There’s a lot of suffering that comes from struggling with strong emotions. If you can’t deal with your emotions in your life you get derailed. If you can’t deal your partner’s strong emotions the relationship gets derailed. One way to deal with strong emotions is self compassion.
Self compassion has three components: 1. Recognition, 2. Validation and connection to humanity, and 3. The extension of compassion. Recognition of emotions means feeling emotions in your body and naming them. Validation and connection means making sense of your emotions and recognizing that they are understandable to be having and part of the human experience. Compassion is being kind and caring for the feelings. Sometimes compassion means taking a deep breath, letting yourself cry, or taking a walk. Other times compassion means standing up for yourself and setting boundaries with yourself (not continuing to do behaviors that add to suffering) and others (not letting others continue to do behaviors that add to your suffering).
The better you can do self compassion, the better you deal with your stress and stress of others. If I’m not judging my own experience, I can be more responsive to my feelings and not pile on shame and anger to my pain. With less shame and anger, I can be more present and loving in my life. And the better I can tolerate my pain, I can be better at tolerating your pain. After all, part of the inability to tolerate others pain is that their pain can often cause the pain of helplessness or sadness or fear or guilt, which are all painful experiences. When we practice self compassion we’re less reactive and can even help calm out the other persons nervous system (nerdy neuroscience tidbit: thanks to mirror neurons in the brain, when I’m calm, my partners subconscious mind picks up on that and calms down. The opposite is also true and the more upset I am, the more he will pick up on that and start to react to and match my upset).
Admittedly, self compassion sounds like a woo woo concept, but in fact it has 1000s of research studies that validate its efficacy. Studies show that it decreases symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addictions and it also increases happiness, productivity, and physical health.
Self compassion is not just a cute idea but an action. To cultivate it, it needs practice (especially since it’s so counter to our natural judgy impulses). Kristen Neff is the leading researcher on self compassion. Here is a link to her website with several practices to build self compassion. If this resonates with you, a quick google search on self compassion should yield many other valuable resources to keep practicing. And as always the things I mention in blogs are things that I love working on with clients too, so feel free to reach out and schedule an appointment. I’d love to help.