Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself

by Kristin Neff

From the Buddhist point of view, you have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people. If you are continually judging and criticizing yourself while trying to be kind to others, you are drawing artificial boundaries and distinctions that only lead to feelings of separation and isolation. This is the opposite of oneness, interconnection, and universal love—the ultimate goal of most spiritual paths, no matter which tradition.

In other words, self-compassion provides the same benefits as high self-esteem without its drawbacks.

Compassion is not only relevant to those who are blameless victims, but also to those whose suffering stems from failures, personal weakness, or bad decisions. You know, the kind you and I make every day. Compassion, then, involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering. It also involves feelings of kindness for people who are suffering, so that the desire to help—to ameliorate suffering—emerges. Finally, compassion involves recognizing our shared human condition, flawed and fragile as it is.

“Human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that feeling everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering, and everyone has the basic right to do this. .

“Self-love seems so often unrequited.” When we don’t succeed in reinterpreting reality so that we feel better than others, when we’re forced to finally face up to the fact that our self-image is more blemished than we would like it to be, what happens? All too often, Cruella De Vil or Mr. Hyde emerges from the shadows, attacking our imperfect selves with a surprising viciousness. And the language of self-criticism cuts like a knife.

Unsurprisingly, research shows that individuals who grow up with highly critical parents in childhood are much more likely to be critical toward themselves as adults.

People with critical parents learn the message early on that they are so bad and flawed that they have no right to be accepted for who they are.

A verbal

assault doesn’t have quite the same power when it merely repeats what you’ve already said to yourself.

If we look more deeply, we see that harsh self-criticism is often used as a cover for something else: the desire for control.

There is a difference, however, between healthy self-deprecating humor and unhealthy self-disparagement.

Because self-critics often come from unsupportive family backgrounds, they tend not to trust others and assume that those they care about will eventually try to hurt them. This creates a steady state of fear that causes problems in interpersonal interactions. For instance, research shows that highly self-critical people tend to be dissatisfied in their romantic relationships because they assume their partners are judging them as harshly as they judge themselves.

This means that self-critics often undermine the closeness and supportiveness in relationships that they so desperately seek.

Feelings of inadequacy and inferiority are associated with acts of self-harm—like drug and alcohol abuse, reckless driving on purpose, and cutting—which are really attempts to externalize and release emotional pain.

A number of large-scale studies have found that extreme self-critics are much more likely to attempt suicide than others.

Feelings of shame and insignificance can lead to a devaluing of oneself to the extent that it even overpowers our most basic and fundamental instinct—the will to stay alive.

Being all the way dead has to be better than feeling dead inside.

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. —PEMA CHÖDRÖN, Start Where You Are

If parents provide inconsistent support, however, or are cold and rejecting, children develop what’s called an insecure attachment bond.

They learn that the world is really not safe, that their parents can’t be relied upon. This tends to impair children’s confidence in exploring the world—an impairment that often extends to adulthood.

children are securely attached to parents, they feel they are worthy of love. They typically grow up to be healthy and happy adults, secure in the belief they can count on others to provide comfort and support. But if children are insecurely attached, they tend to feel they are unworthy and unlovable, and that other people cannot be trusted. This creates a pervasive feeling of insecurity that can cause long-term emotional distress and affect the ability to form close, stable relationships later on in life.

When we consistently give ourselves nurturance and understanding, we also come to feel worthy of care and acceptance. When we give ourselves empathy and support, we learn to trust that help is always at hand. When we wrap ourselves in the warm embrace of self-kindness, we feel safe and secure.

Over time increased cortisol levels lead to depression by depleting various neurotransmitters involved in the ability to experience pleasure.

We have the power to live with joy and contentment by responding to our suffering with kindness.

I had never experienced what it felt like to be really seen, cherished, and loved by a man for who I was. So I assumed that having someone who didn’t leave me was as good as it got.

“Feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It seems like a vicious cycle: the more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel.”

We risk getting burned out, exhausted, and overwhelmed, because we’re spending all our energy trying to fix external problems without remembering to refresh ourselves internally.

Our sense of self becomes so wrapped up in our emotional reactions that our entire reality is consumed by them.

What we think and feel seems like a direct perception of reality, and we forget that we are putting a personal spin on things.

Suffering stems from a single source—comparing our reality to our ideals.

When reality matches our wants and desires, we’re happy and satisfied. When reality doesn’t match our wants and desires, we suffer.

the key to happiness was understanding that suffering is caused by resisting pain. We can’t avoid pain in life, he said, but we don’t necessarily have to suffer because of that pain.

Our emotional suffering is caused by our desire for things to be other than they are. The more we resist the fact of what is happening right now, the more we suffer.

As discussed in the last chapter, there are untold prior causes and conditions that have come together to produce our current mental and emotional experience—conditions beyond our conscious choosing.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation . . . and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts,nothing else. —HERMAN HESSE, Wer lieben kann ist glücklich. Über die Liebe.

When we feel fatally flawed, incapable of handling the challenges life throws our way, we tend to shut down emotionally in response to fear and shame.

All we see is doom and gloom, and things go down from there, as our negative mind-set colors all our experiences. I like to call this mental state “black goo” mind.

We tend to take the positive for granted while focusing on the negative as if our life depended on it.

Rumination about negative events in the past leads to depression, while rumination about potentially negative events in the future leads to anxiety. This is why depression and anxiety so often go hand in hand; they both stem from the underlying tendency to ruminate.

We balance the dark energy of negative emotions with the bright energy of love and social connection.

This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need.

being aware of your feelings without being hijacked by them, so that you can make wise choices.

Research shows that people who are more self-compassionate have more emotional intelligence, meaning they are better able to maintain emotional balance when flustered.

Many of Gilbert’s patients have a history of being abused by their parents, either physically or emotionally. For this reason, they are often frightened of self-compassion at first, and they feel vulnerable when they are kind to themselves. This is because as children, the same people who gave them care and nurturance—their parents—also betrayed their trust by harming them. Feelings of warmth thus became jumbled together with feelings of fear, making the foray into self-compassion rather complicated. Gilbert cautions that people with a history of parental abuse should proceed slowly down the path of self-compassion, so that they don’t become too frightened or overwhelmed. Even among those without histories of physical or mental abuse, Gilbert’s research indicates that people are often afraid of being compassionate to themselves. They worry that they will become weak, or that they will be rejected, if they don’t use self-criticism as a way of addressing personal shortcomings. This fear of compassion then acts as a roadblock to treating oneself kindly and exacerbates self-judgment and feelings of inadequacy.