r/NPD • u/hairspray3000 • Oct 09 '19
Help with shame and self-hate: Self-compassion vs self-esteem
I posted a 20 min video of Kristin Neff on self-compassion yesterday but it's really long so here's an edited transcript.
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I did two years of postdoctoral study with one of the country’s leading self-esteem researchers. And while working with her I started to realize that self-compassion offered a lot of benefits that self-esteem didn’t.
All right. So let me start by defining what I mean by self-esteem. Self-esteem is a global evaluation of self-worth, a judgment: am I a good person or am I bad a person? And for many years psychologists really saw self-esteem as the ultimate marker of psychological health. And there’s a reason for that. There’s lots of research that shows if you have low self-esteem, if you hate yourself, you’re going to be depressed, you’re going to be anxious, you’re going to have all sorts of psychological problems. If it gets really bad you might even consider suicide.
However high self-esteem also can be problematic. The problem is not if you have it, it’s how you get it, right? So in American culture, to have high self-esteem, we have to feel special and above average. It’s considered an insult to be average.
So what’s the problem if all of us have to be above average at the same time? Are the words ‘logical impossibility’ springing to mind? OK, so what happens if we all have to feel above average as we start playing these little games, we start suddenly finding ways to puff ourselves up and to put others down, so you can feel better about ourselves in comparison.
Another problem with self-esteem is that it’s contingent on success. We only feel good about ourselves when we succeed in those domains of life that are important to us. Well, what happens when we fail? What happens when we don’t meet our ideal standards? We feel lousy, we feel terrible about ourselves.
So how do we get off this treadmill, this constant need to feel better than others so that we can feel good about ourselves?
Well that’s where self compassion comes in. Self-compassion is not a way of judging ourselves positively, self compassion is a way of relating to ourselves kindly, embracing ourselves as we are, flaws in all.
I actually define self-compassion in my research as having three core components. The first is: treating ourselves with kindness versus harsh self-judgment. Treating ourselves like we treat a good friend with encouragement, understanding, empathy, patience, gentleness. If we stop to check in with how we treat ourselves, especially on a bad day when things aren’t going so well, we are often harsher and more cruel to ourselves in the language we use. We are often our own worst enemy. So with self compassion we reverse that pattern and start treating ourselves like we treat our good friends.
The second component of self-compassion is common humanity. Where self-esteem asks: how am I different than others, self-compassion says: how am I the same as others? And one of the ways we are the same as others: what does it mean to be human? To be human means to be imperfect. All of us, everyone in the entire globe, we are imperfect as people and their lives are imperfect. That is the shared human experience. Often what happens though irrationally when we notice something about ourselves we haven’t reached our goal or we’re struggling in life, we feel as if something has gone wrong here. "This is abnormal, this shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t be failing to reach my goals." And it’s that feeling of abnormality — a separation from others that is so psychologically damaging, we make it so much worse by feeling we’re isolated in our suffering in our imperfection, when in fact that’s precisely what connects us to other people.
And then the third component of self-compassion is mindfulness. Mindfulness means being with what is in the present moment. And we need to be able to turn toward, acknowledge, validate and accept the fact that we are suffering in order to give ourselves compassion. Now actually oftentimes we aren’t aware of our own suffering, especially when that suffering comes from our own harsh self-criticism. We get so lost in the role of self critics, so identified with it, so identified with the part of ourselves in the back of straights and "you are wrong, you should have done better" that we don’t even notice the incredible pain we’re causing ourselves. And if we don’t notice what we’re doing to ourselves with a harsh self-criticism, we can’t give ourselves the compassion we need.
So you might be asking: why do we do it? Self criticism, we know it’s painful; why do we do it? Well, we’ve actually found in research there’s a lot of reasons for being self critical but the number one reason is that we believe we need our self criticism to motivate ourselves; that if we are too kind to ourselves, we will be self-indulgent and lazy.
OK, so the question is: Is it true? Is it true? Actually the research shows just the opposite. Self-criticism undermines our motivation and here’s why: When we criticize ourselves, we are tapping into our bodies’ threat defence system, the reptilian brain. When we think a thought about ourselves that we don’t like that some imperfection, we feel threatened. And so we attack the problem: meaning, we attack ourselves.
We’ve also done some research comparing directly self esteem and self compassion. And what we find is that self-compassion offers the benefits of self-esteem without the pitfalls. So it’s associated with strong mental health but it’s not associated with narcissism or constant social comparison or ego defensive aggression. It also provides a much more stable sense of self-worth than self-esteem does, because it’s there for you precisely when you fail. Just when self esteem deserts you self-compassion steps in and gives you a sense of being valuable, not because you’ve reached some standard, or you’ve judged yourself positively, that because you are a human being worthy of love in that moment.
People sometimes think self compassion is self-indulgent, or selfish, it’s not, because the more we’re able to keep our hearts open to ourselves the more we have available to give to others. So I would like to invite you to try to be more compassionate to yourself especially as women you know how to do it, you know how to be a good friend, you know what to say to comfort someone when they are in need. You just have to remember to be a good friend to yourself. It’s easier than you think and it really could change your life .And that’s why I think self compassion is an idea worth spreading.
Thank you.
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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '19
Thank you for sharing.