Being mean to yourself won't make you "better"
When you dislike yourself, it can be hard to accept that developing more self-compassion would be helpful. Here's what opened me to the possibility.
I recently bought a book with a title that, just a month or so earlier, would have sent me running straight for the hills.
Said book is the Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Dr. Kristen Neff and Dr. Chris Germer, and the whole “Self-Compassion” bit is not something I have historically been open to. In fact, I’ve been dowwnright hostile to it. Ask any of the therapists I’ve had over the years—mentioning “self-compassion” is a good way to get me to shut down and resist helping myself or even receiving help entirely. But over the past month or so, my mindset has shifted enough that I’m finally ready to admit that this attitude (surprise) isn’t helpful. Thus, the workbook.
The reasons I went with the workbook are pretty straightforward: Dr. Neff is the person when it comes to self-compassion because she was the first person to actually research its benefits. Also her book has an almost perfect rating on Amazon with thousands of reviews. That’s good enough for me! It’s also important to me to have someting physical in my hands that’s full of notes and reflections—I’ve been in therapy long enough that “working on” feeling better is getting a bit old. It’s easy to say “I’m working on it” and do no work at all. A workbook, at least, makes things clear: “working on it” means doing the things in the workbook.
The reasons I’m ready to actually do that work are a bit more complex, and that’s what I want to cover in this post. I’ll want to walk through the reasons I’ve historically struggled to accept self-compassion and some of the things that helped me let go of that resistance and recognize the value in building a kinder relationship to myself.
Why I resisted self-compassion
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Being hard on yourself doesn’t make you better—it makes you worse
I started to see a new therapist recently, and almost immediately he seemed to recognize that much of my pain seemed tangled up in a lack of self-compassion. I could tell that he was often nudging me to be kinder to myself or to cut myself slack. When I’d inevitably start beating myself up, he’d gently intervene to ask things like “Would you talk to a friend like you’re talking to yourself now?” and “Would you say that perhaps your inner critic isn’t being fair?”
Naturally, I resisted all of these questions. “Of course I’d talk to a friend like this if she f***ed up as badly as I just did!” Yeah, right. Of course I would.
The inner-critic and Freud’s Über-ich
That “inner critic” my therapist rightfully called out for being harsh is a concept similar to Freud’s super-ego. In my case, I find that the German word Freud originally used for this concept actually captures what’s going on in my head a bit better than either of the English possibilities: Über-ich.
Über-ich. Above-I. Beyond-I. It’s easy to miss the nastier connotations obscured by the neolatin “superego” or to not take the cuddlier “inner critic” seriously. I hate this, because I’m no fan of Freud, but learning the German translation actually really helped me get to grips with this part of myself—how it tries to help me, and how it ends up hurting me.
The Über-ich means business—and its business is perfection. Of course you’re never going to live up to its standards. Those standards are, definitionally, beyond you.
Perhaps in part due to its unpleasant resemblance to Übermensch (a word coined by Nietzche and later corrupted), and perhaps because of its uncomplicated, bare honesty, Über-ich paints its shadow in stronger strokes than do either inner critic or superego. The Über-ich means business—and its business is perfection. Of course you’re never going to live up to it’s standards. Those standards are, definitionally, beyond you.
Thinking about the inner critic as an Über-ich, it’s clear that it can do harm even if it ultimately just wants you to be a better version of yourself. Yes, the inner critic provides an aspirational standard to work towards. It lets us know when we’ve done something wrong—which is good information to have. We don’t have inner critics for no reason.
But as you’d expect of an über-anything, the Über-ich doesn ’t really know where to stop. Instead of simply chiming in to let me know that I’ve made a mistake or alert me to some potentially harmful consequences of a behavior or choice, my Über-ich devalues me for failing to meet its standards and hands me all of the verbal whips I need to lash out my own penance for that failure. It is the part of me that sees myself as insufficient and worthless—lower.
And “lower” is clearly no way to think about any human being, yourself included.
A harsh inner-critic turns help into harm
One of the nastier manifestations of my strong self-loathing is its ability to turn help from people who care about me into self-harm. When someone tries to help me when I’m down by listening or providing support, I often use their support as an opportunity to argue my case for how they’re wrong, I’m right, and I’m just as awful as I say I am. It usually looks something like this:
“You don’t think it’s a big deal that I can’t establish a morning routine? Well you’re wrong, because it is a big deal. It’s evidence that I lack discipline. It’s evidence that I’m lazy and can’t control myself, like an animal. Don’t pretend it isn’t a big deal!”
Yikes.
This tendency is especially vicious because my loved ones can’t really do anything right: Say nothing, and I’ll feel unsupported and abandoned (and take their “abandonment” as proof that everything the inner-critic says is true). Say something, and I’ll use it as an opportunity to reinforce my own harmful ideas. The same thing often happens with my therapists. I’ll show up to therapy, and instead of working towards a better mindset, I just use the presence of my therapist as an opportunity to put on my favorite I-suck-a-lot-and-can’t-be-helped record.
In the moment, I see comapassion directed at me—no matter whether it’s coming from someone else or from myself—as coddling that will prevent me from being hard enough on myself to make real change. So instead of accepting help that could actually move me towards my goals or otherwise improve my life, I resist it. And that’s clearly not a recipe for being “better” at anything.