Chapter 22

Developing Self-Compassion

IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing the value of self-compassion

Being nice to yourself

Saying no

Letting go of the past

Have you ever watched a news story about a scam victim losing a big chunk of money to a fraudulent investment scheme? If so, you probably found it easy to feel compassion for the victim. You felt that way, even if the victim wasn’t very sophisticated and failed to detect that something fishy was going on. You never thought that the victim was primarily at fault. The blame was on the perpetrator.

However, if you were the victim of the same scam and lost a bunch of money, you’d undoubtedly call yourself stupid for having been such a fool. You’d likely feel ashamed and guilty. Your confidence in yourself might be shaken badly. You would blame yourself rather than the conman that stole your money.

Most people can easily feel compassion for others, but they don’t even think about having compassion for themselves. Yet, there is another way: It’s called self-compassion. Self-compassion confers many benefits for those who manage to acquire it, including the following:

• Greater life satisfaction
• Better relationships
• Increased happiness
• Optimism

Self-compassion encompasses four somewhat related, overlapping concepts:

• Being kind to yourself
• Asserting yourself
• Forgiving yourself
• Accepting yourself

If you’ve battled an addiction such as smoking or vaping, you probably experienced a number of lapses or even relapses along the path toward eventually quitting.

If you have little self-compassion, you probably blamed yourself for relapsing, thought of yourself as weak, and stayed stuck longer than necessary. Self-compassion allows you to push forward through setbacks and, as such, is a great companion of resilience (see Chapter 21).

In this chapter, we discuss how to recognize the four related concepts of self-compassion. We also describe methods for enhancing each of these components.

Being Kind to Yourself

Being kind to yourself doesn’t come so easily for most people. But it’s a habit much like any other — something that can be strengthened and developed by repeated practice. It’s easy to imagine being kind to others. For example, when someone is sick, you immediately feel empathy and concern. You ask what you can do to help.

Now it’s time to start treating yourself the same way. When you’re in pain, find ways to comfort and soothe yourself. The pain could be from craving a cigarette. Or the discomfort could be from a physical ailment. Or perhaps you’ve lost someone important to you, and you’re suffering. Ask what you’d do or say to someone else and do it for you at such times. For example, you might do or say the following to yourself:

• Get more rest.
• Order food in tonight.
• Go out and see a movie if you’re up to it.
• Hire a temporary cleaning person.
• Ask a friend for help.
• Take a mini vacation from work.
• Get yourself some chicken soup!

Don’t think that self-kindness is self-indulgent. When you treat yourself with kindness, you have more stamina in reserve for facing challenges. Realize that it takes time to develop the self-kindness habit. Consider putting a note on your refrigerator saying, “Be kind to yourself today.”

Asserting Yourself

Part of showing self-compassion requires practicing standing up for yourself with others and learning to say no. That skill is called assertiveness. Assertiveness is an effective, middle-ground way of communicating wants and needs. It’s positioned between overly passive and excessively aggressive communication styles.

Passive people acquiesce to the demands of others. When you acquiesce and simply do what others want, you end up neglecting your own wants and needs and show more compassion for others than for yourself. You may be too passive in dealing with others if you agree with many of the following statements:

• I’m afraid to disagree with others.
• I let other people have their own way.
• I apologize even when things aren’t my fault.
• I hate it whenever someone is mad at me.
• I want everyone to like me.
• I give in to avoid any conflict.
• I say yes even when I want to say no.

Aggressive people dominate and attempt to crush those who oppose what they want. They show little regard for other people’s desires even when others have a good point. You may be overly aggressive in communicating with other people if you agree with many of the following statements:

• I have to win every disagreement.
• I don’t care if I have to step on someone to get my way.
• I want to be in control at all times.
• I never see the point in apologizing for anything.
• If someone crosses me, I push back ten times harder.
• It’s my way or the highway.
• I never walk away from a good fight.

Assertion, by contrast, is neither passive nor aggressive. To be assertive, you listen to others, evaluate any differences from your own views, and look for compromise positions. You don’t automatically agree or reflexively disagree with others. You listen carefully and expect others to listen to you. Sometimes you may have conflict, but that’s okay because conflict is inevitable in human interactions.

You probably have an attitude of assertiveness (and self-compassion) if you agree with many of the following statements:

• I have the right to express my opinions if I’m respectful of others.
• If someone asks me to do something, I have the fundamental right to say no.
• An important key to asking for what I want is to do so without anger or rancor.
• When people try to take advantage of me, it’s my responsibility to stop them. I don’t have to let it happen.
• I respect others, and I respect myself and my needs.
• If someone is unkind to me, I can choose to leave or say, “Stop being unkind.”
• When I’m irritated, I will express it constructively.
• When a contentious issue arises and does not resolve, I can agree to disagree.
• When someone mistreats me, I can set a boundary without getting angry.

If you feel your assertiveness skills are up to snuff (no pun regarding tobacco intended), that’s great. If not, it’s probably something for you to work on. Being assertive is treating yourself with compassion and respect. You believe you’re equal to others — no better no worse.

Consider reading Your Perfect Right: Assertiveness and Equality in Your Life and Relationships, 10th Edition, by Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons (Impact), for detailed instructions on becoming more assertive.

If you have trouble with assertiveness, you may want to consider talking with a mental health professional who can help you learn this skill. It can make a difference in your life.

If you’re a teenager or young adult, realize that considerable difficulty with assertiveness is common. However, it’s a necessary ingredient in resisting peer pressure to smoke or vape. Here’s a look at how the three styles of communicating would look when a friend pushes you to try a new vaping device and you’ve never vaped:

• Passive style: “Oh, um, sure I guess.”
• Aggressive style: “Screw you, dude! Get the hell out of my face.”
• Assertive: “I know you’d like me to try it, but it’s just not my thing. No, thanks.”

Forgiving Yourself

If a little boy fell down in the mud, right in front of you and you were the only adult around, what would you do? Would you tell the kid to buck up and stop crying? Or would you help him to his feet, make sure that he’s not seriously hurt, dry him off, and maybe give him a hug?

When you fall down in the mud, what do you say to yourself? Do you scold yourself for being a klutz? Or do you get back up, tell yourself that it’ll be okay, take a warm bath, and treat yourself to some hot tea? Far too many people take the self-critical approach.

When people criticize themselves, they often think that the self-condemnation will somehow motivate them to do better in the future. But self-criticism actually has a paradoxical effect. Instead of motivating people, it usually drains them of initiative.

Think of a teacher who berates and humiliates his students whenever they fall short of his expectations. Students who misbehave get their knuckles rapped with a ruler. By contrast, the teacher down the hall, praises students for their efforts and encourages cooperation, creativity, and even the willingness to take a few risks and make a few mistakes. Which classroom would you want to be in? Which students do you think would perform the best? As you would probably guess, most students achieve more and perform better with the teacher down the hall.

Train your brain to be the teacher down the hall for yourself. When you mess up, make a mistake, or forget to do something, treat yourself with kindness and compassion. We give you more ideas for creating self-forgiveness in the sections that follow.

Saying no to perfectionism

One of the most common issues experienced by people with emotional problems is that of perfectionism. They adhere to a life credo of striving for ultimate flawlessness and a refusal to accept anything else. Examples of a perfectionistic attitude include the following:

• I cannot accept mistakes.
• I can’t relax until my work is done.
• Work always comes before pleasure.
• I have extraordinarily high standards.
• I push myself relentlessly.
• I hate for my work to be interrupted.
• Play is for foolish people.
• Mistakes are unforgiveable.

Perfectionism explains part of the power of nicotine for many smokers. People who work all the time don’t give themselves permission to play or do anything but toil. Nicotine delivers badly needed feelings of pleasure without interrupting the ever-constant striving of perfectionists.

Perfectionists do literally millions of things very well. But they dwell on their mistakes. One way to battle perfectionism is to start valuing and appreciating mistakes. Mistakes have much to teach you if you let them. Savor your mistakes!

Let’s say that a perfectionistic man has stopped vaping for over a year. He ends up lapsing after getting a traffic ticket. He’s so upset about the ticket (a mistake on his part) that he self-sabotages by vaping. He made one mistake, but he failed to learn from it and he made another (vaping). Ideally, he can embrace his mistakes and stop a continued cycle of mistakes by forgiving himself and moving on.

One last example of the absurdity inherent within a perfectionist’s perspective: Imagine a painting of a landscape. The grass is cut evenly, the sky is blue with no clouds, flowers are all in full bloom, and the sun is shining. No weeds in sight. Trees have perfect, unbent branches. Everything is in order. Would you feel drawn to this scene? Or would it seem artificial and unreal? Would it feel like it’s missing something? Would the painting seem uninteresting and flat? Imperfections give us richness and true beauty. The painting begs for life, flaws included. That’s what giving up perfectionism gives you.

Not turning guilt into shame

Simply put, guilt is a reaction people often have when they’ve done something wrong or inappropriate. Guilt can be a useful emotion in that it tells you to pay attention to your behavior. If you’ve violated one of your own personal moral guidelines, guilt can alert you to that and make you more sensitive to the issue in the future.

On the other hand, many people respond to personal transgressions by feeling a deep sense of shame. Shame represents a personal evaluation of the entire self. It’s a global, painful, humiliating feeling of unworthiness and disrepute. Unlike guilt, shame erodes the belief that change is even possible. It repudiates the soul. Such self-repudiation hardly paves the way for moving to a better place. Instead, it keeps you stuck, mired in self-loathing.

Guilt tells you that you did something bad. Shame tries to tell you that you’re bad.

Shame has a variety of toxic effects on those who experience it, including:

• Increasingly engaging in self-destructive behaviors, such as a relapse in smoking
• Self-sabotaging by getting into unnecessary arguments
• Neglecting yourself
• Believing you’re undeserving of good outcomes

If you’ve acquired the shame habit, it’s time to do something about it. With shame, it’s like you’re stuck in a muddy pothole in your road of life. It’s time to fill that hole in with sand rather than more water. To fill up that hole of shame try the following:

• Admit that you have these powerful feelings of shame and share them with someone you trust. If you don’t have the right person in your life, consider seeing a therapist.
• Ask yourself if your actions are more appropriate for the feeling of guilt, which is a normal response to misbehavior. Is shame possibly an overreaction?
• Appreciate that guilt is an emotion that pushes you to change your ways. Shame stops change cold.

Quite a few smokers feel ashamed of their habit. They feel humiliated and weak — not a good place to be if the goal is quitting. Instead, realize that no smoker starts smoking with the intention of becoming addicted. So, give up shame and understand that smoking does not define you. Self-forgiveness is a better path.

Enhancing self-forgiveness

The road to finding self-forgiveness can be a rocky one. It takes time, perseverance, and patience. We offer the following strategies to stimulate your endeavor.

Figuring out what’s responsible: Taking a look at the blame game

When people feel guilty about something, they often assume the complete blame or responsibility about what they did. That’s rarely true. Let’s take smoking, for instance. Smokers think that they are entirely responsible for their habit. In some ways, that’s true.

Indeed, smokers are the only ones who can stop smoking. But if you take a wider lens, many other factors are likely responsible for a smoking habit. For example:

• Heredity: There is an inherited tendency to become addicted to nicotine and other drugs. This inherited tendency is out of the smoker’s control.
• Upbringing: The way smokers are raised has a lot to do with whether she develops self-control, has models who smoke, or has opportunities to smoke at a young age.
• Exposure to secondhand smoke: This appears to seed the nicotine addiction in many cases by altering brain development.
• Exposure to advertising: Tobacco companies spend millions of dollars trying to influence especially vulnerable populations such as young people to become smokers (and vapers). They have decades of experience and are quite good at what they do.
• Peer influences: When a teen’s best friends smoke or vape, he’s more likely to start. If peer groups exert pressure or simply provide multiple models for smoking or vaping, it can prove to be an irresistible force.

Ponder this list of sources of blame for acquiring the smoking habit. Consider which of these may have influenced you and to what degree. Ultimately, there is no definitive answer. But what is clear is that no one deserves 100 percent of the blame. We suspect these factors account for a majority of the influences that lead people to nicotine addiction.

Realizing that the past is the past

Many people carry their past throughout their adulthood. It’s important to understand that you can’t change what’s already happened in your life. Focus on the present and the future because that’s where you can make changes. Use your past mistakes only as a guide to improve your present and future decisions.

Accept that you’re human. You, like every other person in the world, have hurt others and made dreadful mistakes. You, also like everyone else, need to take responsibility for what you’ve done. However, being truly human means you can’t be perfect. So, strive to feel compassion for yourself.

Writing yourself a compassionate letter

Think about what makes you feel guilty or ashamed. Imagine all the details. Now, pretend that you’re someone else. You’re a loving, kind, and forgiving friend of yourself. As that friend, write a letter to your ashamed self. Offer comforting words and ideas to your ashamed self. We recommend you write one. See Figure 22-1 for an example of such a letter.

We realize writing such a letter could feel a little silly. However, techniques like this have been found to be effective. Give it a try. And feel free to add to your letter over time. Carry the letter with you for a while and review it often.

FIGURE 22-1: A sample letter to my ashamed self.

Accepting Yourself

Accepting yourself takes the idea of forgiving yourself one step further. With this approach, you drop the entire notion that there’s even something to forgive. In other words, you quit judging, evaluating, and critiquing. Doing so frees up emotional energy to be directed toward whatever you want.

Letting go of self-evaluations

Rating or grading yourself is a foolish endeavor. The process almost never produces anything useful. So, let us explain why the practice of judging and evaluating yourself is a bad way to go:

• Evaluating yourself takes up valuable time. You could spend that time fishing or going to a movie. Why waste it on self-evaluation?
• Evaluating yourself takes away your attention from problems at hand. Studies show us that people focused on how they’re doing actually perform worse because they’re concentrating on their self-judgments rather than working on a problem or task.
• Self-evaluation promotes thinking in terms of all good or bad. Most actions we take involve a complex mix of outcomes.
• It’s impossible to rate your overall worth. For example, say you’re a model citizen who volunteers, helps your neighbors, participates in neighborhood cleanups, and donates to charity. One day, you’re texting while driving and accidently hit another vehicle, causing minor injuries. Are you a good person or a bad person? Neither. The very idea of evaluating you as a totality is absurd.

Accepting yourself is another facet of acquiring a mindful lifestyle as described in Chapter 21. Mindfulness involves awareness of present moments without judgment. Similarly, accepting yourself means letting go of the need to judge or evaluate yourself as a person, which can interfere with living a fulfilling life. Instead, you can explore yourself with curiosity and detachment and learn a lot in the process.

Exploring accepting affirmations

An additional avenue toward self-acceptance can be found by exploring accepting affirmations. We have a sample list for you. But feel free to add to it or make your own.

• I am today and not my past.
• Living matters more than judging.
• I am open to all possibilities and potentials.
• I don’t need to fear failure if I just open myself to greater understanding.
• My experiences matter more than my accomplishments.
• I don’t need to say I’m sorry for being who I am.
• I accept who I am unconditionally.
• I am grateful for my life.
• I feel comfortable with myself.
• I matter.
• I am neither perfect nor flawed.
• I accept my body and embrace it.

Research tells us that familiar things are more believable, so we recommend that you repeat these affirmations often. They’ll slowly begin to feel part of you. Consider making flashcards with a few of your favorite affirmations.

These affirmations can help you avoid dropping into a hole when negative events occur. Instead of berating yourself, you can give yourself true self-compassion. You can refocus on your goals and stop negative, self-defeating beliefs. And affirmations as part of self-compassion can help you stay nicotine-free for the long run.