Self-Compassion is Impossible . . . Until You Discover Your SELF
“Compassion as a spontaneous aspect of Self blew my mind, because I’d always assumed and learned that compassion was something you had to develop.”
- Richard Schwartz, PhD
I never really understood self-compassion and self-acceptance. I trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and other mindful meditation systems for years. They all had a heavy emphasis on self-compassion and plenty of practices for support, but they all ultimately fell flat for me.
All mindful meditation approaches that I trained in were based in the idea that what we take to be the “self” is ultimately an illusion. If we practice mindful meditation enough, we’ll begin to see that all the thoughts and feelings we take to be the “self” are just passing phenomena, and in the open space of awareness, compassion for our suffering can arise.
That’s nice and all but it never happened for me. After years of daily meditation and different mindfulness retreats and practices, I felt my anxiety greatly reduced, but confused as ever about self-compassion. It’s not as though I had a ton of self-loathing or self-criticism, but I certainly had my fair share of feeling unworthy of love.
But hey, as a white, cis-gendered, hetero, guy in the U-S of A in the 2010s, my lack of self-compassion was hardly crippling. I lived and still live in a social context that makes things pretty damn easy on me.
So, I discovered real, deep, unmistakable, life-changing self-compassion quite by accident. I didn’t go looking for it. It happened when I was looking for better ideas and practices to help childhood cancer parents with the anxiety and depression that comes along with the trauma of fighting for your child’s life.
On this journey, I eventually discovered Internal Family Systems (IFS). I’ll save the full story for another day, but when I began to dive deeply into and practice IFS I found that self-compassion is not only real but it is the spontaneous and natural out-flowing of learning how to come into relationship with one’s inner parts.
I’m writing this on a day when I just got done with back-to-back coaching sessions with two very different clients. But they both had these profound moments of tearful self-compassion emerge spontaneously as they came to witness an inner part from the perspective of their capital-S-Self.
I’ve now seen it hundreds and hundreds of times (and in my own system countless times). Self-compassion requires coming into contact with your capital-S-Self. It can’t happen any other way. We can try to make parts of us be nicer to other parts of us, but it’s always going to be tentative and dependent on external factors being just right (like when family, work, friends, health, etc. are all perfect, it’s a lot easier to feel nice inside).
The type of self-compassion that comes from your capital-S-Self isn’t dependent on anything else. It’s always there, always has been, and always will be. All you need is to learn how to slow down, listen to, witness, and be with your parts so they feel safe enough to relax back and let your Self shine through. And when that happens, the compassion simply flows.