Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today and if you've listened before, welcome back. When I started creating content about psychology and self-development about a decade ago, I would not have guessed that self-compassion of all things would be one of the things that people reacted to the most strongly.
I would really struggle with applying self-compassion and the phrase alone can elicit some cringes. Self-compassion seems like a pretty basic good thing, right? It's the ability to be kind to ourselves when things are difficult and show ourselves the same care and support we might have for a friend who's going through a hard time. So if that's such a good thing, what's going on here? Why do so many people seem to struggle with self-compassion? And what can we do about it?
Help me answer some of those questions. I'm joined by Dr. Chris Germer. Dr. Germer is a clinical psychologist, a part-time lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the author, co-author, and co-editor of a number of books, including The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, and Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, which is regularly used in graduate programs.
And he's also the co-developer of the Mindful Self-Compassion program with Dr. Kristen Neff, who we've had the pleasure of speaking with on the show in the past. And together, they co-authored three books now on Mindful Self-Compassion, including their most recent Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout, which just came out. So congratulations about that, Chris. Thanks for us, and it's so nice to be here to speak with you. Thanks for having me on.
Same, really looking forward to this one. So glad to talk to you, and so glad to have you here. In part because I have experienced these struggles with self-compassion myself, and I've definitely talked with a lot of people who have that kind of difficult relationship with self-compassion. But as somebody who's been exploring these topics for a really long time, I want to start just by asking you, has that also been your experience?
Oh, for sure. Now self-compassion is a little more mainstream, so we don't get as much pushback. But in the early days, everybody said, oh, my goodness, self-compassion, self-selfishness, self-compassion training is only going to make me more selfish and narcissistic, and don't we have enough of that already.
And then when people hear compassion in the general public, they often think of weakness. They say, oh, my goodness, I have too much of that already. I'm too sensitive already to how other people feel. And I can't add anything, any, any more compassion to my life. I'll just be overwhelmed.
So as you said, there's a kind of a cringe factor. It's decreasing, but it's definitely there. But the good news, of course, is that there are over 7,000 studies on this subject now. And across the board, it shows it's good for you. It decreases distress, increases well-being, even improves relationships. When we talk about self-compassion, we have a lot of support, you might say, but still people are wary.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that some of that wearing this gets to and you even kind of named a few of them there and just what a newer sign. Some of the common misconceptions or misunderstandings that people have about self-compassion, really common one is some version of, well, you know, the challenges that I face when compared to the challenges faced by so many people can seem very, very small and kind of meaningless in comparison.
Can I really extend myself that sort of feeling when so many other people out there have it worse? People worry that it will make them a little bundle of sorrow and suffering, in other words, self-pity. But actually the research shows that people who are high in self-compassion, they have more perspective on what they're going through and also they ruminate less. So that's one.
Another one is self-indulgence. People think, I learn self-compassion, I'm just going to sit around and watch TV and eat bonbons, you know. But the research shows people who are high in self-compassion, they actually take better care of themselves. They sleep when they're tired, they go to the doctor when they need to.
Really, the deal is that when people are self-compassionate, they take better care of themselves and just sort of laying around and doing nothing and being complacent is not, you know, is not taking better care of yourself. Perhaps the biggest one is demotivation. And people think that if I'm more self-compassionate, I'll lose my edge, you know. In other words, if I'm not self-critical and I'm kind of self-encouraging, maybe I'm not getting enough of a kick in the butt.
What the research shows is that people who are high in self-compassion, they actually have as high standards as anyone else. But they're actually more motivated to achieve them because they're motivating themselves with kindness and self-appreciation and respect rather than harsh self-criticism, which will get us out of the chair, but it won't get us to the goal line. You know, it's actually... Yeah, stick with it. We need to... We need encouragement. We need a good coach, you know.
I would love to drop you into a situation talking with somebody who thinks or feels these things, Chris. And maybe we can use that situation as a way in to talking about a lot of what we want to talk about today. That's a great idea. Yeah, let's say they're talking to somebody either they've walked into your office or as often happens, you're at the end of some talk you've given about this topic that come up, they say hi to you, and they say something along the lines of this.
You know, I hear what you're saying. This all sounds really nice. These all sounds like things that would be great for me to be able to access. But, man, I'm just doing a normal job. It's a hard job, but it's a normal job. Many of other people do some hard jobs and they seem to make it work. I've got stressful stuff going on in my life. But how can I take a break right now when there's so much that's going on?
And then sometimes I try to apply these self-compassion tools that you teach, Chris, and they're great tools or helpful stuff. But I just kind of keep feeling that because the things in my life that are stressing me out are still stressing me out. Oh, forrest, you know, care for yourself in different ways. But man, I've still got these challenges out there. So between those things, you know, I've just really struggled with all of this.
And I'm sure that there's something else in there that I should be doing, but I don't really know what it is. What do you think about this? Well, I can tell you what would go on in my mind. Yeah, that would be great. First of all, I would appreciate in my spirit that the person has attended a talk or come to a workshop and that I would acknowledge either verbally or to myself that that is already an active self-compassion.
In other words, the wish to do something good for oneself by cultivating self-compassion. And then, you know, is more or less the concern, you know, it's not working for me because the conditions of my life haven't changed. And then what would go through my mind, and I might say it in some form, is it does take time. It does take time. And sometimes we really need to change the conditions of our lives, not just how we relate to those conditions.
And that then brings up the subject of tender versus fear self-compassion. Tender self-compassion is like being with ourselves in some kind way as we would for a friend, but fear self-compassion is taking action in the world. You know, maybe the job is not the right thing for that person, you know, or maybe there are some boundaries that need to be made on that job, you know.
But at the very deepest level, what I might be thinking when a person presented that situation is, I wonder how they're practicing. I wonder how they're practicing because sometimes people are feeling anxious or depressed and the sole criteria for whether or not the practice works, is if they feel less anxious and less depressed.
And that's a reasonable request. But the problem is is that it has kind of the seed of its own demise, which is because when self-compassion is real, we are actually opening to the pain in our lives and responding with kindness without any strings attached.
You know, the same way we would respond to kindness, but the same way we would be kind to a child with a five day flu, and it's only the first day, you know, you're not thinking, okay, I'm only going to be kind to my child because if this is going to end the flu, you know, it's not like that. We say, no, child is suffering, I'm kind to the job.
Similarly, can we in fact be kind to ourselves because we're anxious, because we're depressed, because we have a lousy job rather than expecting that this should, you know, miraculously overnight, and change anything. So basically if we front load the kindness in this way, inevitably it works better, but it still might take some time depending on the gravity of the situation.
I think this really gets to something you've written and spoken a lot about, which you call the paradox of self-compassion, which is that essentially yeah, we give ourselves that self-compassion not to solve a problem necessarily, although it can help with that, or to feel better necessarily, although it often helps with that too, but because we feel bad, and I think that that kind of difference and intent is what you're really speaking to here.
That's what it is, yeah, and then there's a, so that's what you know what we call the core paradox of practice, you know, because most people practice to manipulate how they feel, and that's resistance and what we resist persists, you know, but what we can feel we can heal, so what would it take to actually open to the experience, and then, you know, give ourselves the most natural thing when we're suffering, which is kindness, but that the other there's a related paradox, and that is,
when we suffer, we practice not to perfect ourselves, but to embrace our imperfections, or as Jack Cornfield says, the point of practice is not to perfect ourselves, but to perfect our love.
In other words, and when they're suffering, that means perfect our compassion, so it's a tricky thing, it's definitely paradoxical, and right out of the box, this makes no sense whatsoever, but when somebody's been practicing for a while, and then they've hit a wall, I can't go any further than this, it really is an invitation to have a different intention, different motivation, different approach to the whole thing.
We're getting right to the heart of this, farthest than you clearly know a lot about self compassion. This is a lot of fun for me, because usually it takes like an hour and a half to get to where we are now. Hey, love that. This is the very essence of self compassion, if people stop listening right now, they would have heard it all.
Well, for starters, love to hear it, very respectful, people's time out there, we definitely try to get to it, and I appreciate that also on a personal level, Chris, definitely means a lot to me. And just to kind of keep going here, because I think that you, kind of like you're saying, you've already gotten to the place where I was kind of hoping that we would go to some extent.
With this person, and I've been this person, this person I was modeling, I've been that person at least to some extent. The first one of these is the ability to perceive that somebody is struggling, like we need to be able to see ourselves as having a kind of problem or having a kind of challenge.
If you think back to the person I just modeled, well, they're downplaying all of their challenges to some extent, right? They're saying, well, other people have it worse, is it really that bad? All of that. The next, you talk about needed to feel kind of a connection or a kinship with other people, amidst that suffering, common humanity, this is a normal human experience, all of that.
There might have been a little bit of that there, but again, there was kind of downplaying and denying and sort of pushing away to some extent. And then you need a generally warm and kind attitude toward ourselves. And the person might have had that. They were shown up to the workshop, they were interested to talk with you about it. Those are all good signs. But you can kind of see in the role play, the presence or absence of these different things and maybe connected to that a little bit.
One of the major reasons that people struggle with self compassion, at least in my experience, is that they feel like they are just fundamentally not worthy of it for lack of a better way of putting it. Like how can I feel compassion for somebody who really has done bad things? And I know in my mind every single bad thought I have ever had every bad thing I've ever done, you know, I've got the whole catalog in there.
So how can I extend compassion to myself? And then we get into the shame piece of it. And that's a major part of your work. Yeah, so there are many ways that we render ourselves unqualified for a self compassion. And one is, yeah, other people have it. Whereas the me and other is, I don't deserve it.
You know, if you only knew, you know, there are many different ways that we minimize both our suffering. In other words, not open to suffering and also interfere with our ability to receive the medicine, which is kindness. And compassion for this whole thing to work. We really do need to, first of all, be able to open to the suffering where we feel we actually need to validate it.
Actually being kind to ourselves and seeing things as part of humanity, common humanity kind of opens the door to feeling suffering. But if we actually don't contact our struggles, then we won't be able to give ourselves the kindness that we need. So there are really two things. There's, can I open to pain and then can I give myself the kindness that I need? We have to be able to open to our pain in some way.
But then when it comes to giving ourselves kindness and not being deserving, we need to go very slowly with that. Because often what people are concerned about is not so much that they're not deserving, but what may get kicked up emotionally when I start giving myself compassion.
In other words, if I start saying to myself, may I begin to accept myself just as I am? We're very likely to start thinking about many times in the past when we were either not treated in an acceptable way or aspects of ourselves that are not acceptable. So people are afraid of what we call back draft or kind of difficult emotions and old wounds that could arise.
So that is often part of the I'm not deserving part. It's like the suspicion that something is going to come up inside that is a little stronger than I can deal with around the area of shame that you just described. But when somebody feels just a lot of shame, like let's just assume they know they feel shame, they're not like afraid of something erupting, they've got it, they know it, but I'm not deserving.
Then we have to go very, very gently into this. We have to go very gently into this. And in particular, ask ourselves, how could I care for myself in a way that would feel genuinely good? And one thing, for example, that people who have a lot of shame, particularly shame associated with trauma can do is they're really good taking care of others.
So for example, if somebody has a dog, you know, they might take really good care of the dog, but not so good care of themselves because the dog deserves it, but I don't. But actually by taking care of the dog, there is a sense of well-being that comes in. There's a sense of worthiness that comes in. You know, I'm a good caretaker.
So there's always a way in. There's always a way in. Sometimes the way in is by caring for others, which then warms up our awareness and starts to activate compassion. And then we just need to include ourselves in the circle of compassion. In other words, in order for my dog to be well, then I need to be well. You know, I can't like starve myself and feed my dog. Well, actually, I need to feed myself for my dog. You follow what I'm saying? In other words, yeah, absolutely.
One of the ways of overcoming this sense of non-deservedness is by focusing on who actually deserves compassion in our immediate environment, giving that one compassionate and then talking ourselves in, sneaking ourselves in. In other words, including ourselves in the circle of compassion. For starters, very clever. Chris is kind of like a way to trojan horse some of these ideas. Absolutely. And it's not full of the enemy. It's full of the medicine.
That's right. It's full of the little self-compassion there, which is fantastic. And one of the things we talk about, I want to focus in a little bit on what you said there about back draft for a second, because it's very, very common. And something we talk about on the show is some regularity is experiencing out. So the basic idea is that we have all these feelings inside that we avoid in different kinds of ways.
And sometimes you need to feel the feeling in order to be able to work with the feeling to kind of get it up there. And sometimes what happens when, which you detail in the book with Kristen, very, very well is when people first start kind of applying that self-compassion to themselves. Something about this system in some way that's kind of hard to put your finger on sort of senses that this is an opportunity to do that.
And that safety has been created. We've got that secure base. We're given ourselves the chance to kind of get in there and feel some of those feelings that we need to feel. But then those feelings do not feel good. And we go, oh, don't want to do that again. So this is a very common process for people. I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this. And I'm wondering once they get to that, oh, don't want to do that again, phase.
How do you work with people around it? Are there things that they can do or tools that they can apply? So first of all, I would honor that stuff is coming up that might be a little too much to handle at the time. And this is actually a sign of progress that is to say it's a sign that the medicine is in the body is in the system that it's actually doing its work that feeling, you know, these strong emotions and old wounds.
This is actually fundamental to the transformation process. So we want to make sure that that back draft is normalized that people understand that this is actually how compassion heals. When we can meet what arises with kindness, compassion, common humanity and mindfulness. In other words, to hold it in a loving and understanding way as it probably was not held when it happened originally.
So we want to make sure that people don't like freak out over this. That understand this is a good thing. But we have to work skillfully with it. In other words, we don't want too much back to it. If somebody had trauma history, we don't want to be them to be retraumatized. If somebody, we don't want people to get overwhelmed with difficult emotions. So when we work with self-compassion, you know, if you can think of three concentric circles, the center is safety.
The next circle is challenge and the outer circle is overwhelmed. If we ever start to feel overwhelmed, we want to move towards safety. We want to stay either in the safe space, which usually means we're comfortable but not learning too much or in the challenge space, which is optimal learning. But when we get into the overwhelm, then we learn nothing. So when people have back draft, particularly if they are overwhelmed with back draft, then we need to move towards safety.
There are a variety of ways of doing this. But as we proceed in self-compassion practice, a nice little motto that we have is, at any point in the practice, ask yourself, lean in, lean back or let go. If we feel safe, we can lean in. If we feel challenged, we can either lean in or lean back. And if we feel overwhelmed, then we should let go of what we're doing.
We should stop doing what we're doing and shift our attention to something else, either present moment experience, you know, anchoring our awareness or, and this is really important for us. If somebody is doing mind training or meditation or something, they think this is like the most important way of practicing self-compassion, but it's actually not so. There's an equally important way of practicing self-compassion, and we can shift to this other modality and that's behavioral self-compassion.
Actually, physically taking good care of ourselves, asking the question, if we feel overwhelmed, what do I need? What do I need right now? Do I need to physically comfort myself? Do I need emotionally soothe myself? Do I need to validate myself? Do I need to protect myself? Provide for myself? Motivate, what do I need? Do I need to feel safe? How do I do it? And the answer to this is almost always behavioral, behavioral self-compassion, and this is not a lesser practice.
But behavioral self-compassion is fundamentally safe because it is so ordinary, so we can always practice self-compassion, even when we have a lot of back drive, just shifting the way that we're practicing self-compassion. Creating really great retail experiences is tough, especially with multiple stores, teams of staff, fulfillment centers, separate workflows, it's a lot, but with Shopify Point of Sale, you can do it all without complexity.
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Head over to OneSkin.co and for a limited time, our listeners can get 15% off One Skin with our code being well at OneSkin.co. Could you give just a couple of very quick examples here, Chris, of what you mean by behavioral self-compassion? So the quintessential self-compassion question is, what do I need? But if we're kind of emotionally overwhelmed, it's hard to answer that question. So then we got to break it down. We got to make it a little more narrow.
So in the area of tender self-compassion, we have the categories of comforting, soothing, and validating. So we can say, what do I need to emotionally comfort myself? So maybe that means pet the dog or listen to music or wrap myself in a blanket. And those are things in the world you can do. Those are behaviors. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or what do I need to validate myself? Maybe the most self-compassion thing is to reach out and talk to a friend.
Ask, let's go to dinner or to journal, to know what we're feeling, things like that. Or what do I need to protect myself? Do I need to say no to something? Do I need to stand up and say no? Or provide for myself? What does it take to provide for myself? What does it take to provide for myself physically, emotionally? What does it take to provide for myself spiritually? Maybe what I really need to do is to sit down and pray.
This is all behavioral stuff. And it is fundamentally safe because it's so ordinary, but it is not a lesser practice. In fact, we can practice behavioral self-compassion all day long, whereas how long are we going to meditate? You know, maximum one or two hours a day. Where do we do with the rest of the day? If we spend the rest of the day abusing ourselves and then we try to learn self-compassion in an hour of meditation, waste the time. We want to do both.
Yeah, and I think this also gets to something that you guys put in the book, the recent mindful self-compassion for a burnout book that really spoke to me, because I thought that it was such a great articulation of something that people really struggle with. And then along the lines of, when we're in the grip of intensive motions, we need to hold ourselves first before we're able to hold our experience.
And this is in a section where you talk about some of the differences between mindfulness and self-compassion. And what I love about these various behavioral practices is for starters, they get us out of the mind palace for like a better way. What does my dad say? Yeah, the mind is a cave of bats is one of the lines that he likes. You know, it's all going on there. It's a chaotic place. You've got to be careful when you're walking around.
And it puts us into direct experience and things we can actually do out in the world. And also, all of these things are incredibly soothing. They're all forms of holding ourselves, like providing our self that safe base from which we can work. So I really love the behavioral aspect of it. And behavioral activation is a hell of a drug in general if you can get to it.
So we cut this intuitively when we're interacting with other people, at least most of the people who are listening to a podcast like this one probably get this intuitively that if we kind of start by joining right. We start by relating to another person from that stance of hearing their experience or saying, you know, wow, that sounds hard before getting to hear are the 17 things that you can do to solve this problem for yourself.
But we aren't always so great at applying that to ourselves for people who are having a hard time relating to themselves without entering a problem solving mode. Because I can speak for myself. I'm a big problem solver. I'm there to give you the 10 point plan. But I'm not always so good at being in the more relational space. Are the things, whether it's understandings or just like tactics that can help people with that.
So, you know, in the old analytic framework, there was a thing called flight into action, which was a defense. Wow, that's a great line. I love that flight into action. Yeah. In other words, like to do those 10 things, you know, and struggle with them and so forth, it frees me from feeling what it was that was the kick in the butt that maybe want to do this in the first place.
Or what was my suffering? So to actually be aware that, you know, I would like to first be present in my experience before I start, you know, moving into, you know, 10 different solutions is a really important thing. It is such a fact, what you said, you know, you said initially when we're going to talk to somebody who's struggling, we want to join with them. But we're not just joining with them because, you know, otherwise they won't listen.
Period. We're joining with them because we know that by giving people a chance to, as Ticknot Hans says, empty their hearts. They probably are going to figure out what we were going to suggest anyway or they come up with something better. So what is really important when we're trying to help somebody else is to recognize that our presence is often and our patients and our willingness to listen and to provide space for somebody to open their hearts is probably the best thing that we can do.
This, we know from interacting with other people. But what is the corollary in self compassion? And the corollary is ultimately loving awareness, you know, mindfulness with a lot of warmth. And in other words, when we're suffering, can we give ourselves the same blessing, the same grace, the same gift? Can we actually sit down and be with ourselves in the same way without catapulting into action?
Because generally speaking, when people are not self compassionate, they have a whip and they're really, you know, trying to get themselves to do stuff constantly. But what would it take to just sort of put down that whip? And I think the answer is experience, you know, just like experience with other people, when we recognize that actually I don't need to talk and I don't need to recommend.
And actually people will get more out of being with me when I don't. When we realize this with other people, we can in fact begin to understand the preciousness of being with ourselves with compassionate awareness, with loving awareness to just sit with ourselves. And we provide a whole host of tools for people to how do we sit with ourselves, how to be with ourselves without having to do anything.
So for example, one way which research shows clearly changes physiology is soothing touch, you know, you put a hand over your heart and it will definitely decrease cortisol just about everybody has this experience or some other place on their body where they, which they find comforting and soothing.
There's even research that was done pretty close to where you live at UC Berkeley that showed that 20 seconds of soothing touch per day for one month significantly decreases stress and increases self compassion. This is so such a small thing, but when we are unable to be with ourselves, in other words, you pointed out sometimes in the midst of intense and disturbing emotions, we have to hold ourselves before we hold our experience.
If we don't know how to hold ourselves, we can learn self compassion, we can learn simple things like soothing touch or asking ourselves, what do I need to hear right now and then offering ourselves those same words or behavioral self compassion, taking a warm bath, what do you need? So all this allows us to be with ourselves without trying to force ourselves into some remediative action.
Yeah, I think that's really great Chris and this connects to a bunch of other things like it's kind of just like a web going out a little bit because the particular topic that you guys were focused on in the most recent book was burnout. And burnout stems from keeping on going when you don't have any battery left when you're when your batteries run dry, right, and but you're keeping on the plug away.
And we were talking a minute ago about shame and one of the things with shame is that there's often this. There's often a coping mechanism that people have where they do in order to avoid the feeling of not being enough essentially keep on doing so that they don't experience the shame that they're feeling.
To validate to those themselves that they are in fact a good person, even if there's that voice in the back of the head that even while they're doing all that doing it's still telling them that they are not actually a good person. So it's a little bit of turtles all the way down it's an attempt to solve a problem, but the solution's not actually helping you that much and that then leads to burnout.
Then the shame voice just absolutely turbocharges because you can't really do it anymore and now your stock your stock in that experience and along the way it's really difficult to hold yourself because there's still that underlying. Model that the person is carrying around of not good enough can't do this whatever it is and for starters I say that just to think about that person and extend a little bit of compassion toward the person who's going through that experience.
It's a very very difficult experience to go through. I'm wondering if you've seen that and in that model that I was kind of describing are there places that you tend to start with people. So there are many different causes of burnout and you named one of them and that is a kind of relentless striving and to some extent the relentless striving is you might say motivated or driven by shame.
A variation on that theme is perfectionism you know when good enough is never good enough and often shame is at the root because this is slight different variation but the idea is that myself worth depends on what I do not who I am.
And so shame is behind that in other words if we're constantly doing and trying to be perfect you know where do we get the idea that you know we have to that first of all this is going to we're going to succeed by being perfect at work or that we could even be perfect where do we get this idea we got it because being in my own skin being my own person is not acceptable you know I feel shame.
The question is how do we help a person who is for example is driven by shame perhaps in perfectionism or excessive striving and you know I think the way you framed it is just really clear you know in other words what a person needs to do is in some way to get their self worth.
In another way and in particular to deal with the shame now what's interesting about self compassion is that we actually it actually addresses shame without ever having to call it shame because some people feel like a shame that being ashamed somebody comes in saying i'm burnt out and you say well no you really have a shame problem you say oh geez thank you for sharing you know.
But we don't have to do that because self compassion is a is a positive resource that is the opposite of shame I mean the research is very clear about this people who are high in self compassion are low in shame people who grow in self compassion reduce their shame so when somebody is doing anything perfection is a
rescribing to hard coming from shame all they need to do is to begin to be kind to themselves in ways that they have not here to forb and kind to themselves in ways that are palatable because then what happens is the self worth gets a different source so if our self worth was originally from work which is known as contingent social approval in other words I do this well somebody likes
me and then I'm okay when our self worth is due to external approval it's very fickle and it's very unstable and frankly it we will never succeed except for a few short moments but when our self worth the source of self worth is inner kindness in other words when there's an inner voice which says you're doing the best you can not a bad not a bad start you know you've got what it takes you've also got the discipline you can figure this out you don't
have to do it today or tomorrow but we will get there good on you you know if there's an inner voice that's talking like this then actually all this excessive striving and perfectionism starts to dissipate and this kind of inner voice is what people actually learn when they learn self compassion they learn how to exchange harsh self criticism for encouragement and support and kindness we find a more stable source of self worth from inner kindness rather than external approval and then
people can relax then they can relax and that could be a very long process for people as you know for more I mean that's not it would be great if it were something that we could just talk about in a podcast episode and give people access to but these things often take a long time with people and they're often very deep rooted and really difficult to work with
very deep very very deep it's about who we are yeah and who we are started being created the moment of birth a lot of what we consider shame pronus is locked in by the time we're five you know I mean we can develop shame from cultural and systemic oppression and so forth and we can develop later in life but when we're shame prone it often starts with disconnections that may have occurred in the first few years of life before we even had a personality
you know moments of emotional disconnection that were persistent over time makes us feel like what's matter with me that's the source of shame so to get to the bottom of shame as you said forest is a very very deep and also incredibly fruitful enterprise but we don't we're not just trying to pull back you know the layers of obfuscation and get to this horrible thing at the root
instead we're learning to love ourselves up and then these things will reveal themselves when they can be worked on in other words we don't need to do archaeology what we need to do is to love ourselves up and shame will yield
that's so interesting Chris I want to ask you about that because there's this this very funny relationship between shame and self compassion that that you've already alluded to here which is that on the one hand self compassion absolutely incredible antidote for shame right we have all these views about ourselves they're very negative views if we can find a way to apply more kindness to ourselves wow can really help with those views on the other hand shame is incredibly good at blocking the person's ability to apply self compassion to themselves because
of all the reasons we've talked about right the moment the self compassion comes online all of these counter examples all of these negative thoughts start just bubbling on up and for starters again very difficult to work with very common problem that people can be experiencing and also one of the things that I really liked that you guys recommended as an intervention for this kind of problem and you know please correct me if I'm wrong here but that's sort of how I thought about you guys positioning it was
mindfulness based practices focused on evaluating thoughts versus evaluating reality a lot of the shame thoughts that we have about ourselves are very exaggerated they're very complete they're very rigid and they are out of proportion what's actually going on around us and one of the great ways to find counter examples to that is just by looking into our direct experience and that's where mindfulness comes in as a tool would you mind talking about that a little bit that sort of gets the ball rolling you know a kind of
analysis of the situation but shame is mostly just like trauma it's in the body you know it's deep so what you described by you know asking yourselves you know if I were like if you're perfectionist is say well you know what would be like if I didn't
perfect all the time what what would happen and how terrible would that be this is kind of a kind of a cognitive process which opens the door to I don't have to do that perhaps or it's not helpful to do that it basically shines a bright light on what we're doing that is not fruitful however to actually transform what has created that
edifice in the first place requires deeper work you know it requires actually changing our physiology it requires that we start to feel safe when we felt threatened it requires that we start to feel loved when we felt disrespected or dismissed you know it requires that we can hold our trembling heart in a loving embrace when we would otherwise flea and so the shift in physiology is from threat state to a care state you know from
cortisol and nor an adrenaline to oxytocin in the endorphins we actually have to change the way it feels inside in order to dismantle unrealistic expectations of ourselves I think this gets back to what you were saying a couple of minutes ago Chris about the different concentric circles that a person could exist and right you've got
safety you've got challenge and I think the third one was overwhelmed for a lot of people when they first start encountering these topics the space of challenges pretty thin there's safety and there's overwhelm and you move through challenge to get to overwhelm pretty darn briskly you know so a lot of what this becomes about is you can talk about it a bunch of different ways expanding the
window of tolerance is a phrase that people use a lot it's a little bit of a complicated one it's got some got some issues with that but it's one that you might be familiar with if you're listening to it let's say that somebody wants to go through this process they have enough resourcing internally to be able to apply a bit of
self compassion for themselves when they apply that self compassion they maybe they get that back draft maybe they're not able to stick with it for very long before moving into overwhelm what have you found whether it's a practice or just a process that you go through with people that helps people start to be able to stay in challenge for a longer period of time before moving into overwhelm essentially mindfulness yeah mindfulness so compassion is more activating emotionally
activating the mindfulness compassion training can quickly get too hot you know and gets too hot because of back draft and mindfulness allows it to cool down it allows us to anchor our awareness to stabilize our awareness so there are actually four ways that we apply mindfulness and self compassion practice the first one is not necessarily cooling or calming that is to open to what we're feeling
and what but also to do it this is calming in as much as possible in an accepting way and when we like know when we're struggling but with acceptance it creates a space around the thing in other words a little gap a little perspective out in which we can be compassionate so the first way that mindfulness can be helpful is its awareness with acceptance
and that then creates room for a compassionate response another way that mindfulness is helpful is as we were talking about before anchoring or stabilizing our awareness in other words when we are caught in a storm like an overwhelm and we want to get back to safety we can feel the souls of our feet or we can feel the internal rhythm of the breath or we can
look at a beautiful something beautiful in our room you know anchoring in present moment awareness is mindfulness practice and this is really helpful for working with compassion a third way and this is really really interesting and that is that we can find mindfully find emotion in the body so for example if you feel fear you know and if you just state in your
head you can you'll be like thinking okay you know what's the threat and where did it come from and how do I avoid it and is it coming after me you know we have these kind of our thoughts are so fast that if we want to work with a difficult emotion in the head it's really hard to do because frankly it will help run us however the body is slow and emotions consist of a physical side and a mental side so fear for example has a pounding heart or tension in the chest
but fear also you know has catastrophizing thoughts is but what if we find you know say we're in a moment of fear or moment of shame or moment of despair if we can feel in our bodies where do I feel fear where do I feel shame where do I feel despair and we can actually literally physically hold that part of our body in a compassionate way it will change the emotion
because it's like a system and when you relate in a new way to part of the system in this case the physical expression of a difficult emotion it starts to subside so that's the third way and then the fourth way that mindfulness is really helpful in self-compassion practice is as in the form of equanimity so mindfulness which is present moment awareness with acceptance when we do this long enough that space expands and we begin to be able to have what we call balanced awareness
we begin to be able to take things as they come a little more with less reactivity and then when we are able to see things in a kind of a spacious balanced way flow and behold something incredibly precious emerges which is wisdom wisdom and so we need mindfulness slash equanimity slash wisdom in self-compassion practice so that we can make wise compassionate choices if we think we can just decide what to do next based on compassion we're wrong
we need to know the causes and conditions in which something occurs in addition to a compassionate heart in order to know what to do so mindfulness is really essential in order to regulate our emotions and also going forward in life to be able to choose choices that are actually going to keep us steady and loving I think that was a fantastic run through that their crests very very helpful and it also connects at least in my mind that I'm curious what you take us on this
to the very first thing we were really talking about which is that paradox of self-compassion and the ability to be with a feeling without having an agenda associated with it because that's equanimity in a way of being you are present with it without having a view about it or becoming overwhelmed by it that's precisely the essence of that paradox is the essence of mindfulness
yeah yeah totally which is which is so interesting right this is a kind of operational definition of mindfulness in the context of compassion training yeah and so it's very normal again to be overwhelmed by a feeling it doesn't make you wrong if you're overwhelmed by a feeling
it's not necessarily a bad side if you've been unable to apply equanimity in that kind of way it's totally normal it's totally natural and what happens for a lot of people in those different this different windows of presence windows of tolerance is that they get to overwhelm and they go have some version inside of themselves of the story of I need to stay here to kind of prove that I can do this
or other strong people are able to do this for a logger some version of that right and you know this is the fact that I need to pull back is yet more evidence that you know there are all these things that are deeply wrong with me and we know with a thousand pieces of evidence that that's just not how it works anybody can get overwhelmed and when we camp out there we're just giving the brain more evidence that this thing that we're doing is bad
we're not learning something useful and good from it and so that's just more for like people who are listening who might be going through this kind of a process who might get a little seduced by that voice of like just keep going yeah sometimes it's good to not just keep going basically the greatest danger in self-compassion is over zealousness you know people that think well first of all when it's when you start having back draft
you know the same thing to be working then we double down because then we get extra back draft you know but when when way to think about this is it's just really important to have our intention clear so if we're struggling and then we think well I need to like struggle through this why because if you would like to learn compassion and then you're kind of driving yourself over the edge this is not compassion you're not practicing compassion what you're practicing is
struggle stress and maybe even self harm so you don't do it yeah so we have to get really clear about our intentions there's a psychologist Marshall Linnean who once said I heard at a conference here at Harvard she said what good is compassion if it doesn't actually help
so it back draft could really make you know it makes compassion tricky but when we have too much back draft it is not helping and when we respond to back draft with over zealousness then it will be harmful so we need to be very clear why am I doing this now just let me say one thing that people who practice mindfulness meditation they are they often hear when it's difficult you know just sit with it
bear with it and then you're going to learn important insights such as the truth of impermanence or or how the sense of self creates additional suffering or you might actually begin to dissolve in your pain and you'll develop the you'll learn the truth of selflessness in other words these are insights that lead to wisdom so some people their intention is not compassion their intention is wisdom and as a result they may actually get some benefit in sticking it out
but if you are on the compassion path which is about the alleviation of suffering through kindness then if you notice that you're doing something that is unkind and not alleviating suffering stop it that's the most competitive thing we can do just stop it yeah yeah and it is so funny how I think very understandably and maybe it's because we're coming from a place of having real problems real pain
and and wanting some wanting some relief when a person's experienced a lot of distress for a long time like it's very understandable to keep on plug in a way with it but I think a lot of a lot of this just comes down to a person having an appreciation and an acceptance for what they're experiencing right now
where they are inside of their own system and what is their actual level of capacity and it's okay to lean on your level of capacity but you don't want to try to put your fist through the wall because it's just not going to end very well for you most of the time
no it's not going to end well that's I think it was a beautiful summary what you just said for us I think it's Chris I appreciate that so as we get to the end here I do want to ask you one question from maybe a slightly different perspective the very very beginning you were talking about the different different misunderstandings that people have about self-compassion and some common misconceptions
and one of them got to the idea of losing your edge and I want to ask you about a version of that which is well will self-compassion prevent me in some way from doing healthy and appropriate forms of self-correction or self-evaluation and we haven't really talked about that much during the episode so I wanted to give you an opportunity here at the end no that's a really good question particularly in the context of of work stress and burnout
and so one of the most consistent findings that we have in the self-compassion research is we see that people who are high in self-compassion are more willing to admit mistakes more willing to risk failure and they are also more able to cope with failure and motivate themselves in the way we described before to achieve their goals so that whole constellation of how do we relate to things when things go bad self-compassion helps us on many different levels
and I also want to say something about the core paradox you know you were saying earlier that we really need to forget about the goal we don't want to manipulate our experience we just want to focus on the kindness aspect it may feel like we're abandoning something important temporarily in order to achieve that goal more effortlessly and strategically and that's in fact true but the other thing is that it actually is a lot of work to radically accept ourselves and our experience as it is now
it's actually a lot of work and it's also the most intelligent thing we can do because you know carriages had that beautiful paradoxical saying that the curious paradox is that when we accept ourselves just as we are then change happens as if by itself
so it's not like we're giving up on ourselves what it is is we're getting smarter at how we work by radically accepting ourselves and our moment to moment experience we are significantly increasing the likelihood that we will in fact succeed and also learn from our failures yeah right so this is a lot of work actually most people take the easy way out by just focusing on what they want to accomplish and they ignore how they're trying to go about it
like like beating themselves up to achieve it that is not helpful and so the sooner we recognize that the more the easier and frankly the more productive our lives will be Chris thanks so much for doing this with me I thought this was really fantastic I had helped me with my own process around these topics which I always appreciate and I think that people will get a lot out of it
thank you you're a very generous interviewer far as because you're willing to share in your own experience and that you also kind of roll with the conversation rather than having 20 fixed questions you know you're you're a brilliant interviewer thank you Chris I really appreciate that so it's a lot to me I'm grateful to have had this opportunity and I hope it's been helpful to your listeners
really loved this conversation with Chris focused on self-compassion again Chris's new book is mindful self-compassion for burnout and he wrote that with Dr. Christian Neff who is one of the original people to do research on self-compassion and I started by asking Chris why so many people seem to struggle with the topic of self-compassion
self-compassion seems like it would be a basic good thing you're being kind to yourself the same way that you would be kind to other people who are going through a difficult time but it's true that people often cringe at the phrase self-compassion there are a lot of misunderstandings about it and people can struggle to apply it inside of themselves for a whole bunch of different reasons that we explored during this conversation
one of the reasons that people sometimes struggle with self-compassion is that self-compassion can surface a lot of complex and difficult content for people they can pull up a lot of inner resistance maybe a person has absorbed narrative that they have to maintain a certain standard of performance in order to deserve a self-compassion so they're only allowed to be kind to themselves when they can accomplish certain kinds of things out in the world
there might be some inner resistance that looks like how can I feel sorry for myself when so many people have it worse than I do how can I be compassionate to myself when there's a voice inside of me that's telling me all the time that I'm a bad person that I have done bad things
it's understandably a lot easier to be compassionate to somebody else out in the world when we appraise them as being a basically good person who hasn't done anything wrong and the reality is that every single person knows every bad thought they have ever had every bad deed they have ever done
and we compare the full rolodex of that experience knowing every single item in the ledger against our very incomplete view of other people we talked about backdrop in some detail during the conversation and this is when an attempt to apply self-compassion ends up feeling bad in and of itself
that self-compassion had inquiry that you did surfaced all of this material inside of yourself that feels bad for example you might say something like I accept myself a basic self-compassion phrase and that is immediately met by thinking about all of your unacceptable qualities
and this is an example of a bunch of different big topics in psychology first it's an example of a kind of repression we push all of this material down and when we first start trying to kind of open the door to it which self-compassion can often do it flows out more strongly than we expected to
it's also an example of how our content is often highlighted by its opposites classic example of this if I tell you to not think of an elephant what are you going to do you're going to think of an elephant and even very basic self-compassion of acts like taking normal breaks from work can trigger those kinds of negative internal voices after all if you were really a good person if you were really effective you'd be able to keep on working
from there we really focused the conversation on the topic of shame and working with shame shame and self-compassion have a complex relationship with each other on the one hand self-compassion is really fantastic for helping people work with shame
on the other hand shame is really good at blocking self-compassion and Chris shared a I think a really great roadmap for working with shame and taking a compassionate approach to shame-based experiences and emotions that you might be having inside of yourself
first we talked about the prerequisites for self-compassion in order to apply self-compassion we need three things we need to be able to perceive that we're struggling we need to feel a sense of kinship and relationship with others amidst suffering in other words our suffering is a normal human experience other people suffer too other people feel shame other people have done bad things other people are imperfect whatever the phrase is to you that really lands and is meaningful
and then third we need a generally warm and kind attitude towards ourselves and this is where the very critical inner voice tends to enter the picture it can be very difficult for people to apply that warm and nurturing voice so when we're able to develop those three things we can start to apply self-compassion but a common problem that people fall into a self-compassion is the belief that it itself just doing the practice will solve a problem or cause a pain point to go away
and it might do that self-compassion can be enough to solve a problem but we also talked about the paradox of self-compassion we give our self-compassion not to solve a problem but because we feel that and that change of focus that movement from having a pursuit orientation
a action orientation solve a problem orientation into that more world of being with was a major focus of the conversation as you start to work with those back drafts that can come up as you apply self-compassion it's normal to get pushed outside of your window of tolerance
or as some people prefer your window of presence and this relates to the model that Chris shared of those three concentric circles where we have safety then challenge and then overwhelm most of the time we want to hang out in safety and then we want to try to expand that world
of challenged a little bit we want to be able to push it out a little further so we can stay and challenged a little longer without falling all the way into overwhelm then when we are in overwhelm the goal is really to exit overwhelm it's not to try to continue to practice there
and this is again a very common mistake or misunderstanding that people have about internal work that is not unique to self-compassion it's very common when people first learn about things like exposure therapy and let's say that this is a person who has a fear of drowning that rather than learning how to swim in the shallow end of the pool staying in that world of challenge they instead can and ball off the diving board right into the deep end now all this does is it sets them up for failure
they keep on having more of the bad experiences that led to them believing that self-compassion wasn't for them in the past and so of course once you have that additional bad experience you're not going to want to return to trying this practice on
and when it comes to expanding that window of presence Chris really recommended mindfulness-based tools for a couple of reasons first of all mindfulness can be a great way in to seeing reality more clearly shame-based thinking is by its nature very incomplete
it is rigid, it's one-dimensional and it tries to compress all of who you are this very complex individual with like every other individual strengths and vulnerabilities pluses and minuses things that you've done well and things that you've done poorly down into this kind of one-dimensional object
and Chris recommended in particular four mindfulness practices it's awareness with acceptance for starters so we begin with acceptance of what's going on around us that's acceptance of ourselves, acceptance of our environment and really trying to see things clearly in that way
then there could be a kind of anchoring or stabilizing awareness this is often somatic in nature you're returning to what is a practice here might be trying to feel the souls of your feet or your sit bones if you're sitting in a chair Chris also mentioned that it can be difficult for people to work with hard emotions in their head we have a lot of thoughts, the mind is a cave of bats those thoughts happen very rapidly and we can find ourselves kind of racing to keep up with them
but the body tends to operate a little bit more slowly so can we be mindful of the body? can we apply some of the tools that Chris talked about putting a hand on ourselves and kind of a soothing way, a gentle way moving into the more behavioral activation strategies even could be a version of this sensing into your body, taking care of your body, trying to support yourself
as you're going through the difficult experience that's causing this back draft and then finally talked about equanimity which kind of relates to that core paradox of self-compassion we have balanced awareness we can take things as they come with less reactivity
we can be with what is without having so much of a judgment about it and that idea generally of more being without so much doing is something I've been thinking about a lot recently it's been a big part of my personal practice and part of that's because it's something that I kind of struggle with
I'm a, as I said during the conversation I'm a big doer I like to move into action around stuff and when we're having a conversation with other people we can experience this kind of intuitively we know that just immediately launching into problem solving
is not necessarily going to be the best way to interact with our friend who's having a hard time it can seem insensitive, it can seem like we just don't get it all of that stuff but when we're with our own emotions just speaking personally it is so easy to go into the problem solving mode
without actually being in the more experiencing mode for a long enough period of time for your body to actually feel safe and comfortable and it's from that safe base that we can then do all of this very useful work I hope you enjoyed the conversation today again it was with Dr. Chris Gurmer
Chris is a great guy he's also the author of a whole bunch of different books including the Mindful Path to Self Compassion and his most recent book with Dr. Christian Neff Mindful Self Compassion for Burnout that just came out recently
and I've included a link to it in the description of today's episode If you've somehow made it this far without subscribing to the podcast yet please subscribe that would really help us out we'd really appreciate it if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon
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