Understanding Self-Compassion - The Definition

To experience self-compassion is to show oneself empathy, kindness and care during moments of suffering.

How often has that critical voice inside found excuses to blame and shame you?

Perhaps you’ve ‘eaten too much’ or ‘not enough’, or you were refused a job, or rejected by a lover, and all you hear is that you’re not good enough.

Maybe after an intense argument, once the anger towards the other dies down, you begin to feel angry at yourself for how argumentative you are, or you begin to judge yourself for judging others.

The list of reasons we find to be harsh on ourselves is unending, and it adds an additional layer of discomfort to what might already be a really difficult situation. This process essentially extends and enhances our feelings of distress.

This is where self-compassion really shines – offering a gentle yet firm counterforce to challenge and sooth our inner critic and harshness.

Self-Compassion is kind, but it is not ignorant. We can hold ourselves with both compassion and accountability.

Many of us will instantly recognise that we can be ‘too harsh’ on ourselves, and yet there’s a good chance that we carry, somewhere within us, the underlying belief that this criticism is beneficial – that it is the only way for us to recognise our mistakes and grow. However chronic and harsh self-criticism, which we could view as judgement without compassion, is predominantly linked with negative psychological, social, and physiological outcomes.

Self-compassion on the other hand is associated with:

• Improved eating behaviours

• Overall psychological wellbeing

• Reduced stress, anxiety, and depression

• Reduced overall levels of self-criticism

It is perhaps not surprising then that compassion has also been linked to improved stress management and resiliency.

With this is mind, it’s easy to understand why practicing self-compassion is becoming so popular. In the post to follow this one I will dive into strategies for cultivating self-compassion, and for now I will start with the basics and explore what exactly self-compassion means. This fundamental understanding can prove instrumental when integrating self-compassion into our lives.

Defining Compassion and Self-Compassion

Compassion can be defined in simple terms as the witnessing of suffering while feeling motivated to take action to relieve it.

Self-compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff identifies 3 elements of self-compassion as being:

• Self-Kindness

• Common Humanity (Connection)

• Mindfulness

  
  

Personally, I find it helpful to define self-compassion through an expanded set of 5 components which I would like to share. 

The 5 Components of Self-Compassion

1.      Recognising Suffering

2.      Suffering as part of the Common Human Experience

3.      Displaying Empathy and Acceptance

4.      Welcoming Emotions with Warmth

5.      Action to Alleviate Suffering

Let’s take a look at each one a little more deeply and develop an idea of how we can cultivate this within ourselves and towards others.

1. Recognising Suffering:

The roots of the word compassion are something like ‘to be with suffering’. Hence, recognising our own suffering is fundamental for being self-compassionate.

So, how do we recognise suffering? It helps in the first instance to be clear on what this means. Suffering essentially refers to the endurance of physical or emotional pain, or an unpleasant or uncomfortable experience that we would rather avoid.

Part of recognising our suffering involves a conscious awareness of the present moment, aka mindfulness, as well as authenticity. Attempting to be overly positive and acting like ‘we’re fine’ when we’re not, or trying to constantly avoid or distract ourselves from feeling can be strong barriers to this.

2. Suffering as part of the Common Human Experience:

Many psychological and spiritual modalities understand suffering as a fundamental part of the human experience – to exist is to suffer.

It’s important to add here that suffering isn’t necessarily seen as ‘bad’ or something we need to ‘get rid of’. It just is. And recognising that suffering is part of what it means to be alive, and that we are not alone – neither in our suffering, nor in making mistakes – can be fundamental to helping us to cope with our experience.

A common emotion behind the criticism and judgement that intensifies our suffering is shame. When we feel shame, we have a tendency to want to isolate and withdraw, to see ourselves as uniquely ‘bad’ or our ‘failures’ and ‘mistakes’ as unique to us. Instead, we have the opportunity to recognise that our emotional experience is valid and shared by so many others under similar circumstances. We can remember that absolutely everyone makes mistakes and what really helps us to grow isn’t the internal dialogue of stupidity, but the capacity to explore the situation with curiosity, and from there learn what you might do differently in future.

3. Displaying Empathy and Acceptance:

I’d like to start by defining empathy here. Empathy is the ability to understand and to sense feelings.

Feeling our feelings might sound simple, but the majority of us are quite skilled at dampening or outright ignoring what we feel in our bodies. It takes skill and practice to start allowing uncomfortable sensations, emotions and feelings to be felt in full, and even further practice and support to understand and accept them for what they are.

The qualities of curiosity and courage can be really beneficial in this process. Curiosity can help us to shift away from judgement and towards a state of exploration – allowing and even seeking out what is present with the desire for understanding. Calling on courage nudges us towards holding hands with fear so that, instead of turning away from our emotional experience with fright, we may be invited to recruit fear to come along on the ride with us.

 4. Welcoming Emotions with Warmth:

Here we take empathy one step further. As we become more comfortable with allowing, understanding and accepting what shows up within us, we can begin to actually invite and welcome our feelings in. Doing so with warmth, or an embrace, can be metaphorical or you can literally get warm, cosy and hold yourself in your arms as you welcome in your emotions.

This applies not just to our feelings, but also our feelings about our feelings. Let’s say you’re feeling sad; you’ve gone through the process of accepting and even welcoming this feeling only to discover that you also feel angry about feeling sad. There can be a temptation here to push back on this feeling, perhaps thinking that it is not compassionate to feel angry towards ourselves. However, that anger has a message for us too, and really seeing, allowing, and welcoming in that feeling is perhaps just as important as the initial welcoming of sadness.

It may sound nice in theory, but how do we actually welcome in these uncomfortable feelings?

In truth, this process can be quite complicated and the strategies involved may vary greatly from person to person. However, the qualities of self-care and self-kindness will commonly underlie this process for us all. That means showing consideration and care for our feelings, and attending to our needs in these difficult moments. Quite often when we really do welcome the most difficult feelings in, when we show care towards them, we also help to release them and move forward instead of remaining trapped in an ongoing loop.

This could be as simple as placing a hand on the heart, talking to myself in a soothing tone of voice, and asking myself (perhaps even asking that emotion I am welcoming) what I need in this moment and then attending to that.

I’d also like to emphasise here that welcoming in uncomfortable feelings doesn’t have to mean being overcome by them. For those of us that have lived our lives chronically disconnected, it can feel incredibly overwhelming and scary to welcome these feelings in and we may come up against a lot of resistance. This is where working with a professional to help you go through this process at a pace that feels good for you, and to help you create a sense of safety is incredibly important.

5. Action to Alleviate Suffering

This step is a really important part of the process and noting this component can help us to remember that self-compassion is not a passive process, but an active one.

The idea here is not to deny or escape suffering, or to resist or ‘fix’ it, but we can take action, or at least be motivated to take action, towards alleviating our suffering. This could also be worded as minimising the intensity of the suffering.

This could take various different forms, such as:

• Displaying the above 4 components towards ourselves

• Listening to our needs and taking action towards meeting them

• Understanding our boundaries and setting them

• Asking for support from others

• Making changes in our lives to live more in alignment with our values

We’re not always going to be able to resolve the external source of our suffering, but we can attend to our internal sources and explore what little steps we can take that will help us to cope with what we are living through in any given moment.