How to foster self compassion

Being compassionate with yourself is the cornerstone of mental health and trauma healing. When it comes down to it, much of your mental health struggles can be reduced to the questions, “do you love and accept yourself exactly how you are?” For many people, discovering that they lack self compassion and then finding ways to start to build it is the first step in their healing process. If you can genuinely love yourself as you are, you stand a much better chance at finding ways to navigate life in a healthy and enjoyable way.

Building self compassion when you lack it is not an easy task. Usually, lack of self compassion comes from deep seeded beliefs about yourself or traumatic events or memories that are hard to accept. Building self compassion takes practice, effort, and continued attention in order to grow. Self compassion isn’t something you just have or don’t, it is like a muscle that you need to work out in order for it to grow. Your beliefs about yourself, how you talk to yourself, and the actions and thought patterns throughout your life will build up or break down your self compassion muscle.

Here are some ways I have found that help you start to build a sense of love and compassion for yourself.

Affirmations

What you think and say about yourself will start to become your reality if you repeat it enough. This is true of both negative and positive statement. If you constantly tell yourself that you are not enough, you’re failing, and that you aren’t a good person, you will start to believe this on a conscious and unconscious level. On the other hand, if you intentionally tell yourself that you are good enough, that you are doing well, and that you are loveable, you will start to believe this too. This is the power of affirmations. The trick here, is even if you don’t believe it to be true, if you repeat it enough to yourself, it will affect your thoughts and feelings and before you know it you might notice a shift in your self perception.

There are many different affirmations you can try with this exercise. Anything that you’d like to start believing about yourself that is positive will work. Remember that you don’t actually have to believe it for it to work. In this case, you can fake it until you make it. Try writing an affirmation that you’d like to start believing in your life, write it down on a post it note, and place it in a prominent place in your room, somewhere you will see it everyday. Then, every time you see the piece of paper, try saying the affirmation out loud to yourself.

If you’re having trouble coming up with an affirmation, you can use the Buddhist Metta meditation which was developed specifically to help foster compassion and lovingkindness. It goes like this:

“May I be happy.
May I be well.
May I be safe.
May I be peaceful and at ease." 

Put your thoughts on trial

Sometimes your negative self talk might not accurately reflect how you really feel about yourself. You can experience negative moments in your day, or feel a negative mood about yourself, but it might not be the full story about how you feel. In some cases, it can be helpful to challenge a negative belief about yourself to see if it’s really true, and if there’s not a more compassionate alternative you could think instead.

One way I recommend challenging thoughts is to put your thoughts on trial by writing down a list of the evidence that a thought is true and the evidence that the thought is not true. Try taking a negative belief about yourself and break it down to see if you can find ways in which it's not actually seeing the whole picture and might not be true for yourself. In this way you can challenge these negative beliefs before you start to really believe them about yourself.

For example, if you have the thought “I’m a bad person”. You could break the evidence down like this:

Evidence for
I sometimes lie

I don’t get all my schoolwork done

My friend is angry at me

Evidence against
I call my grandmother every week

I try my hardest in life

My partner appreciates me

If you look at the above evidence, maybe you realize that “I am not a good person” isn’t the most accurate summary of your feelings. A more compassionate thought might be “Sometimes I do good things in my life and sometimes I struggle to do the things I know I should”. Taking a look at the objective evidence for and against a negative belief can help you see more clearly whether a thought is accurate or not, and can help you weed through negative self talk and throw out what doesn’t feel true.

Break it down into parts

If you lack self compassion and have negative beliefs about yourself, oftentimes its not all of you that feels this way, but its a specific part of you that is holding a negative belief. If you break your mental life down into different parts, it can be easier to see that some parts are compassionate towards yourself, and others might not be. Understanding that negative self talk and lack of compassion are only part of the story can help you see that there are other parts with more positive and compassionate perspectives.

Often, you will notice a critical part in yourself that is always pointing out what you are doing wrong. When you notice that, try zooming out from that perspective and notice if there is another part of you that is less critical and more compassionate. You can welcome all parts, the positive and the negative, but by noticing the positive you will realize that its not entirely true that you lack self compassion, its just that it might be hard for you to access the part that does have it. Noticing all the different parts that make up your thoughts and emotions can help you get unstuck from a specific negative viewpoint you might be used to.

Finding ways to get out of negative self talk and foster more self compassion can be a difficult task. If you are particularly stuck and have been for some time, it can take a while to start to notice more self compassion in your life. Start wherever you are and see if you can’t find at least one thing to be compassionate to yourself about. Fostering self compassion is a process that takes time. If you intentionally put effort into building lovingkindness for yourself, over time you will start to notice more self love in your life. This is an incredibly important step in your psychological healing and is a gift that you can keep on giving to yourself for the rest of your life.

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Are you struggling to foster self compassion in your life? Do you need help understanding what is blocking you from accepting yourself? I offer compassionate and effective trauma therapy, drug and alcohol counseling, and depression therapy in Santa Cruz, and online anywhere in California. Reach out today to schedule a free consultation to see if I could be a good fit to help.