Many of us have had experiences that taught us it is dangerous to love or value ourselves. Therefore
we hold unconscious beliefs that self-kindness will lead to harm. In other words we are afraid
to love ourselves without even knowing why. If you are someone who struggles with self-compassion,
searching your heart for these deeper beliefs or fears may be an essential first step.
In the previous video I went over the six common misconceptions or fears around self-compassion.
Things like if i give myself compassion I will be lazy or selfish or self-indulgent.
All these concerns have been addressed in the research, and the truth is there are
no downsides to self-compassion. In fact there are only a huge array of positives.
People higher on self-compassion are lower on anxiety, depression, and stress. They also
have more happiness, life satisfaction, gratitude and optimism. That being said,
even if you watched the last video and were really on board with the idea of self-compassion
and decided to do a self-compassion practice every day, there's a chance you'd hit up against a wall.
Why? Because even deeper than our conscious fears around loving ourselves are our unconscious ones.
These are ones that would be impossible to research because they're too unique to our
own lived experience. Like, "if i love myself my narcissistic father will be threatened and
find some way to put me in my place" or "if i seem confident then my sister, who's always struggling,
will feel inferior and will start decompensating, and my whole family will be stressed out."
See how unique this can be to our own personal experience and how highly specific. Because
while we do pick up on cultural messages on how we should treat ourselves, most powerfully our brain
learns what to do and not to do based on what was safe for us to do or not do when we were young.
Sometimes that means physically safe, if we came from an abusive household or experienced danger
because of our race such that we had to adapt and act in certain ways to physically protect
ourselves. But often we're talking about emotional dangers. But in either case if we learn that
feeling something or doing something will lead to a bad outcome, our brain will code that thing
as a threat, even if it is something innocuous or even positive, like self-compassion or self-love.
But why would self-love ever have a negative outcome? Let's discuss that. What we will
explore are the two main types of fears that we develop and why. And I would camp those into an
either interpersonal fears or existential fears around self-love. Let me address the interpersonal
fears first. By interpersonal fears I mean what I learned will be rejected or abused or punished
for valuing myself. Let me use one of my dearest clients as an example because he has about the
most intense shame i've ever seen. We've recently begun exploring how valuing himself was super
unsafe in his family of origin. Why? Because his mother, probably because of her own deep shame,
had to be better than everyone and have all of the goodness herself and put everyone else beneath
her. So she would punish my client for showing any kind of self-love. If he ever got accolades from
a teacher or school or won an award, she would tell him "don't get too big for your britches."
Now that's a fairly overt example where the parent is literally saying "don't value yourself,"
but often there are more implicit or subtle situations that can lead us to fear self-love as
well. Like one of my friends was exploring with me how when she was young her family was struggling
with some medical and financial difficulties and her parents were clearly very stressed. Plus her
brother also struggled emotionally so they were dealing with that as well. So when my friend,
who was actually really bright and was doing pretty well, when she succeeded at something,
it felt cruel to show that to anyone or to feel good about it because her other family members
were not doing so well. So in solidarity with them she had to avoid feeling healthy pride or mastery.
And interestingly enough that was not the only learning that impacted her self-esteem.
The other had to do with the fact that her parents only knew how to give
love through helping or protecting or sort of rescuing another person in need.
So when she was three years old and saying things "like i want to do it by myself" she would notice
their disappointment. Like they didn't know how to be connected without being the helper.
Even today they're always asking you know "do you need money?" or "how can we help you?" It's almost
like they don't know how to love her and her independence and success. And in our conversation
she realized how guilty she felt whenever her independence made her parents feel unneeded
and therefore disconnected. She had unconsciously learned "my pride, my confidence will hurt others.
See how specific that fear is to her situation with a very clear emotional learning?
I mean, for many years she wasn't conscious of why she was uncomfortable with pride,
but once she was able to deeply reflect it, makes perfect sense.
That being said, while these fears are so unique to our own learning, there are some common themes
like, "if i raise my head up i will target further abuse," or "if i stop making myself the problem
then i will have to face that my parents were the problem." Okay I actually want to take that
last sentence and just stretch it out a bit, because it is a very powerful and common theme.
And while it is learned interpersonally, it is more what i would think of as an existential fear.
What does that mean? That means that my brain says "I cannot deal with seeing some part of reality.
If i allow x y and z to be real, it will be too destabilizing for me." And what is the most
painful thing for a child to see when they are young? That my parents don't know what
they're doing. That's a terrifying thought because children are completely reliant on
their parents for to protect them. So if they really allow themselves to see the obvious,
which is that mom and dad are not doing a good job of taking care of the family, it can create a
huge amount of fear and inner instability. So what will kids often do instead? Blame themselves.They
will develop a sense that they are the problem not the parent. It doesn't matter if it isn't
true. The brain doesn't care so much about truth, it cares more about what will help us survive. And
however horrible it is to have shame and to blame myself, if it allows me to feel a little safer,
because i've preserved my image of mom and dad, then i'll take it. And honestly that probably is
better than the alternative. Children need to feel at least a modicum of stability,
even if it's based on something very negative like thinking poorly of oneself.
That's still better than the sense of chaos and fear that would come of thinking poorly of mom and
dad. When children blame themselves often they do so to create a little island of certainty,
perhaps even gain a slight sense of control, without which it would be difficult to face life.
Okay so obviously these learnings and fears can go pretty deep.
And because of the way they are encoded in the brain they are generally not conscious.
That being said, it is possible and important to make them conscious. That is what therapy is all
about, at least the deeper kinds of therapy--the ones that Bruce Ecker calls non-counteractive.
In non-counteractive approaches (also called experiential approaches),
instead of just telling our brain the way it is (counteracting our brain), we slow down
and understand its lived reality, and what it has learned to expect, whether that's rational or not.
Until we address those deeper fears, an approach like CBT, which tells us to override them, I don't
think will really work for us, at least not in relation to something as deep as undoing shame.
However, there are many forms of therapy, and even some self-help, that can help us transform the way
we treat ourselves, through working with the parts of us that believe it is unsafe to feel self-love.
This work needs to be experiential because our brain only believes what it experiences, right?
So if you are someone wanting to develop self-compassion what advice would I give?
Well one place to start is by going to Kristin Neff's website and signing up for one of her
courses on self-compassion. That way you can learn some self-compassion practices you can
try out using them in your daily life. I think a practice is the first place to start because often
we simply have difficulty with something because we haven't learned it or practiced it enough yet.
So an obvious first step is to learn the steps of self-compassion,
try doing them, and see if your brain will let you, even if it's awkward at first.
However it is possible that you will start engaging in a self-compassion mindfulness practice
and, for the reasons we just explored, you will find some part of your mind resisting
or even feeling disturbed by it. And that resistance is based on fear like your mind
saying "what are you doing to me here? I learned it's unsafe to care about myself! So don't push
us towards self-care! That feels dangerous!" So that's where deeper therapy might be necessary.
Remember that client I was mentioning whose mother told him "don't get too big for your britches"?
Just this week we had a breakthrough which gave him a lot of relief from his shame.
And I got his permission to describe our work here because I think it's a great example of the type
of inner work we can do to relieve unconscious fears around self-love. So for this client how
he usually experiences his shame is as this very cruel inner bully that tells him he's worthless.
then in response he feels small and scared and simply screams back "leave me alone!"
The shift occurred when he understood that while he is scared of his inner bully,
that shaming voice itself is simply like a young frightened part of him. Realizing that his inner
bully must be afraid of something, or else it wouldn't feel so compelled to bully and shame him,
he was able to bring on a little curiosity and get a little observing distance.
Ihad him step back both from the bully, and from the little hurt boy inside screaming "leave me
alone!" and that way he could access his inner adult that wanted to show up for his own mind,
even for his scary shaming voice, and offer support. From that vantage point he could ask his
inner bully "what are you afraid would happen if you stop shaming me?" Slowly the answer emerged,
"it is dangerous to feel good about myself because doing so means disagreeing with mom.
Mom thinks I'm bad, and I have to agree with her. If I disagree with mom, she'll hurt me. She will
send me to boarding school, like she threatens. Unless I agree that she's right and I'm bad,
the little love I have from her will evaporate and the whole family will send me out into the cold.
These were the types of words that began to emerge. Now for my client, understanding the
fears held by his inner bully was a pivotal point. Why? Because the moment he could feel the shaming
part's fear, he could also feel compassion for it. He could really get how his inner critic and
shaming voice, the one he'd always been afraid of, was really just a frightened child itself.
And he was able to take it by the hand, in fact he pictured in one hand taking the shaming voice
and the other hand taking the part that had been shamed, and he was feeling so loving and
protective of both of them. And he imagined taking them by the hand to a warm cabin in the woods
where only safe and loving people were around. That simple but deep process took the wind out
of the sails of his shame, because now the part of him that was scared of losing mom's love could
realize that he's safe now. He no longer needed to worry about pleasing mom or gaining her love,
because now my client is able to feel love for himself. This love created the sense of security
he needed to finally disagree with mom and begin to accept his own value. So that example I just
gave would be a good demonstration of how the fear of caring for ourselves might be
worked through the lens of IFS or Internal Family Systems therapy. IFS is not the only therapy that
works beautifully with shame. In fact in my other videos I talk about AEDP and Coherence Therapy
and how they can shift unconscious learnings as well. It was through Coherence Therapy that
I learned about these deeper unconscious fears that can block our ability to value ourselves.
But if you struggle with your relationship with yourself, I encourage you to watch the
IFS video series I made because it will give you some language and imagery to better understand
and interface with your mind in general, and some tools you can use to address the unconscious fears
that block self-compassion. So I will put a link up to that video as well. Thank you for watching.
Thank you for watching. I hope you found this video helpful,
and if you did you can help me out by liking and subscribing. Or if you're a therapist who
would like to train with me, while earning CEU's, you can visit my website at toriolds.com [Music]