So now you know why you – or your wonderful, successful friend – keep picking the wrong guy or gal. Self-critics are often attracted to judgmental romantic partners who confirm their feelings of worthlessness.
For each event, use mindfulness, a sense of common humanity, and kindness to process the event in a self-compassionate way.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and.
The best context for examining this is a close friendship – because let’s face it, sometimes we’re not as compassionate as we might like to be with our children or partners or family members: they’re too close. We tend to have more space in our reactions with our friends, and we take them less for granted since these relationships are voluntary. This means we’re often our best selves with our close friends.
Self-esteem is a fair-weather friend. It’s there when things go well but deserts you when things go badly, just when you need it most. Self-compassion is a perfect alternative to self-esteem. It doesn’t require feeling better than others, it isn’t contingent on other people liking you, and it doesn’t require getting things right.
Lyubomirsky finds that several key factors make a difference in terms of maximizing happiness. Some of the most important are being grateful for what you have, looking at the bright side of difficult situations, not comparing yourself to others, practicing acts of kindness, being mindful, and savoring joy.
Clearly you don’t have complete control over your actions, or else you’d only act in ways that you approved of. So why are you judging yourself so harshly for the way you are?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? – KAHLIL GIBRAN, The Prophet.
The beauty of self-compassion is that instead of replacing negative feelings with positive ones, new positive emotions are generated by embracing the negative ones.
We feel uncomfortable when things don’t fit with our schemas – a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.
It’s ironic that anger, which is an inherently powerful emotion, causes women to feel powerless because we’re not allowed to acknowledge anger as part of our true nature. Instead, we feel like an alien force has taken us over and say things like “I lost it” or “I wasn’t myself.” This is because women have been taught to reject their anger and to see it as foreign.
In a meta-analysis of seventy-one studies, we found that women consistently had lower self-compassion scores, although the difference was a small one. The reason we’re less self-compassionate is partly due to the fact that we tend to be more self-critical.
Sometimes we need to be angry in order to have the courage to confront those threatening or disrespecting us. If we don’t get angry, we’ll be much less likely to stand up for ourselves. Because anger energizes us and focuses us on the threat at hand, it equips us to take self-protective action.
When qualities of kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness are applied toward the suffering of others, they manifest as compassion. When they’re applied to our own suffering, they manifest as self-compassion. When they’re directed toward others’ positive qualities, they manifest as mudita: sympathetic joy. And when they’re directed toward our own positive qualities, they manifest as self-appreciation.
So it’s definitely not the case that self-compassion leads to complacency and inertia. Quite the opposite. By losing our fear of failure, we become free to challenge ourselves to a far greater degree than would otherwise be possible.
Sometimes when children act in difficult or tiresome ways, they are actually sending the message that they need their parents’ emotional support. It may not be attention that children are seeking but connection.
The best way to counteract self-criticism, therefore, is to understand it, have compassion for it, and then replace it with a kinder response.
With self-appreciation, we don’t need to put others down to feel good about ourselves. I can appreciate my own achievements at the same time that I recognize yours. I can rejoice in your talents while also celebrating my own. Appreciation involves acknowledging the light in everyone, ourselves included.
Mindfulness is sometimes seen as a form of “meta-awareness,” which means awareness of awareness. Instead of simply feeling anger, I am aware that I am now feeling anger.
But self-kindness involves more than merely stopping self-judgment. It involves actively comforting ourselves, responding just as we would to a dear friend in need. It means we allow ourselves to be emotionally moved by our own pain, stopping to say, “This is really difficult right now. How can I care for and comfort myself in this moment?” With self-kindness, we soothe and calm our troubled minds.