we never fail, we will never learn to take responsibility for our actions and understand the relationship between what we do today and the outcomes of tomorrow. We will deny ourselves the chance to grow.

Failing to fail

However, negotiating failure is a delicate balance. The fear of failure may lead us to disengage from things that we perceive to be too hard thus limiting growth. Lack of experience with failure might encourage us to do this. Often, as parents our instinct is to protect our children from failure or to rescue them when things go wrong. This can prevent them from learning the valuable lessons that coping with failure has to teach and undermine their resilience. Children who reach late adolescence without having learnt to fail may be devastated when they reach the world of early adulthood and encounter an inevitably increased level of competition as they have not developed the skills to accept, reframe and move on from setbacks in a nurturing home environment. Lack of engagement associated with fear of failure may lead to disaffection due to being insufficiently challenged which can result in a number of poor outcomes such as underachievement, low self-esteem, poor relationships and low mood.

The downside of failure

The experience of failure can, of course, be damaging in an unhelpful environment. Highly critical environments which reward achievement independent of effort may promote malignant perfectionism and result in internalised high self criticism. High levels of self criticism have been found to be associated with poor well-being outcomes. Whilst many perfectionists believe they need their inner critic to spur them to achieve success, research in fact demonstrates that the ability to accept and be kind to yourself in the face of failure is associated with better outcomes.

Dwelling on failure or constantly feeling one has failed can lead to a sense of helplessness and depression, whilst persistently fearing being judged as failing can lead to stress and anxiety. In a culture where our young people are constantly evaluated in school and persistently exposed to social media images of perfection out of school, whilst being culturally pushed to always strive for success, is it any wonder that adolescent mental health services are at breaking point?

Self-esteem Vs Self-compassion

Promotion of good self esteem has traditionally been seen as a means of addressing these issues. However, self-esteem, although often associated with good mental health, is rooted in our comparative society, it necessitates a judgement of how you are doing relative to others. Alternatively, self-compassion promotes mindfulness of our reality with acceptance of our failings and the suffering this brings and kindness towards ourselves and our needs in this situation. This is not to necessarily make ourselves feel better (although often it does) but because we feel bad. Failing does feel bad, but it is an essential part of humanity, or common humanity to use the self-compassion terminology. Being able to acknowledge and accept that is the first step to using the experience for learning and growth.

Be careful what you wish for

It’s OK to fail, it’s inevitable that we do. We need to allow ourselves to do so, to feel the consequences, to learn to cope with the emotions, to evaluate and transform the experience, to allow us to move forward develop resilience and grow, thus promoting our well-being. On a cautionary note, we need to be careful about the ideals we strive for. Our failures can pave the way to achieving our goals. Most of us have goals that we think are going to make us happy. But will they? That is another question.

About the author: Sarah Monk

‘We Are The Positive Psychology People’

The Positive Psychology People is co-founded and sponsored
by Lesley Lyle and Dan Collinson,
Directors of Positive Psychology Learning and authors of the
8-week online Happiness Course

The post Why failure is important to well-being appeared first on The Positive Psychology People.

I have previously blogged about my ongoing journey towards a more compassionate self. Here I talk about some of the reasons that some people find it hard to be kind to themselves.

Self Compassion (SC) is defined by Neff (2011) as comprising three interrelated components:

Mindfulness: of our own suffering in a state of balanced awareness such that we don’t avoid difficult feelings but also don’t get caught up in ruminating on them.
Common Humanity: Recognising our suffering is part of being human and feeling connected rather than isolated through this experience.
Self Kindness: Treating ourselves with kindness and support when facing challenging situations, as we would a friend rather than using critical self judgement.

There is also a motivational and active component to SC concerned with wanting to alleviate our own suffering and acting in ways to do this.

Kind To Others, Kind To Self?

So, SC is being kind to ourselves in the same way we would be to a friend, or is it? Are these processes equivalent? Gilbert et al (2011) suggest not necessarily. Indeed the exact definition of compassion and how its relationship to SC is conceptualised varies between schools of thought. This might not seem important, but in terms of research and understanding the underlying mechanisms it is highly relevant. Some studies have in fact found that the relationship between compassion for others and SC can be variable  (Lopez et al 2018, Neff & Pommier 2013). Gilbert et al (2011) suggest that having compassion for others, the ability to receive compassion from others and having compassion for ourselves may represent distinct, if related, processes which have been shaped by different evolutionary needs and are also differentially influenced by our individual attachment history. Clinical evidence and research studies clearly show that some people experience difficulty engaging with the different aspects of compassion. Gilbert et al (2011) found that fear of compassion for self was linked strongly to fear of receiving compassion from others in student and therapist populations and suggested this was indicative of a general difficulty dealing with affiliative emotions, related to insecure attachment style and high self criticism.

The definitional minefield around the research in to compassion and self compassion is further compounded by the fact that many practices such as Loving Kindness Meditation promote more than one of these processes, so that trying to elucidate the underlying mechanisms by examining training induction studies is also fraught with complexity.

In summary research is beginning to produce a consensus that compassion for self and others is good for our wellbeing in a number of ways. However, we still need to do a lot of work on teasing out the underlying mechanisms and understanding how promoting these processes can help  people, with different characteristics in varying circumstances as well as understanding what the blocks to progress might be and how they can be addressed.

Promoting Compassion For Self And Others?

So where does this leave us on an individual level, now, if we’re trying to develop compassion in our lives to promote positive wellbeing? From Neff’s research based work on SC and Gilbert’s work rooted in evolutionary theory and clinical application, I suggest you consider the following issues.

Your Beliefs About Self Compassion

Examine your beliefs about SC which may relate to your upbringing. Common misgivings about SC are that it is weak, selfish, self-indulgent and about making excuses and self-pity. These reflect a lack of understanding of the true nature of SC. In fact research indicates SC is associated with resilience rather than weakness, better investment in relationships rather than selfishness, healthier behaviours with a long term focus rather than self indulgence. SC is less about making excuses than allowing yourself to admit mistakes without beating yourself up, thus minimising self pity. People high in SC actually take more responsibility for their actions, realise failure is part of life and tend to pick themselves up and try again. This relates to the further false belief that SC undermines motivation. We tend to feel we need that critical voice to ensure effort and achievement. However evidence does not support this and people high in SC tend to show better achievement and engagement than those high in self criticism.

Your Ability To Feel And Tolerate Emotions

Compassion based experiential exercises encourage feeling difficult emotions in the body. Some people find this very aversive particularly if they have developed a coping style associated with avoidance. Even being exposed to supposedly “pleasant” affiliative emotions can feel threatening to some people depending on their developmental history. Being able to feel and tolerate a full range of emotions is a key area in promoting all types of compassion. Many people need to proceed slowly with this and if it is particularly difficult for you the help of a therapist may be useful. Being overwhelmed by intense emotional experiences is one reason why people might give up pursuing compassion based practices.

Consider Your History Of Attachment

Linked to the ability to experience and tolerate emotions, trying to enhance SC may need you to be willing to look at your attachment history. How your experience of relating to others and feeling safe and secure has developed over time and through a range of relationships will influence your ability to relate with kindness to yourself and be open to kindness from others. There is a spectrum here, but it is not just people who have a history of abuse or a clinical disorder that need to be cautious here. Most of us have experienced some issues with attachment. While this is usually more pronounced if experienced during childhood, later relationship patterns can also be relevant. An openness to exploring these ideas can promote the journey to increased SC.

Look At Your Levels Of Self Criticism and Shame

Consistently Self Criticism and Shame have been found to be negatively associated with SC. Harsh self judgement Vs self kindness represent one of Neff’s defining components of SC, however this may not be a simple spectrum and learning to be aware of and reduce self critical thinking may be a complementary process to learning to relate to yourself kindly. Being prepared to reduce the hold of your inner critic may be hard. Those who have associated shame, where they make global negative evaluations of themselves, may have difficulty in believing they deserve SC and this can be a major impediment to progress requiring therapeutic intervention.

Despite these pitfalls, perils and our need for better quality research to underpin practice, I still believe the compassionate path is one worth taking if our goal is authentic wellbeing. It is however, not a shortcut and our individualistic, competitively oriented culture can add further roadblocks to compassion which need addressing at a societal level.

References
Gilbert, P., McEwan, K., Matos, M. & Rivis, A. (2011). Fears of compassion: Development of three self-report measures. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 84, 239–255.

López, A.,  Sanderman, R, Ranchor, A.V. & Schroevers, M.J. (2018). Compassion for Others and Self-Compassion: Levels, Correlates, and Relationship with Psychological Well-being. Mindfulness, 9, 325–331

Neff, K. (2011). Self Compassion: Stop beating yourself up and leave insecurity behind. Great Britain: Hodder & Stoughton. Lopez et al 2018,

Neff, K.D. & Pommier, E. (2013). The Relationship between Self-compassion and Other-focused Concern among College Undergraduates, Community Adults, and Practicing Meditators. Self and Identity, 12, 160–176.

About the author: Sarah Monk

‘We Are The Positive Psychology People’

The Positive Psychology People is co-founded and sponsored
by Lesley Lyle and Dan Collinson,
Directors of Positive Psychology Learning and authors of the
8-week online Happiness Course

The post Why Is It Hard To Be Self Compassionate? appeared first on The Positive Psychology People.