I asked a client of mine in therapy the other day, ‘How do you judge your loved ones when they make mistakes?’ Pat came to the reply, ‘I don’t judge them for it, it’s only human to make mistakes. I accept them with their mistakes.’ Would you believe it if I told you that this same client is in therapy working on his problem of self-berating? In other words, the attitude that he holds towards himself is that ‘I must not make mistakes and if I do it proves that I am a worthless person.’ This is not the only time that I have come across this irony with my clients. I find that quite a few clients are able and willing to extend compassion towards their loved ones, humans, and pets, but sadly not towards themselves. I wonder why we are so averse to self-compassion! Why do we hold ourselves to unrealistically high standards that serve as rigid conditions for self-acceptance? Why do we find it hard to drop the ‘need’ to prove our worth and desperately hold onto a sense of high self-esteem?
Just like people are willing to be compassionate towards others more than themselves, I find that they are also striving to receive that compassion from their loved ones. When they don’t get it, in the form of validation, acceptance, assurance, appreciation, approval, etc, they feel depressed, hurt, and angry. I think we are focusing on the wrong source of compassion in our lives. Here’s a question I’d like all of us to ponder over – how can I be my own source of compassion towards myself?
In order to answer this question, let’s first see how self-compassion can be understood. It can broadly be defined as ‘understanding and accepting oneself with one’s inadequacies, fallibilities and misfortunes as a complex, ever-changing human, living a complex life.
The opposite of self-compassion is ‘self-berating’ – being one’s own harshest critic, judging oneself negatively, and then devaluing oneself for one’s inadequacies and fallibilities. When we hold this kind of self-downing attitude, we become susceptible to feeling emotions such as unhealthy shame, guilt, unhealthy regret, and depression. I can cite various contexts where we berate ourselves and fail to be compassionate towards ourselves. For example –
In all such situations, we fail to extend compassion to ourselves; the same compassion that we would readily extend towards other people in similar situations. Do we truly recognize the damage that this self-berating can cause in the long run? If we don’t, how can we help ourselves see that we are abusing ourselves and depriving ourselves of a basic human want?! If we do recognize, what leads us to continue it?!
In therapy, some people express that they believe self-compassion is just a softer word for complacency and self-coddling. Nothing can be further from the truth. Being compassionate towards oneself does not mean turning a blind eye to one’s flaws and faults. Advocates of self-compassion are not suggesting that one should stop striving towards one’s goals and be kind to oneself regardless of everything. In fact, an attitude of self-compassion; that is accepting oneself holistically as a fallible, complex being, allows us to look at our faults, flaws, and inadequacies without anxiety. This happens because we know and believe that these behaviours and choices don’t define our whole self in any stable or global way. We believe that we can work on correcting our mistakes, changing our choices, overcoming our flaws, and learning to do better. It frees us up to be different versions of ourselves, take calculated risks when required, and face and overcome challenges instead of running away from them. In this sense, self-care or self-love are habits we can cultivate, which don’t encourage toxic positivity but are actually rooted in a very realistic acceptance of oneself and one’s life conditions.
How do we implement self-compassion in our daily life? In other words, what kind of self-care practices can we imbibe to show ourselves for better emotional health? Some elements involved in implementing it would be–
Acceptance of our innate fallibility – mistake-making tendency as a part of one’s whole self instead of rejecting it as unwanted and using it to devalue oneself
Forgiveness of our fallibilities, while still caring about correcting them to whatever extent possible
Acceptance of ourselves as an unrateable being, whose worth can’t be estimated in a stable and global kind of way
Drawing and implementing our boundaries firmly but kindly.
Acknowledging our pain without dismissing or diminishing it and taking steps to alleviate or cope with the pain
Acknowledging and appreciating our efforts to change whatever we can about ourselves and our life circumstances, while accepting the limitations to change
Taking deliberate actions toward our own well-being with kindness and gentleness
Maybe, practicing self-compassion in thoughts and in action, consistently and mindfully can be our resolution for the coming year!
About Author –
Swati Khanolkar –
Director of In Vivo and AEI Certified REBT Supervisor & Faculty
‘In Vivo’ was started in 2007 with the aim of making people aware – in their minds and in action – that they themselves have the ability and the power to make a ‘Proactive Choice’ to take …Read More
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