By Freeman Wicklund
This article aims to help you get the most out of your self-compassion practice by explaining some common challenges and doubts, and arming you with guidance on how to respond to those challenges and doubts.
If you are here, you have probably already watched The Power of Unconditional Self-Compassion and have been exposed to the myriad benefits that self-compassion confers upon those who practice it. (If not, you can watch it on our Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 page -- scroll down to class 4.) Now you are excited to start the practice and experience these benefits for yourself. Wonderful!
Let’s start by arming you with the knowledge that will help you practice self-compassion with skill and confidence, so you can reap the delicious fruits of the practice.
Addressing Fear and Anxiety
Paul Gilbert is a clinical psychologist and author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. He uses self-compassion as a therapeutic tool with his therapy clients.
He has found through experience that people who have a history of being physically or emotionally abused by their parents or guardians, may become frightened or feel vulnerable when offering themselves self-compassion. This happens because the same people who gave them care and nurturance, also caused them to suffer, and their minds have been conditioned to cause feelings of warmth and fear to arise at the same time.
If you find self-compassion causes fear or anxiety to arise in you, he recommends you offer yourself self-compassion slowly at first. This will prevent you from becoming too frightened and overwhelmed.
He also recommends visualizing yourself in a safe place, with a caring and compassionate being who is offering you unconditional love and kindness. The safe place can be anywhere that gives you a sense of peace, safety, and comfort. It may be real or imagined; such as on a tropical beach you have visited, or your best guess at what heaven is like. The compassionate being can be the Higher Power of your understanding, a wisdom teacher who embodies love and compassion, a loving animal companion, or anyone who helps you feel completely loved, understood, and appreciated.
By implementing self-compassion slowly and using these compassionate visualizations, over time, you will recondition your mind so that fear does not arise when you receive care and compassion from yourself or others. This will be a priceless gift to yourself and open the door to a much more wonderful life.
The Three Stages of Self-Compassion
As you start practicing self-compassion, you may find yourself progressing through different stages. Cristopher Germer is a clinical psychologist at Harvard. Based on work with his therapy clients, he has identified three stages of self-compassion that people experience and offers guidance on how to skillfully respond the challenges of the first two stages.
The three stages, their challenges, and how to work through them are as follows:
Backdraft: People who regularly engage in self-judgment have often developed an identity of being worthless. When they start treating themselves with compassion, their identity fights back by erupting into anger and intense negativity. To move through this stage, respond to any anger and negativity that arises by mindfully allowing the experience and offering compassion to the parts of you that are angry and negative, to yourself as a whole, and to the experience itself.
Infatuation: In this stage the practitioner has learned how to use self-compassion and feel the relational pleasure of compassion. They find the relational pleasure self-compassion generates to be so wonderful, that they want to enjoy it all the time. To move through this stage, respond to this craving for pleasure by investigating your motivations: do you do this practice to eliminate unpleasantness (aversion), to gain pleasure (craving), or to offer yourself unconditional care and improve your emotional health (loving equanimity)?
True Acceptance: In this final stage, we have purified our motives behind using self-compassion. Rather than use self-compassion to eliminate unpleasantness, or feel pleasantness, we use it to relate to ourselves with care and kindness. We have integrated the reality that pain is a part of life, that we are all imperfect, and that happiness arises from accepting things exactly as they are.
If you experience the issues described in the first two stages, try the recommendations to help you move through them. Whether you find these stages apply to your experience or not, know that self-compassion will be a journey that helps you generate insights that will enable you to deepen and refine your love and wisdom. Therefore, be consistent, persistent, and patient with the practice.
Let’s turn now to address three of the most common concerns and doubts that people have about practicing self-compassion.
If I don’t use self-criticism to confront my personal shortcomings, won’t I become weak?
The research shows self-compassion gives us a wiser perspective and the self-support needed to courageously confront challenging situations like failure, illness, inury, etc., and difficult emotions like fear, shame, embarrassment and so on. In doing this, self-compassion actually makes us stronger and more resilient.
If I don’t use self-criticism to confront my personal shortcomings, won’t I be letting myself off the hook for my bad behavior, and opening myself up to rejection by others?
Quite the contrary. The research shows that self-compassion actually helps us live more responsibly by giving us the means to honestly see and address our shortcomings in lasting, meaningful ways. Self-compassion provides mindful clear-seeing which helps us notice our unskillfulness, inherent self-worth to be emotionally vulnerable, and the courage, energy, and wisdom to apologize to those we’ve harmed, make amends, and change our behavior so it is more skillful.
People who practice self-compassion tend to be more self-aware, emotionally vulnerable, compassionate, and behaviorally skillful. These qualities help them cultivate close, loving, authentic, mutually supportive, and caring relationships.
If I treat myself with compassion, won’t I become lazy and self-indulgent?
This is the most cited reason for why people don’t want to practice self-compassion. But this assumption is not supported by the research.
Consider the use of judgment and compassion in another context. Say your 12-year-old daughter comes home from school having failed an exam, would calling her stupid and worthless motivate her to do better and focus on her studies? Maybe, but it also increases the chances that she will hate you, hate herself, or both. Your judgment towards her increases the chances that she will fear you, see you as unsafe, and not trust you to share her problems with you. It also increases the chances she will be more afraid of failing, which will make her fear doing her school work, and exacerbate the original problem.
When we try to motivate others or ourselves with judgment, the source of that motivation is a fear. Judgment is used to mentally and emotionally abuse the target. This threatening and unkind way of relating causes stress that’s hard on the body. This fear-motivation increases the likelihood that we will avoid doing the work (procrastinate), seek out sense-pleasures to cover up the discomfort the fear causes, and feel a lot of stress and anxiety if we ever do get around to doing the work.
But what if you respond to your daughter with compassion? What if you reassured her that everyone fails at times, that you still love her, that she can and will do better with a better study routine, and that you will even get her a tutor or help her yourself? This compassionate approach helps her feel safe, supported, loved, and hopeful. She sees that your love for her is unconditional and that she can trust you enough to confide her problems with you. All of this aids her in working hard and reaching her potential.
With compassion, love and joyful service motivate our actions. This love-motivation provides us with energy that decreases laziness, self-indulgence, procrastination, and stress. This love-motivation also generates relational pleasure that helps the body remain strong, resilient, and energized.
Test It
The research says self-compassion makes us more resilient, self-aware, stronger, and behaviorally skillful; it helps us cultivate loving, intimate, mutually beneficial relationships; and it decreases procrastination, chasing sense-pleasures, and stress. But is this true for you?
Test it! find out for yourself. Give self-compassion a long, patient test drive, and experience how it benefits you and others.
Practice self-compassion for three months to give yourself time to learn it, move through the stages, improve your skill at using it, and master the practice. Then evaluate if the self-compassion practice enriches your life and makes sense for you.
Summary and Next Steps
While you test the practice of self-compassion in your life, having read this article, you know that difficulties may arise. If they do, refer back to this article and its suggestions for how to deal with those difficulties.
We briefly summarize those challenges and explain how to skillfully respond to them here:
If self-compassion causes fear and anxiety to arise, offer self-compassion slowly, and use the prescribed visualization practice explained above.
If self-compassion causes anger and negativity to arise, offer compassion to those parts of you, as well as to the situation, and yourself as a whole.
If you use self-compassion to avoid pain and gain pleasure, investigate and purify your motives. We aim to relate with compassion in an effort to benefit ourselves and all life, to help us bravely confront the reality of suffering so we can see it more clearly, and to help us accept the present moment without any craving and aversion.
If you doubt the practice, that’s fine. Be aware of the doubts, but don’t let them stop you from testing the practice for yourself. Commit to using self-compassion regularly in your daily life for three months while mindfully noticing if, and how, it benefits your life, and the lives of those around you. This will give you first-hand, empirical data with which to counter any nagging doubts.
Now that you have armed yourself with the knowledge of how to work with potential challenges, it is time to start implementing self-compassion in your life. We encourage you to read the article ”Treat Yourself with Compassion: Developing Your Own Self-Compassion Mantra” for specific details on how to start practicing self-compassion in your life.
We wish you boundless peace, compassion, and success!
Additional Self-Compassion Resources
Read the article ”Treat Yourself with Compassion: Developing Your Own Self-Compassion Mantra” for specific details on how to start practicing self-compassion in your life.
Take the Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course to learn more. Class four, The Power of Unconditional Self-Compassion, speaks directly to this subject.
Watch Dr. Krisin Neff’s poweful TEDx Talk “The Space Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion.”
This handout is based largely on information found in Dr. Kristin Neff’s excellent book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. If you want to explore this topic more in-depth, we highly recommend reading the book.
Learn more about self-compassion at Dr. Neff’s website: self-compassion.org.
Banner photo credit: Autumn Goodman @auttgood