Self-Compassion

Self-Compassion teaches you the art of being kind to yourself by identifying what causes you to beat yourself up, how it affects your life negatively, and what you can do to relate to yourself in healthier and more compassionate ways.

It’s kind of a cliche in psychology to take whatever problems you have and blame them on your parents. Although this might be an oversimplification, there’s some truth to how it works in terms of being hard on yourself.

Research indicates that the chances of beating yourself up skyrocket if you had a parent that was critical to you as a child.

As if scientific proof wasn’t enough, consider it from a logical standpoint. When you’re a kid, you rely on your parents to guide you. They help you make sense of the world and keep you feeling safe and loved. It makes sense that we have a tendency to want their approval.

Put all of this together with a demanding parent and you’re asking for trouble. Consider yourself a child for a moment. If you had critical parents that were hard on everything you did, right or wrong, it would add up after a while.

Eventually, you’d develop an unhealthy view of yourself as not being worth loving. You would feel like you had to be better, perfect, even, or you couldn’t be loved. Of course, you would want to avoid them criticizing you, so you’d likely begin doing it yourself before they could.

Before long you’ve internalized all of this and it’s simply a habit to be hard on yourself for even the smallest slip-up.

Visualize yourself walking down the street with your best friend in the middle of winter. As you round a corner, she hits an icy patch falls to the ground. How would you respond? This scenario, or any similar to it, identifies a key point in the difference between how we treat ourselves versus how we treat others. If it was just you falling on your own, you might get angry because of your clumsiness. You’d be embarrassed and may call yourself stupid, even. But when it’s a friend, you ask if they’re okay, help them up, and take care of them. Another word for this is compassion. When we try these things in response to our own problems, that’s called self-compassion. A key point here is to shut down the logical thinking that looks to the reasons for the error and instead focus on just feeling. What does it feel like when you mess up? Let yourself go through the emotions, like you would for a friend whose dog had just died. It starts with asking a question to gain an awareness of…