In Defense of Self-Compassion

In Defense of Self-Compassion

January 30, 2024

Ironically, the only person I feel the need to defend self-compassion to is… ME! The original title of this piece was going to be Fuck Self-Compassion or something equally erudite. There’s a whole series of posts in my drafts called Fuck Motivation, Fuck Vulnerability, Fuck Gratitude, and, well, you get the idea. 

It’s not that I don’t see the value in the above, nor am I just a bitter person by nature. In fact, I am a relatively happy (most of the time) person who is generally fun to be around. I love to think, wonder, explore, play, sing, dance, and learn. My job teaching littles brings me no end of joy. 

If you have read any of this blog yet, you’ll know about some of the heavier experiences I have had in my life. For some reason, whenever events such as these have transpired, the automatic reaction of my brain has been some variation of “It’s your own damn fault! Stop whining and do something different! Shut up and focus. Other people have it way harder than you do, stop being such a complainer. You deserve this crap, you bring it on yourself. He had an affair because you are a terrible wife. Your baby is sick because you are a shitty mom. People are not OK because you are in their lives.” Yes. This has been my constant inner monologue. 

It’s amazing how many things I say to myself that I would never say to a friend. It’s amazing how I have always thought that the only way to get anything done was to scold myself. I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 40, and it is a fact that ADHD brains have a stronger than average negativity bias. One of the origins of my self-beratement is that I was hyper aware of the fact that others seemed to have an easier time getting things done than I did. I would try and focus in school only to find the bell had rung and I hadn’t heard a thing the teacher had said. I compensated by internally screaming at myself in order to accomplish anything. That pattern stuck, and it stuck hard. 

Now to the matter at hand. For the past six years, I have been in treatment for pain in my neck and shoulder which was the result of whiplash sustained in a car accident. I was rear ended by a fast moving vehicle which happened to be a cube van loaded up with plumbing equipment. I also ended up with concussion number five as a result of said accident, the effects of which are still with me enough that I can now only work part time. Not ideal in the world of a workaholic. “Going down”nearly destroyed me. I have sought counselling numerous times over the past six years; my mental health has really suffered due to the chronic pain and the headaches that have never left me. They’re not as bad as they were six years ago, but they still affect my functioning way more than I would like. 

When it became apparent that I was going to need more physio than the average bear, a tiny little wisp of a thought curled through my brain, faintly whispering “You’re not getting better because you are a bad person.” To be clear, it wasn’t an actual voice. The auditory hallucinations would come much later, along with the suicidal ideation. When I had to go off work for three months because my eyes would not work together and the vision exercises given to me by the concussion therapist were causing such intense vertigo that I could not walk in a straight line, this whisper became a plume of smoke that stuck in the folds of my brain like the smell of campfire smoke sticks in damp hair. 

I have had excellent care for my injuries, but knowing that I was lucky enough to be able to have paid time off work and benefits that would cover so much treatment made it worse. I felt that because of the level of privilege I enjoy in my life, I owed it to the world to get better as soon as possible so that I would not be a drain on the system. Two years, three years later, I was long back at work but still being sent off to different specialists, and the pain persisted. The vision issues persisted. The headaches, well, they persisted and dominated my life. So did that idea that the only thing keeping me from getting better was the fact that deep down inside, where no one could see, I was a monster who didn’t deserve to get better. 

“Hey! Quit harshing on yourself!” scolded my physiotherapist. He is a specialist in whiplash injuries that don’t respond to treatment. For a long time, I thought that maybe I just wasn’t being consistent enough in my exercises, but the reams of paper charting my daily efforts proved otherwise. I had asked him to check my form on some stretch or another, because I thought I must be doing something wrong. I would achieve strength goals and then suddenly the pain would come back worse than before. I had said something like “I must be stupid or something, anyone else would have been better by now. There is something wrong with me.”

He stopped our exercise session and reminded me that it’s just a fact that a certain percentage of people have persisting pain (say that three times fast haha) and that it was not because of some character flaw that I was still requiring treatment. He verified that I was in counselling and said to remember that one of the effects of chronic pain can be declining mental health. He encouraged me to stop scolding myself and cut myself some slack. 

“Quitter! Whiner! Just do it! You have to go through it to get through it! You wouldn’t be in this situation if you just tried harder! Stop making excuses! There’s no reason for this to be happening! Lazygoodfornothinglittlebitch…”

Yep. That’s my brain talking to me. Over the years, numerous friends and colleagues have gently mentioned to me that I am way too hard on myself. The reply of my inner monologue being “Figures they would say that, you’ve tricked them into thinking you’re a good person. You’re a rotten, despicable person who destroys others. People are damaged by having you in their lives. Your kid wouldn’t be struggling if it had been born to anyone but you. There is something fundamentally wrong with you.”

Ugh. Exhausting is not the word for this. Especially when you are trying to harness it to use it as motivation. I may not be an optimist by nature, but I am definitely a pragmatist. Even in the throes of a crisis or trapped in the mirk of despair, I can usually find a way to harness the negative in order to achieve some small gain. Not this time. When I had to go off work again two and a half years ago due to the same brain injury, the negative self-talk had reached a crisis point and I was actively planning my own death by suicide. 

Self-compassion was a term that had been bandied about by numerous professionals throughout the course of my treatment and therapy. Physiotherapists, concussion therapists, neurologists, my family doctor, occupational therapists, social workers, psychologists, massage therapists, teacher friends who could see that I was going down hard. My brain had a violent reaction to the term, shouting inside my head “Fuck that! Self-compassion is for weaklings and pussies who can’t get shit done! It’s an excuse to feel sorry for yourself!” I bought the books but couldn’t get past the introductions without feeling massive rage. My psychologist and I spent many hours trying to uncover the reason for this resistance to self-compassion and concluded that until my out of control inner critic was tamed a bit, I would probably not make much progress. 

It is hard to have compassion for a self that you hate. It is hard to motivate a self that you hate, so you drive it harshly with words that may as well be whips leaving welts all over the body. My inner critic took the idea of self-compassion and twisted it into something that would harm me if I succumbed to it. Put another way, it would be dangerous to have compassion for myself because it would weaken me. Without the abusive words driving me to do exercises that hurt and left me unable to function, I would not have the motivation to get better, or so went the twisted logic. 

One day after finding out I was not approved to go back to work because my progress in vision therapy had stalled, I was saying horrible things about myself in frustration to my boyfriend. He very simply, calmly, and a little bit sadly, replied with “You are the worst bully to yourself.” What?!

 I was quite taken aback. Nobody had ever called me a bully before in any context. I am the opposite of a bully! Somehow that hit me in a different spot in my gut – for the first time, the tirades I had been throwing at myself seemed less  helpful and more harmful. They seemed less motivating and more… well… cruel and sad. The fact of the matter is that I carry a deep shame about who I am as a person. This led me to stay in an abusive marriage, to overachieve in an attempt to prove my basic worth as a human, and to be a workaholic in a helping profession to compensate for the feeling that I will never, ever be enough. 

One of the basic premises of self-compassion is that we all suffer sometimes. “Common humanity” is what it is referred to in the books I have read. My main sense throughout my life has been that I am NOT like anyone else, and not in a good way. It is one of the earliest senses I had of myself, that there was something profoundly wrong with me that no one else could see but that I know is there. In CBT schema therapy they call that the Defectiveness schema, and I have worked hard at undoing it for going on twenty years. It is a part of me that I have not been able to get rid of. Following the comment by my boyfriend, I decided to adapt the old adage to “feel the fear and do it anyway” to “feel the disgust and at least read the damn book.” Less catchy, but that’s what I did. 

I can be a bit of a dramatic person. There, I said it. I have been known to trace my hand flipping the middle finger in the middle of a page of a self-help book that pissed me off because it hit a little too close to home. The faces I made at this poor book while I read it and the verbal abuse it endured while I swore at it and berated it were pretty epic. Even though I have FINALLY been able to access a bit of self-compassion I still have a running monologue of “this is such bullshit” going in the background when I am attempting to do some of the exercises. 

The main thing that has stuck is the use of the phrase “This is a moment of suffering.” In the past I would refuse to acknowledge the suffering. It seemed like a negative-whiney-cry-arse thing to do in this world where we are admonished to be positive above all else. Just think positive and everything will be great! I also have a finely honed defense mechanism that keeps me from actually FEELING my emotions. I can logically speak to how I would be feeling if I COULD feel, but if an emotion breaks through and I feel it in my body, I tend to panic. The wording of “This is a moment of suffering” is nice and factual. It just is. I don’t have an opportunity to judge myself for suffering. It has allowed me to access a semblance of common humanity because there is no denying that everyone in this world suffers. Even the people who get better after only six months, not years, of physio.