Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind

The author, Kristin Neff, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. One important source of inspiration for the author appears to be her experiences with Buddhist meditation. I liked her writing style.

As I understand it, self-compassion is the application of compassion to oneself. It involves first recognizing that you are in pain, and providing yourself with unconditional kindness and comfort. I think that a supposition of the author is that failures, mist

The author, Kristin Neff, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. One important source of inspiration for the author appears to be her experiences with Buddhist meditation. I liked her writing style.

As I understand it, self-compassion is the application of compassion to oneself. It involves first recognizing that you are in pain, and providing yourself with unconditional kindness and comfort. I think that a supposition of the author is that failures, mistakes and not measuring up to others in a least one trait (wealth, beauty, etc) are part of the human condition and that therefore disappointment is inevitable (hard for me to argue with that). Dealing appropriately with pain and disappointment requires directing kindness and comfort towards oneself. Distinguishing self-compassion from self-pity or self-indulgence is a tricky business, a challenge which the author takes on repeatedly.

One tricky bit for me is the notion that everyone deserves compassion. Although a softie myself, I found myself wondering “Really? What about a Hitler or a Stalin or a Charles Manson?” Despite my skepticism, she has a point. Nobody choose their genes, and few can do much about their parent’s behavior or the environment they experienced as a child. In general, Neff disputes the notion that we are in full control of our lives; because we not, we are not entirely responsible for our actions. This view would seem to make assessing the degree of individual responsibility tricky.

The book contains numerous exercises (journaling, making lists, etc) for cultivating self-compassion. Unfortunately, the table of contents does not list for easy reference the pages numbers of these exercises. Towards the end of the book there are some chapters on “applied” topics, such as self-compassion in relationship to parenting and romantic relationships.

The author distinguishes between self-compassion and building self-esteem in a three ways. Self-compassion involves recognizing that one’s failures, moral and otherwise, are hardly ever unique to you and that imperfection is part of the human condition. In general self-compassion involves recognizing ones commonalities with other humans. Self-compassion has less to do with one’s specific accomplishments or current social or other status than that one deserves self-compassion as a sentient being. Once you realize that you are entitled to self-compassion you can face up to your short-comings (and thus try to reduce them) rather than trying to evade them. Self-esteem in contrast generally involves comparing oneself with others based upon your success in life. This process can involve running other people down in order to build you up. Self-esteem emphasizes ones differences from other people. Emphasis on ones self-esteem often results in trying to evade recognition of your short-comings, often by blaming others or external events in order to protect your self-esteem. The author details how the emphasis on self-esteem in the schools, a movement first promoted by psychologists but now discredited in the research literature, has increased narcissism and encouraged a stupendous level of grade inflation. I found the chapter on self-esteem to be one of the most interesting, but then I like a good literature review of scientific topics.

Towards the end of the book, Neff devotes a short space to self-appreciation rather than self-compassion. The tricky business of distinguishing between self-esteem and self-appreciation is accomplished by noting that one’s worthwhile characteristics need not be unique to you, indeed they may be quite common among the human population.

There are some weird bits in this book, primarily to do with the autism of her son, Rowan. Perhaps these incidents would discredit the rest of the book in the minds of some readers. The strangest thing to me was one incident during a family trip to Mongolia (!) in hopes that traditional Mongolian shamans could do something to fix the most trying symptom of Rowan’s autism, his lack of toilet training at age 5. Why Mongolia? Well her husband, Rupert, a travel writer who appears to have grown up in Zimbabwe and who had a long standing interest in native healers in general, had noticed that their kid seemed to improve around horses (horses are another love of Rupert), and indeed Rowan had first started to talk coherently when on a horse, so Rupert came up with “avid horse riders” + “traditional healers” = Mongolia. At one point the author and her husband Rupert allowed themselves to be beaten with leather thongs (rather like a whipping) on legs, arms and back. This event, which raised welts rather than drawing blood and which the author helpfully notes was slightly less painful than childbirth, strikes me as very odd Admittedly, I’m not the one with the autistic kid and thus may not appreciate sufficiently that desperate times call for desperate measures. Something on the Mongolia venture worked, as Rowan toilet-trained himself and generally improved (if I were Rowan, I would be claiming that the bit with leather thongs, by beating out evil spirits from his parents, was the crucial factor….) Other personal failing detailed in the book include the failure of her first marriage due to an affair she had.