Compassion is the ability to respond kindly to human suffering. All people, at some point in our lives—or, why not, in a large part of them—find reasons to suffer. Denying it is nothing more than avoiding recognizing that our existence is tied to the painful possibility that achieving our most significant goals will be a difficult task, that the people we love most will let us down, that an unexpected event will distort the course of our path through life. complete. And accepting it, of course, is also hard.
A priori, reflecting on this can be quickly labeled as a pessimistic perspective on life, but nothing could be further from the truth. Recognizing that pain will accompany us throughout our journey can be liberating, as it forces us to stop resisting discomfort, taking away the regret of avoiding experiencing discomfort at all costs.
There is a subtle difference between pain and suffering: the latter is an added spice to the pain inherent to life. In other words, it is impossible to escape pain, but we can work on ourselves and make wiser decisions with the goal of suffering less. However, the reality is that relapsing into the cycle of suffering in the face of certain life contingencies—an unexpected breakup, a layoff, the loss of a loved one, the difficulties of finding direction, value or purpose…—is a probability, forgive the redundancy, too likely. We are human, and no matter how much we strive day after day to reduce our suffering to a minimum, nothing prevents us from stumbling over the same stones.
Even in the face of these difficulties we must remember that we are trying to do the best we can and therefore we must be kind to ourselves. This is where another skill comes into play: self-compassion. Training self-compassion is crucial to developing a healthier relationship with ourselves; that gives us the possibility of falling and getting up without judging ourselves; all with the goal of, as Marsha Linehan noted, building “a life worth living.” Therefore, in this article we will develop some reasons to cultivate self-compassion.
Compassion is the interweaving of different elements, such as awareness of the suffering of others, understanding or empathy towards the person who suffers, and the desire to alleviate that suffering in the other. The suffering of others matters to us, because we understand exactly how it is experienced in our own body, what emotions come from suffering and what thoughts are accompanied by the most difficult experiences. For this reason, those who feel compassion, according to Strauss and collaborators, understand the universal nature of suffering in human experience and are tolerant of the unpleasant feelings that emerge after personal suffering.
For its part, in line with Neff’s contributions, self-compassion is the ability to be kind to ourselves when we are suffering, being able to recognize that suffering and making mistakes is a shared human experience.
This means that, Although the conditions of each human being are extremely divergent, we all suffer, and therefore, it would not be wrong to say that suffering unites us. Furthermore, according to this researcher, self-compassion has another component: the adoption of a non-judgmental stance towards one’s own thoughts and emotions, no matter how unpleasant they are, or no matter how much we disagree with them.
Why cultivate self-compassion
Some people, because of their learning histories, tend to be more self-compassionate than others. However, this does not mean that self-compassion is an inherent quality in certain individuals, but rather that, as we have developed, it is a skill or capacity, and therefore, it can be practiced. Here are some reasons why cultivating self-compassion is a worthwhile pursuit.
1. Self-compassion allows you to advance in personal projects
To advance in personal, creative or professional projects, it is necessary to dive into the world of the unknown. The lack of certainty about what the final result of a project will be, or whether we will be able to carry it out with flying colors, are normal and expected doubts of every human being. When we try new things, we are highly likely to make mistakes that we take the long way to get somewhere instead of the shortcut, that the product of what we were able to achieve is far from being as we would like.
If we remain in the discomfort we feel when we notice that our current abilities are distant from what we expect from ourselves, we can fall into a pit of frustration, anguish and, above all, giving up what is important to us. There’s nothing wrong with getting frustrated—after all, it’s an emotion like any other; The real problem lies in wallowing in that emotion and deciding to abandon all our projects without justification because we consider that they are not worth doing, that we are not yet ready to face them, or that we are incapable. It’s understandable that we have these thoughts, but being guided by them can sometimes prevent us from living a meaningful life. For its part, self-compassion fuels us to try again, again and again, beyond the judgments that our mind makes about our work or worth as people.
As they say, we are more than our thoughts Regarding this, writer Elizabeth Gilbert said, in an interview for Salesforce in 2016: “Everyone starts a creative project in the same place of great enthusiasm, believing they have a fantastic idea, just the one they were waiting for. That’s what I call day one (…) On day two, all the people look back at what they accomplished on day one, and they are full of shame and disgust with their own work because they realize that They could not meet the expectations of day one (…) That is why many people do not make it to day three. What will take you to day three is not discipline or rigor, but self-forgiveness From that place, you can tell yourself: I’m new to this, I’ve never done it before, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but I still think it’s worth trying again.”
As is easy to see, this attitude is extremely loving and compassionate towards herself.
Gilbert uses this metaphor to refer to the importance of self-compassion to advance projects within the field of creativity, but we could extend it to other domains, for example, that of social bonds and relationships. Being compassionate can move us toward those meaningful values or purposes, even when we are wrong, even when we make mistakes, again and again.
2. Self-compassion trains us to stop fighting our thoughts
The human mind functions with a certain autonomy with respect to our will, and on many occasions it is difficult—if not impossible—to control what we think. A well-known example of this is when we have difficulty falling asleep and we try to stop thinking about the time at which we should wake up the next day. We do mathematical calculations to see how many hours of sleep we have left, we notice that they are less than necessary, we get angry with ourselves and, worse still, we reproach ourselves that we should stop thinking about all that, because we have to fall asleep. By this time, the thoughts have multiplied (and our discomfort, too).
We cannot control our thoughts. No human being, to date, has complete control over his mind. And it is good that this is so, because with such automatism the mind maintains a certain state of alert – according to the circumstances – to face potential dangers without the need for us to always be aware of them. For that reason, instead of fighting our thoughts, trying to suppress them or forcibly modify them, self-compassion reminds us that we are people of flesh and blood, that we will not always be able to get the sleep we need, and that it is out of our control. of manipulation to be able to determine when we think and what we think about.
Noticing this can be of great help for people who have parasitic or obsessive thoughts ; ideas with which they disagree, either evaluatively or morally, and which are nevertheless recurring. Not everything we think is necessarily true. In any case, it is always worth mentioning that if the practice of self-compassion is very difficult in the face of these types of problems, a mental health professional can always be of great help to overcome them in a accompanied, safe and responsible way.
3. Self-compassion allows us to cope with losses
When we face the loss of a loved one, a pet, an aspirational project, or a significant relationship, the ideal is to give ourselves permission to grieve such a situation. Self-compassion is an indispensable ally of grief, as it reminds us again and again that overcoming a loss can be more painful and arduous than we thought and wanted. There are no set times when it comes to grieving something or someone, and self-compassion reminds us that we have the right to process the situation both quickly and slowly, with extremely painful thoughts or without tears. Self-compassion involves not forcing ourselves to be or feel something other than what is happening at that precise moment
4. Self-pity, just because
“Self-compassion, just because” is a more powerful motto than it seems. It involves practicing kindness toward our own pain for no practical reason other than simply being human. Sometimes we revel in looking for whys and wherefores, when in truth we don’t need to have a justification to be self-compassionate. In other words: self-pity does not have to be earned. It is not necessary to have embarked on a great project and for it to have gone wrong to be self-compassionate.
We may not even have tried, letting ourselves be carried away by our fears and our distorted beliefs about reality, and still be gracious enough to recognize that we deserve our own forgiveness, without needing to be accountable to ourselves.
