Self-Compassion: an Entry Point to Healing and Personal Growth
Self-compassion means turning inward and treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding you'd offer a friend in difficult times. It involves being supportive when you're facing challenges, feeling inadequate, or making mistakes. Rather than ignoring your pain or getting overwhelmed by negative thoughts, you pause and acknowledge your struggle, asking yourself:
"This is really tough—how can I care for myself right now?"
When we come to understand how the nervous system adapts in response to trauma and unmet needs, we begin to shift the narrative of mental health disorders from one that is often stigmatizing and pathologizing to one that allows for self-compassion through a better understanding of its evolutionary role. Realizing that “I was doing the best I could with the tools and resources I had at the time” fosters a compassionate perspective towards oneself.
Psychotherapy opens the door to understanding the origins of one’s defenses and facilitates the process of untangling from self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs are termed “self-limiting” because, as long as we internalize narratives such as “unworthy” as true, our growth into the person we want to become is limited.
Insights from Francis Weller
Self-compassion is the foundation for befriending our lives. Francis Weller, a renowned psychotherapist, shares that it is the great work of the heart to behold our life as eminently worthy of compassion and love. He suggests that we will not navigate through grief and suffering by mere reasoning but by turning towards our sorrows with kindness, tenderness, and affection. Weller writes:
“Nothing ever heals in an atmosphere of judgment or criticism. We contract and get small under such conditions. We open and soften only when the space around us invites revelation and connection.”
Practicing Self-Compassion
During periods of stress, we often revert to old patterns of relating to ourselves and the world, which can be harsh, critical, and brittle, especially towards ourselves. Self-compassion offers us the opportunity to hold what is vulnerable with kindness and tenderness, allowing these places to remain soft and open. Times of great uncertainty call for a level of generosity to ourselves that helps to offset the effects of trauma, often enveloping our emotional bodies. Our primary intention must be to hold all that we are experiencing with compassion, offering a safe place for our fears and grief to land. The great Sufi poet Rumi writes:
“Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”
This wisdom underscores the transformative power of self-compassion in the journey towards healing and personal growth.
With You On Your Journey
At New York Integrative Psychiatry, our providers take a non-pathologizing, compassionate and integrative approach to care. We invite you to schedule a session where we’ll explore how to cultivate self-compassion, allowing you to treat yourself with the same care and understanding you offer to others. In our session, you'll discover practical tools to quiet the inner critic and nurture a more compassionate relationship with yourself. Schedule your session today and begin your journey to healing from within.