The Healing Power of Self-Compassion
This week, the podcast reviews the healing power of self-compassion and offers a few practical ideas of how to integrate self-compassion into our own lives as self-help approaches.
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Hey there! It’s episode 22! Today’s episode is part 2 for the topic of compassion that we started last week. I shared on last week’s episode, and in some of the PsycHope social media posts over the past week, that I really wanted to explore a topic in the realm of love given we’re so close to Valentine’s day. And, while I considered some other topics like self-love or self-esteem, I came to the conclusion that the topic of self-compassion had the potential to be the most impactful. I’ll give you more details of what went into that decision later this episode.
Last week, we focused on the psychology of compassion with a brief overview of Compassion Focused Therapy. Today, we’re going to review the healing power of self-compassion. And, at the end of this episode, I’ll offer a few practical ideas of how to integrate self-compassion into our own lives as self-help approaches.
To help us get oriented to the topic of self-compassion, I want to provide a super quick high-level refresher on the psychology of compassion discussed last time. If you haven’t heard last week’s episode, I invite you to have a listen. Last week, I drew largely from the work of Dr. Paul Gilbert, the founder of Compassion Focused Therapy who defined compassion as a “sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it.” Researchers and practitioners alike take a biopsychosocial approach that is heavily rooted in evolutionary theory when it comes to understanding compassion. Caring behaviors found in all mammals are a precursor to compassion, which is unique to humans. It is our distinct ability as humans to be self-aware that transforms caring behaviors into compassion. Gilbert also reminded us that “We can be compassionate towards others, open to receiving compassion towards us from others, and be self-compassionate.” So, let’s turn our attention to self-compassion now.
It would be impossible to describe the healing power of self-compassion without referencing and honoring the work of Dr. Kristin Neff. She is acclaimed as one of the world's most influential research psychologists. Now if you heard my recent foundational episode that went into how psychological research informs the self-help interventions explored on this podcast, you may recall how I described that in psychological research, the tests, questionnaires, and surveys we use have to hit certain acceptable levels of being valid and reliable methods for measuring the topic of interest. Dr. Neff developed the first scale to measure self-compassion in psychological research. This was about 20 years ago and was a huge contribution to the field of psychology. Since then, Neff has developed multiple versions of self-compassion scales. She has authored copious amounts of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. For this episode, I’ll be drawing primarily from her books Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, and her more recent book, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive with some information from her website plugged in as well. As always, I’ll include links in the show notes for anyone who may wish to dive deeper into the works of Dr. Kristin Neff.
For our introductory purposes on this episode though, let’s start with a definition of self-compassion. It begins with what we already know about compassion from Dr. Gilbert’s definition – that there is an awareness of some suffering along with the desire to diminish it. In this case, it involves awareness of our own suffering with a commitment to treat ourselves with kindness and understanding. When practicing self-compassion, we ask, how can I comfort myself right now?
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Dr. Kristin Neff describes 3 elements of self-compassion. We might also consider these the 3 dimensions of self-compassion.
The first element of self-compassion is loving self-kindness versus self-judgment. This element connects to something you may have already heard me mention on earlier episodes of this podcast – that so often we say overly harsh and critical things to ourselves that we would never say to a loved one. That’s the opposite of kindness to oneself, and highlights our tendency for harsh self-judgment. And Neff points out that our self-judgment can be so intense at times, that we say things to ourselves that we would also not say to people who we don’t even like.
The second element of self-compassion is common humanity versus isolation. When practicing this element of self-compassion, we’re asking how am I the same as others? Neff points out that part of the shared human experience is that we’re all flawed. Every single one of us. We often struggle to see that though and look at our own personal failures as unacceptable and that there must be something wrong with us. When in the true state of reality, we all have imperfections.
The third element of self-compassion is mindfulness versus over-identification. With this component of self-compassion, we are bringing our attention to the present moment. For regular listeners of the PsycHope Self-Help podcast, this element of self-compassion likely sounds familiar. Mindfulness is an element of self-compassion because if we are not mindful, then we cannot notice we are suffering nor can we notice how we are treating ourselves in that moment of suffering. Neff describes that within the self-compassion framework, mindfulness is in opposition to over-identification because we need some level of distance from our thoughts and feelings. Remember with mindfulness, we are simply noticing and observing our thoughts and feelings and, as related to self-compassion, we are noticing our suffering and how we’re treating ourselves without getting overly wrapped up in the thoughts and feelings that are involved.
When we put these 3 elements together, Neff would say self-compassion feels like: loving-connected-presence.
Rewinding a bit here, back to the self-compassion element of self-kindness versus harsh self-judgment, you might be wondering, why is it that we beat ourselves up mentally anyways? Neff points to false believes, held by many in our society, that we must criticize ourselves in order to have motivation and that kindness is related to laziness. In both cases, the opposite is true though.
Highlighting the biopsychosocial approach we take to understanding compassion, specifically as related to self-compassion, our fight or flight response can kick in when we engage in self-judgment. We’re vulnerable to our bodies perceiving this self-critical way of treating ourselves as a threat. Even though this old brain threat defense system of ours evolved to protect us from dangers in our physical environment to our actual physical bodies – specifically by releasing cortisol and adrenaline to aid us in fighting the danger or fleeing from it – our threat defense system can also respond in this way when there are threats to our self-concept.
In the case of harsh and critical self-judgment, we are simultaneously attacking ourselves mentally while the threat defense system in our bodies is trying to protect us from this attack. Staying stuck in fight or flight mode like this can block our motivation and the long-term consequences of heightened stress levels, like high levels of cortisol from repeated self-criticism, is related to increases in depression. And, back to the false belief that we need to be harsh on ourselves to stay motivated, depressed mood is certainly not conducive to motivation. I also want to weave in here, that our bodily physiological response to self-criticism allows an additional lens through which to view a point I’ve made on other episodes: that self-encouragement is far more likely to result in long lasting behavior change than self-punishment.
Dr. Neff explains that when it comes to trying to feel safe, we’re not limited only to the functions of the old brain, like shifting into fight or flight mode. We can also tap into the soothing power of the mammalian caregiving system. She reminds us that our bodies are programmed to respond to warmth, gentle touch, and soft vocalizations. Oxytocin, one of those feel-good hormones, is then released into our bodies and with it comes increased feelings of trust, calm, and safety, all of which facilitate the ability to feel compassion for ourselves. When we feel safe and comforted in this way, Dr. Neff emphasizes that we are in the optimal mind state to do our best.
Findings from Neff’s numerous research studies support that self-compassion is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and perfectionism. And, self-compassion is associated with higher levels of factors associated with mental well-being including happiness, life satisfaction, taking greater personal responsibility, higher levels of motivation, healthier lifestyle choices, and better interpersonal relationships.
Now, I want to briefly touch upon some psychological concepts that are related too, but different from self-compassion. I’ve mentioned my desire to cover a topic related to love like self-love or self-esteem connected to Valentine’s day being around the time this episode was coming out. This is where I want to highlight a few findings related to self-esteem and self-love that led me to the conclusion that the topic of self-compassion had the potential to be a far more impactful concept to share with my listeners.
In addition to self-compassion, Dr. Neff has actually done extensive research on the topic of self-esteem as well. Self-esteem is a global judgment of our self-worth, in which we’re either good or bad or have high self-esteem or low self-esteem. There is indeed research that shows low self-esteem is associated with all sorts of psychological problems, so for a long time the field of psychology supported developing high self-esteem, but high self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing all the time. It all depends on how that high self-esteem developed in the first place. With self-esteem, we often have to perceive ourselves as better than others to feel good about ourselves. We typically need to feel that we are above average in a certain area of life. But thinking about it from a logical perspective it’s actually mathematically impossible for everyone to be above average. So, in order to feel above average, we build ourselves up in different ways, but a drawback is, we might also push others down to feel better about ourselves.
Neff has recommended self-compassion as psychology’s replacement for self-esteem. She explained that “self-compassion has all the benefits of self-esteem without the pitfalls.” For example, self-compassion is also associated with stronger mental health, but not narcissism or constant social comparisons like we see with self-esteem. Self-compassion also provides a more stable sense of self-worth. As Neff says, self-compassion is there for us precisely when we fail while self-esteem deserts us just when we needed it most. When we experience a fall or setback of some sort, self-compassion is there for us with support not because we’re special, above average, or hit some sort of amazing achievement in life. But because we, like any other human on this earth, are deserving of care and kindness, including our own care and kindness.
When it comes to the concept of self-love, Dr. Neff considers that self-compassion has a loving quality, but that the concept of self-love does not capture it all. Self-love can also involve self-absorption or even narcissism at the extremes. With this in mind, self-love can be viewed as another concept that is not as stable as self-compassion and also brings some downsides with it. So, now you can see, why I had to go with self-compassion in my intent to cover a topic with a loving quality this time of year.
Now that we’ve had a brief introduction to the concept of self-compassion along with an overview of some key research findings about self-compassion, let’s get into some practical ideas of how to bring self-compassion into our own lives as self-help approaches.
As I often do, I made a mindfulness meditation to accompany this podcast episode. This particular mindfulness meditation focuses on being with our suffering, opening to our actual experience, and tapping into how we can give ourselves the same care and concern we would give to a loved one. This guided meditation on self-compassion will be linked in the notes. Keeping in mind that mindfulness is a core element of self-compassion, I want to point out that any practice of mindfulness that aids us in developing those skills of noticing and observing without judgement will help us with noticing and observing any suffering we may be experiencing and how we are treating ourselves during those moments of suffering. So, really any of the mindfulness meditations up on my YouTube channel can be helpful towards those aims as relevant to self-compassion. The PsycHope home on YouTube is psyc_hope. I invite you to check out the mindfulness meditations and other resources available to you over there.
We also want to remember the importance of acceptance when practicing mindfulness and especially with a self-compassion mindfulness practice. With self-compassion we are recognizing and facing our suffering. We are not trying to run away from it or push it down in some way. Without the acceptance piece, focusing on one’s suffering could make the situation worse for us. Remember acceptance does not mean we like the current situation, but it is through accepting that we are experiencing suffering that we can then begin our attempts to alleviate that suffering.
Now this next suggestion for a self-help approach to enhance self-compassion might sound a little woo at first, but stay with me. I promise you, this approach comes straight from Dr. Kristin Neff and is backed up by scientific research. This self-help intervention involves soothing self-touch so we can tap into our mammalian caregiving system and alter our body chemistry with the release of those feel-good hormones. While our bodies response to physical touch originally evolved in the context of infant-caregiver attachment, our bodies generally respond in calming ways to caring physical touch throughout our lifespans and while the source of that physical touch can be from someone else, it can also come from ourselves. Placing one’s hand on the heart or wrapping yourself in your own warm embrace are both ways we can bring on a calming response.
As the final approach we’re going to explore today for bringing more self-compassion into our lives, it’s helpful to consider how we speak to ourselves. If we notice a tendency towards harsh self-judgement or self-criticism, then self-help practices around reframing these types of thoughts might be something to explore. Next week, the podcast is going to look at self-help interventions inspired by Cognitive Behavioral therapy. While we will go into more depth next time on the impact of our thoughts on our feelings and behaviors, today’s exploration of self-compassion sets us up with some beginning ideas of how we can speak to ourselves with more compassion. We can look at the content of our thoughts and ask, are these words during my time of suffering comforting or are they perpetuating my suffering? Are these words during my time of suffering something I would say to a loved one or friend? We can then look for opportunities to reframe our thoughts to be comforting and caring. Again, we’ll explore the power of self-talk in greater depth next time.
Just as I shared a couple episodes back when introducing mindfulness as a self-help approach, I want to encourage patience with the self-compassion learning curve. Self-compassion can be a major shift in how we are used to approaching our own suffering. Giving ourselves kindness and warmth may feel foreign if we have subscribed to the belief that so many of us have – that we need to be tough on ourselves to stay motivated and hit our goals. If you’re struggling to make the shift towards compassion, it may be easier to think first of how you would help someone else and then gradually work on applying that same type of care to yourself.
It's also possible that some people experience a flood of feelings when first opening their hearts to loving kindness as is the way with self-compassion. While facing our own suffering does take courage and is not easy, the spirit of self-compassion is not about putting ourselves in situations that are emotionally overwhelming. If the self-compassion approaches discussed on today’s episode seem too much – or at least too much for right now - in terms of facing any suffering you may have experienced, then it may be wise to shift to a self-help approach with which you have more familiarity.
Well, that’s going to wrap it up for this episode. I hope you enjoyed going deeper into the psychology of compassion with me by exploring the healing power of self-compassion. Perhaps you even felt inspired by some of the ideas for starting a self-compassion practice of your own.
Friendly reminder to follow the podcast wherever you may be listening so you can be updated when new episodes go live. Be sure to tune in next time when I’ll be sharing self-help approaches inspired by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Till next time!
Show Notes
Episode 22, originally published on February 13, 2023.
References
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C10&q=+SELF-COMPASSION%3A+THE+PROVEN+POWER+OF+BEING+KIND+TO+YOURSELF&btnG=
Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C10&q=Fierce+Self-Compassion%3A+How+Women+Can+Harness+Kindness+to+Speak+Up%2C+Claim+Their+Power%2C+and+Thrive&btnG=
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Disclaimer
The information shared on the PsycHope Self-Help podcast does not constitute professional help nor is it a substitute for professional help. If you think you might benefit from more than self-help, here are some helpful resources:
Find a therapist:
Psychology Today, directory for locating a psychotherapist. More details here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/
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Suicide Prevention Hotline: call or text 988
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