Love : the driving force of self-compassion

Why is self compassion a more effective motivator than self criticism?  Because its driving force is love not fear.  Love allows us to feel confident and secure (in part by pumping up our oxytocin), while fear makes us feel insecure and jittery (sending our amygdala into overdrive and flooding our systems with cortisol).  When we trust ourselves to be understanding and compassionate when we fail, we won’t cause ourselves unnecessary stress and anxiety.  We can relax knowing we will be accepted regardless of how well or how poorly we do.   But if that’s true, why should we work hard at all?  Why not just kick up our feet eating pizza and watching TV reruns all day?

Many people assume that self compassion is just a feel good warm fuzzy -a way to coddle ourselves and nothing more.  But healing and growth are not served by such superficial treatment.  Unlike self criticism which asks if you’re good enough, self compassion asks what’s good for you?  Self compassion taps your inner desire to be healthy and happy.  If you care about yourself, you’ll do what you need to do in order to learn and grow.  You’ll want to change unhelpful patterns of behaviour, even if it means giving up certain things you like for a while.  Caring parents don’t constantly feed their kids love candy. Indulging your child’s every whim is not a sign of good parenting.  Being nurturing toward those we care about means sometimes saying no.

In the same way self compassion involves valuing yourself in a deep way, making choices tha lead to well being in the long term.  Self compassion wants to heal dysfunctions, not perpetuate them.  There’s nothing wrong with occasionally indulging yourself, of course.  Sometimes eating that piece of lemon cheesecake is actually a form of self care but over indulgence (ie eating the whole cheesecake)doesn’t feel good.  It’s counter productive, because it prevents us from getting what we really want to reach our highest potential.

The Buddha referred to the motivational quality of self compassion as “right effort”  From this point of view, wrong effort comes from a concern with the ego, with proving oneself, with the desire for control.  This type of effort actually increases suffering, because it makes you feel separate and disconnected from the rest of the world and sets up the expectation that things should always be the way we want them to be.

I am sharing the quote above from Christine Neff’s book on self compassion as a reminder that self compassion doesn’t mean we just indulge in our wounded self all of the time.  We all carry wounds and scars in this life, those of us who growing up were not shown a lot of empathy or emotional support or understanding will struggle more with inward voices of self criticism.  We will often blame ourselves for our flaws and failings and if we dont love ourselves enough we won’t be encouraged either to practice self or develop our ability to learn how.

One difficult consequence of emotional neglect or being left alone a lot also is that we don’t learn proper self care.  We may indulge ourselves to deal with a loneliness we feel deep down inside but won’t dare let ourselves truely feel our feelings, we can then escape and indulge but indulgence is different to taking care of ourselves.

Healing from emotional neglect involves finding what is good for us, what makes us feel better not as a way to escape painful feelings but as a way to address them and treasure ourselves unconditionally, there is a difference.  Some people may think that self-compassion may just be a way to coddle yourself through any negativity or pain but really it is a way of picking ourselves up and not abandoning ourselves and our true needs as we were abandoned in the past.  Self-compassion means we try to be the best possible parent we can be to ourselves, and that desire is driven by love.  When we are overly critical, we are being driven by fear, a host of fears covered over by the inner critic’s internal haranguing that never stops.  When we practice the healing love of self-compassion we can say ‘No’ to that critical and shame inducing inner voice when we need to.  We can remember that often it can lie, telling us things about us that are not true and may have been implanted in us from other sources that do not really know us well nor treat us with encouragement, empathy or loving kindness.