Perhaps the most significant contribution of self-compassion to mindfulness practice is the attention given to the “self.” When our suffering is great, we become engulfed in the experience and identify with it. The “self” suffers. We need to shift the object of our acceptance from the feelings we’re hosting—“a joy, a depression, a meanness”—to the host, as Linda did.
Linda had just received a diagnosis of breast cancer. Remarkably, she was not particularly afraid of dying, nor did she worry much about the possibility of surgery. A single mom, she worried only that her 19-year-old daughter might have to go through life without a parent. Linda could hardly bear the thought, yet she was preoccupied by it. She was afraid for her daughter. When Linda was able to recognize how much she suffered whenever these thoughts passed through her mind, she could exhale and relax a little bit. Simply noticing her stress level helped her start to let go of her fears. Linda began to think creatively about how to prepare her daughter for the worst. Perhaps her daughter’s favorite aunt would take her in? Perhaps her daughter would find a partner of her own before the worst happened?
Keeping ourselves in the picture in the midst of emotional chaos is the first step toward finding a solution. This is not easy to do. When we’re in the grip of strong emotions, our attention narrows to what’s in front of our noses, not what’s behind them: “That’s a problem.” “He’s a pain.” We’re unable to give ourselves the loving attention we need.
When couples are in conflict, for example, each person becomes absorbed in the struggle to be seen by the other. Relational conflict often comes down to “Look at me, look at me!” Each partner seeks validation for how much pain the other person has caused. This is a fruitless quest because when we start accusing one another, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get recognition. A better option is to redirect our attention and compassionately respond to our own suffering first, and then listen to our partner’s suffering.
Our Personal Vulnerabilities
Each of us has personal vulnerabilities that flare up when times are tough. When we don’t recognize our tender spots, they may wreak havoc in our lives. For example, if I lose my job and unconsciously think I’m a “failure,” coping with being a “failure” may become a bigger challenge than finding a new job.
Self-compassion is most effective when the underlying issues associated with emotional pain are acknowledged. And it’s not always easy to recognize our vulnerable areas, especially in the heat of the moment. The psychologist Jeffrey Young of Columbia University has done some of the legwork for us by identifying 18 personal “schemas”—intertwined bundles of intense emotion, body sensations, thoughts, and behaviors—that usually can be traced back to early childhood. Some schemas lead with behavior, perhaps a tendency to be controlling or inhibited, and others lead with feeling, such as mistrust or fear of abandonment. When we recognize the schemas we’re dealing with, they start to lose their grip. Tara Bennett-Goleman wrote a fine book, Emotional Alchemy, about working mindfully and compassionately with our schemas.
If you’d like to take an inventory of your schemas, please go to www.schematherapy.com and order the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ). Otherwise, see if you can identify your vulnerable areas from the list below.
TRY THIS: My Schemas
Please review the following schemas and identify the ones that relate to you most closely. Sometimes two or three schemas exist together.
Abandonment/Instability:My close relationships will end because people are unstable and unpredictable.
Mistrust/Abuse: I expect to get hurt or be taken advantage of by others.
Emotional Deprivation: I can’t seem to get what I need from others, like understanding, support, and attention.
Defectiveness/Shame: I’m defective, bad, or inferior in some way that makes me unlovable.
Social Isolation/Alienation: I’m basically alone in this world and different from others.
Dependence/Incompetence: I’m not capable of taking care of myself without help on simple tasks and decisions.
Vulnerability to Harm and Illness: Danger is lurking around every corner, and I can’t prevent these things from happening.
Enmeshment/Undeveloped Self: I feel empty and lost without guidance from others, especially from people like my parents.
Failure: I’m fundamentally inadequate (stupid, inept) compared to my peers and will inevitably fail.
Entitlement/Self-Centeredness: I deserve whatever I can get, even if it bothers others.
Insufficient Self-Control/Self-Discipline: I have a hard time tolerating even small frustrations, which makes me act up or shut down.
Subjugation: I tend to suppress my needs and emotions because of how others will react.
Self-Sacrifice: I’m very sensitive to others’ pain and tend to hide my own needs so that I’m not a bother.
Approval-Seeking/Recognition-Seeking: Getting attention and admiration are often more important than what is truly satisfying to me.
Negativity/Pessimism: I tend to focus on what will go wrong and mistakes I’ll probably make.
Emotional Inhibition: I avoid showing feelings, good and bad, and I tend to take a more rational approach.
Unrelenting Standards/Hypercriticalness: I’m a perfectionist, am focused on time and efficiency, and find it hard to slow down.
Punitiveness: I tend to be angry and impatient, and I feel people should be punished for their mistakes.
You may want to select one schema that predominates in your life and write down a situation in which it’s likely to play out. Then list (1) the sensations that arise in your body, (2) the emotions that go with the schema, (3) what you’re likely to be thinking, and (4) how you typically act when the schema is engaged. (If none of the schemas given above quite fit you, make up your own.)
Here’s where you can get a fix on self-destructive thinking— identify the mental themes that lead to bad feelings. For example, if your schema is “pessimism,” ask yourself what you say to yourself over and over that supports your pessimism, such as “Why bother?” and “Waste of time!” Or if your schema is “social isolation,” perhaps you think, “Fine for her, but I’m different” when a great opportunity presents itself to you. It’s nearly impossible to track all your thoughts in meditation, but repetitive themes are easier to recognize once we’ve identified them. Just observe these thoughts arise and disappear in spacious awareness.
Recognizing our schemas is mindfulness, and being kind to ourselves in the midst of an active schema is self-compassion. I’ve found that labeling schemas, like labeling emotions, is a remarkably effective way of managing emotions—it dissolves a whole cluster of destructive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in one burst of kindly awareness: “Oh yes, there I go again, expecting failure!” or “There’s my dependency schema again!” This practice is taught in Tara Bennett-Goleman’s book.
When we understand exactly how a schema shows up in our lives, we’re more likely to catch it. If I hear myself saying, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” because I’m afraid of making someone upset, I know I’m in “self-subjugation” mode. If I can’t stop proofreading a report before I give it to my boss, I may be in the “unrelenting standards” mode. If I feel scared before I go to a party, I might be into “social undesirability.” We want to see schemas, feel schemas, and then let them go.
Is There a Self?
Schemas are part of one’s personality. We each have a unique personality—a sense of self—that feels distinct from those of others. A personality gets assembled as we grow up, and it appears to have some consistency over time. Just recall how easily you could relate to an old friend at a class reunion, as if time stood still, even if you didn’t recognize him or her at first from across the room. Some things about us change, and other things stay the same.
Interestingly, most neuroscientists agree that there is no “self” to be found in the brain. In the words of Wolf Singer from the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, the
brain is an “orchestra without a conductor.” The brain is bursting with activity in all directions, but where and how a sense of separate consciousness arises from this blooming, buzzing confusion remains an open question. Additionally, through the lens of inner contemplation, a careful look at our mental activity is likely to reveal only brief moments of experience, arising and falling away. No self—only this thought, that sensation, this feeling, that impression. Even the experience of consciousness comes and goes. Who, then, am I?
A sense of “self” seems to arise spontaneously when we’re in emotional pain. For example, if you’re afraid to die, you might ask fundamental questions about “who” or “what” you are—who actually dies. When your feelings are hurt by others, you may wonder if what you’re hearing is actually true. “Who am I?” The reverse is also true: when we’re in “flow”—calmly, joyfully, and productively engaged—there’s very little sense or care for who “I” might be.
This makes sense if you think about it. The “self” is almost always associated with the body, and our bodies are built for survival. When we’re in physical danger, we fight for survival. When we’re in emotional trouble, we try to defend our egos. The problem with an overly rigid sense of “self” (“I’m young, I’m smart”) is that it interferes with our well-being as life changes, and the ability to adapt to changes in our lives—failure, sickness, old age—is what determines whether we’ll be peaceful and happy in the long run. Trying to continually prop ourselves up against insult and injury can be very stressful.
Ironically, we need a “self” to make progress on the path of self-compassion. If there were no one around to feel the pain of a self-critical or self-isolative attitude, no change would be possible. We can cultivate a kind, gentle attitude—not rejecting, not overly prizing—toward the “self” until it no longer suffers and has no reason to assert itself.
The idea of “no-self” is a hopeful message contained in Buddhist psychology. It really means there’s no fixed self. Even our schemas arise and disappear. The notion of “no-self” doesn’t mean that we’re “nobody,” either. We’re really part of everything. To become happier and to adapt better to changing circumstances, the task is to soften our fixed self-images and behavior patterns that reduce our freedom. Can you occasionally allow yourself to feel like a child when you’re with a child, like an old man with an old man, or like a young woman with a young woman? We become everybody at one time or another, either through empathy or through the many roles and situations of our lives: young/old, bright/dull, pretty/ugly, good/bad, successful/unsuccessful. Can we let that be so, or must we cling to a favorite version of ourselves, adding an extra burden to our lives?
Ironically, the more compassion we give to the suffering “self,” the more flexible it becomes. For example, if I give a lackluster speech and afterward find myself regurgitating every word in my mind, it may help to hear a loving remark such as “Well, it was just after lunch. What do you expect? Everyone would rather be napping!” Compassion from others or from within ourselves helps us accept ourselves in our discomfort. We begin to see the complexity of factors that made things go wrong, and we don’t need to be the center of the universe. In the words of Simone Weil, “Compassion directed toward oneself is humility.”
WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SHOW?
Research on self-compassion is demonstrating that it softens the impact of negative events in our lives. Self-compassionate people are more likely to recognize when their efforts turn out badly and to take responsibility for their part. They’re even more likely to recognize undesirable aspects of their own character, but they don’t obsess over them so much. For example, when a self-compassionate person experiences academic failure, he or she is likely to see it as an opportunity for improvement.
Interestingly, self-compassionate people have high self-esteem, but their self-esteem is not particularly related to how others evaluate them. Self-esteem derived from self-compassion comes from how we respond to evaluations. Receiving a bad evaluation is an occasion for sympathy and comfort, not rumination and self-criticism. People who are self-compassionate are therefore less afraid of failure and rejection. High self-esteem seems to be correlated with narcissism, but self-compassion isn’t related to narcissism. Self-compassionate people don’t need to become grandiose to feel good about themselves.
Self-compassion is a relatively stable way to regulate emotions. We don’t need to build ourselves up when we’re feeling down, such as by using positive affirmations (for example, “Every day I’m feeling better and better about myself”). Rather, self-compassionate people enter into the truth of their experience with softness and kindness, which takes the struggle out of it.
Kristin Neff and colleagues found that self-compassion, as assessed by her scale, correlated even more strongly than scores on a mindfulness scale with measures of wisdom, personal initiative, happiness, optimism, positive affect, and coping. Self-compassion is also related to life satisfaction, emotional intelligence, and social connectedness and inversely related to self-criticism, depression, anxiety, rumination, thought suppression, and perfectionism. It’s pretty plain that self-compassion predicts psychological well-being.
Dieting through Self-Compassion
A leading researcher on self-compassion, Mark Leary at Duke University, along with Claire Adams at Louisiana State University, found that self-compassion helped people avoid unhealthy foods. They gave all participants a test of “restrictive eating” that measured their desire to avoid “forbidden food” like doughnuts. The participants were then divided into different groups, and some were asked to eat a doughnut. Afterward, a bogus story was given for why they should eat a candy or more than one candy if they so wished. Between these activities, some participants were told, “I hope you won’t be hard on yourself [for eating the doughnut]. Everyone eats unhealthily sometimes, and everyone in this study eats this stuff….” Highly restrictive eaters who heard this compassionate message after eating a doughnut had less distress and ate fewer candies afterward. Self-compassion appears to be a healthy way to respond to lapses in dieting. When dieters’ heads are “not cluttered with unpleasant thoughts and feelings,” they can focus on their dietary goals rather than trying to improve their mood by eating more food.
Clinical scientists are now exploring whether self-compassion training can make important changes in people’s lives. Paul Gilbert, a psychologist in the United Kingdom, developed a 12-week program of compassionate mind training (CMT) to help people suffering from high shame and self-criticism. A pilot study showed promising results. CMT works on the assumption that self-critical people have difficulty generating positive feelings through self-soothing, perhaps because they weren’t comforted enough as children and didn’t feel safe. Oxytocin and the opiates are activated by social affiliation and care: stroking, holding, and social support. Gilbert is currently exploring whether those neurohormones underlie the soothing effects of self-compassion training.
The research on self-compassion is currently in its infancy compared to mindfulness research, but the future of self-compassion research is promising and bright.
So far, we’ve learned that self-compassion is a healthy and natural response to suffering. The more we struggle emotionally, the more likely we are to be hijacked by self-criticism, self-isolation, and self-absorption. The path to emotional freedom starts with kindness toward the suffering “self.” In the next chapter, we’ll start to explore the many different ways we can bring self-compassion into our lives.
5
pathways to self-compassion
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And will smile at the other’s welcome
—DEREK WALCOTT, poet
The best way to understand self-compassion practice is that by doing it we’re strengthening the wish to alleviate our own suffering. From this basic desire ari
se countless practical ways of taking care of ourselves. Self-compassion feels good when we practice it wisely, and the more we do, the more we want to do it. Over time a positive cycle develops, strengthening and deepening the initial motivation to practice. We just need to start somewhere.
The fact that you’re alive shows that you’re already taking good care of yourself. But beyond basic self-preservation, what are you doing to enhance your sense of well-being? Are you doing anything that’s not in your best interest? How do we cultivate positive emotions—those that make us happy—without falling into old habits of resisting pain in the process? Finally, is it possible to leave our past—mental patterns that only feed suffering—behind? In this chapter we’ll take a look at a wide spectrum of ways that will enable you to bring self-compassion into your life and free yourself from the clutches of unnecessary distress.
FIVE PATHWAYS TO SELF-COMPASSION
There are five key ways in which we can bring self-compassion into our lives: (1) physically, (2) mentally, (3) emotionally, (4) relationally, and (5) spiritually. Each area offers numerous practice options. Following are some preliminary ideas for how to implement them in your own life.
Softening into Your Body
How do you care for yourself physically? How do you relate to your body when it’s under stress? A compassionate response involves softening into physical discomfort—not tightening up. Compassion is soft and tender. When the going gets tough, the soft get going.
The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion Page 11