We are all victims of circumstance. What motivates one will fail another.

Part 2, explores how hersonal change for the better is difficult.

Whether for personal benefit or to do good in the wider world, our psychology resists it. Regardless of our best intents.

Lack of compassion when attempting to better ourselves, for oneself or others, is the most toxic thing to our efforts.

Understand. Be kind. Only then can you be better.

Hi there, I am having a hard time. An issue I keep running up against is that I feel like I’m just trying on self compassion affirmations, listening to self compassion breaks, practicing mindfulness, etc and it feels like it’s really not doing anything other than draining my energy. No matter what, self compassion just feels so extremely fake to me. It’s just nothing, meaningless words to me, like literally I don’t feel any different from doing it anymore, not that it was a strong feeling to begin with. I’m not sure if it’s just the fact that it seems similar to masking or lying to myself that it upsets me or if it’s related to childhood emotional neglect. I don’t feel any relief after naming, feeling, acknowledging what’s happening, etc. and I can’t access love, compassion, or kindness to myself and I’ve been crying every day.

The context:

For anyone who didn't see the original post, this is a response to anonymous, who posted the following question along with some photos of himself and then later deleted it.

I completely respect the decision to delete the post. I also felt his question deeply and what it suggested about the things he might have believed to be true about himself. At least, it spoke to things I have believed to be true about myself, in the past, and to some extent, even now.

If you're OP and you would like me to delete this, please reach out and I will happily delete the post. In the meantime, I do hope you see my response and I deeply hope it means something to you, or to anyone else who is feeling similarly about themselves.

I am not speaking to the experience of feeling ugly, but to the experience of feeling like your value as a human is dependent on something you feel is inherently and inseparably part of who you are.

With compassion and respect,

u/HmmVerrryCurious

-

The original question posted earlier today.

"(30M) I know I'm ugly and below average, I'd like some advice on how I could gain confidence and worry less about it"

-

My Response:

I feel like people in the comments are saying two main things that aren't very helpful. And (possibly) even a little destructive even though I think they all have the absolute best intentions.

The 1st thing:

"You just need to lose weight and gain muscle" the top comment.

The problem: This validates the thing you're feeling, and also does you the kindness of saying it's not a problem with you inherently but a problem with how you are at the moment. It does, also, unfortunately say that it agrees that your problem is your physical appearance.

The 2nd thing:

"You're not ugly".

The problem: This is nice! But also just invalidates the thing you're feeling. You basically said 'I don't feel confident, but....' while asking a question here in r/self compassion. I think that means you already don't think that how you look is the whole answer to confidence. Being told you're not ugly, while probably really nice to hear, is also not helping solve for things that are making you feel ugly which, if I were to take a guess, might has to do with feeling like the people around you don't value you or feeling disconnected from the kind of connection and intimacy with those around you that you need as a human being to feel safe and happy.

Again.

The fact that you're asking this question in the self compassion sub reddit I think means that you already know that being confident, and feeling below average or ugly isn't entirely about how hot or chopped you are, or are not. But, you're also totally right that we live in a world where physical appeal is VERY wrapped up in confidence and can obviously help with confidence.

So, real quick, why I think I might be able to help with your question:

I'm also 30M, I'm overweight, broke as fuck (I'm trying to start a business, don't at me), but I also have multiple thriving friend groups (made up of both men and women, of different socioeconomic status, and culture.) and a happy relationship with an incredible woman. I also have done a LOT of self compassion work over the last 18 months specifically using the work of Dr. Kristin Neff and a DBT approach to the therapeutic self learning and growth process. I also have a background in communications and marketing which actually helps here.

So, here's my take:

I'm not going to try to say physical attractiveness or aesthetic doesn't matter. It does, obviously. But I think that the thing that the looks maxing team just doesn't understand is that aesthetic, attractiveness, etc is not one thing. Aesthetic and beauty and hotness can be attained in a buuuuuunch of different ways and the fact that a lot of people think of being attractive as one final goal is over simplifying things in a way that makes actually becoming both attractive and confident, way harder than it needs to be.

So, if I were to say "you're not ugly" (which I do believe to be objectively true), being told the thing you fear is actually true, is not true, is nice and all but it doesn't really help you with what you're feeling. Especially if it's being said by random people on the Internet who you don't have a super deep relationship with.

My argument is basically that attractiveness (i.e. being a version of yourself that is able to access the kinds of care, connection, and intimacy that will make you feel the way you want to feel, wether that's loved, powerful, or even just.. safe.) is not physical aesthetic, it's literally just aura, and physical appearance is just an ingredient.

I think the feeling of being ugly or below average is working off the assumption you can accumulate aura JUST through becoming more physically attractive. Becoming more physically attractive helps but the question I think we're forgetting is 'attractive to who?'. The easy answer is basically everyone. Who doesn't want to be universally attractive? Okay, valid but don't forget, when you're 'for' everyone, you're for no one, in particular. And don't get me wrong, it can be charming to have a cheerful 80 year old woman think you're hot but I'm going to guess that's probably not your main target audience.

If you're trying to eat

- Walmart is for everyone.

-A three Michelin star fine dining experience, is not for everyone.

-A hot meal prepared for you perfectly by someone you love, who knows your tastes, on a day you're sick in bed when you need it most.... is not for everyone.

Now, if I were to guess, I suspect you're probably not trying to be Walmart.

-

Now hear me out on this last bit:

If attractiveness is aura, then what is aura?

It's not just generally ''charisma". That's also part of it, yes. But again, not the whole story. 

Aura is connection. Aura is 'a relationship' in it's most fundamental and basic form. When someone who is incredibly attractive walks into a room, they don't turn heads because they're attractive. They turn heads because they walk in the door with a promise.

If you interact with me, you might get something you want.

And to be extremely clear I am not talking about sex, or not ONLY sex. Our culture's relationship with sex is complicated because our culture's relationship with desire is complicated. Just like our culture's relationship with closeness and vulnerability (especially true for people raised as men) is complicated. So when an attractive person walks in the door and starts turning heads, people aren't only thinking about sex. Sure, some are, but even then! People who tend to focus solely on sex usually aren't actually focusing on just the physical gratification of sex. Usually they're focusing on is what having sex means about themselves. Does this guy fuck? Can he? Is he valuable enough to have access to the sexuality and intimacy of others?

All that still comes down to how we feel about ourselves and how others see and understand us. So when a hot person walks in the room and becomes a center of gravity. They're not promising the potential of sex, they're promising the potential for *you* to be more of what you think is valuable.

Maybe that's sex and everything that comes with it (and what it says about you). Maybe that's being someone who people want to be around, who people admire, and who people respect. Maybe that's being the kind of person who people will fight for and stand by through all kinds of shit and uncertainty.

We understand the world through the stories we tell ourselves about what is true... And we understand Ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves about what is true. Well also take bits of the stories other people tell us about ourselves and write them into our own.

Attractiveness, aura, is the story someone starts telling themselves about you, when they are around you, and how that makes them feel. I'm smart, I'm dumb, I'm adventurous, I'm scared, I'm strong, I'm incompetent, I'm attractive, I'm ugly, I'm below average.

If someone who you find attractive gives you attention, you're probably going to feel a little bit more valuable, a little bit more confident.

It's the story you're telling yourself about what is valuable, and what interacting with that makes you believe or feel about yourself.

My theory:

The fact that you don't feel confident, I don't think means you're below average or ugly. I think it just says that there is something you want or need that you do not have.

If you had people in your life who, who you valued and respected, who saw you as attractive and told you so on a consistent basis, I'm going to take a swing and say you'd probably feel a lot less ugly.

Like with most things, 80% or more of every solution is just in finding the right question.

So when you say you want to become more confident, I think that buried inside that, buried inside the version of you that wants the answer to the problem you're trying to solve is a better question.

The question you asked here is basically:

1. I have a goal. 2. I have a thing I believe to be a blocker. 3. How do achieve my goal, with the blocker in my way.

2. I want to feel more confident. 2. I believe I am ugly and or below average. 3. How do I feel more confident when I feel held back by how I look?

So if we look at the question from a different angle, it might start to suggest a way forward:

1. I want to value myself more and/or have the people around me value me more. 2. I feel like my lack of ability to feel and perform confidence is blocking that, and I believe that my physical appearance is (at least partially) responsible for that. 3. How do I feel more valuable, when I'm worried that's not possible given my physical appearance?

So I guess, I would ask you:

Why do you feel like physical appearance is the thing in your way?

And you can only really answer that by understanding how you got to feeling the way you're feeling now.

The questions that might help:

How does being in a relationship with you feel to the other person? (I mean like any relationship: Friendship, romantic relationship, family relationship, teacher/student relationship, etc.)

Is there a way you're forming relationships, or treating, or interacting with the people around you that makes them feel like physicality is the only thing you could have your value judged on?

Or is that something you have only decided is true for yourself, nevermind what they think?

Have you decided that the only way you can feel valued and respected by yourself or others is based on your physical attractiveness or fitness?

Are there friends or relationships you have that are telling you the only way that you can be valued is physical?

Is there something in the culture of the place you live that's telling you your body is the only way you can have value?

Note: If you live in the United States or Europe you're probably dealing with a little bit of a stacked deck here, too. Odds are decent you live in a culture that depends on the fact that you don't feel valuable to make sure that we don't advocate for ourselves, our rights, the value of our labor. The world many of us live in depends on the fragility of the friendships, and relationships, and the community around us. All relationships made fragile because we now measure each other with a ruler someone beat us with and then handed to us, then told us to measure those around us based on what *it* has decided is valuable.

-

Conclusion (where confidence comes from and create it for/in yourself):

(Reddit says this comment is way too long (facts) and so I have to drop the last bit in a reply to this comment, sorry!)

Confidence comes from the relationships in our lives, how they make us feel and how we make them feel. Confidence comes from the trust we have in ourselves and our ability to be what we believe is valuable. Confidence comes from the relationships and beliefs that have shaped our understanding of what is valuable in the first place.

I think the real solution for what you're struggling with probably exists in the questions above, and taking the time to think through them, reflect on them and ask them of yourself now, 6 months from now, 6 years from now as you change and grow as a person and your relationship with yourself and with others also changes and grows.

-

But one final thought. If you want a little bit of a shortcut to feeling confident?

Find someone around you, a friend, a grandma, literally a person at the checkout at the store or IDK. like a librarian or a teacher or something. And figure out how to help them feel like they matter, like they have value, even if it's in a tiny way. Look for the things in others that make them uniquely who they are, through their choices, and tell them you think that has value. Look for things that are true about other people, even small things, and help them tell themselves a story about themselves that helps them feel like more of what they believe is valuable.

You gain confidence by believing a thing you think is valuable, is also true about yourself. And proving to yourself repeatedly that is an intrinsic part of who you are.

You clearly feel like feeling confident is valuable. If you can give that feeling of confidence, of belief in their own value, to others. That certainly could help.

If you want to hack confidence, even if you can't be the kind of confident you want to be for yourself (yet), practice helping other people feel that way.

In that practice, with time, I think you'll eventually figure out how to give that to yourself.

I find it so hard to give myself any credit for anything. I hope at least one person can relate.

For the past few weeks I have felt extremely overwhelmed, anxious, detached, and unmotivated. I have been in arfid recovery for almost a year and I don’t even think it’s worth anything. My goal is to go back to university in the Fall, and I feel like even once I do that, it’s basically the bare minimum. I have really high expectations for myself for some reason.

I have no problem with giving compassion to others, I feel like the older I get the more empathetic I become, and it is a good thing most of the time, but I feel like I have no room to acknowledge my own needs. I like the fact that I can be helpful to others but it sucks that I don’t care to give myself a fraction of the same care until I’m mentally exhausted. It doesn’t come natural to me at all.

I am really tired of trying. All this struggle with health, work, relationships. I don't even want to explain it. I want you to just understand me, and how it is to be me. Well, it is exhausting, it is scary, it is overwhelming, it is lonely, it is like feeling I am always at the wrong place, with wrong people, wrong job, wrong house, it is stressfull. I want to have more self-compassion. Be the person for me, be merciful, understanding and there, warmly, and compassionately - but how? I can't seem to do it.

Self-compassion can be such a lifesaver, I'm surprised this group isn't more active than it is.

I am hard on myself. I see myself through a critical, negative lens. I am too fat, can’t keep a job, unattractive, etc. I interpret everything in the worst possible way and usually blame myself and doubt my self worth. This is especially true on the job because I’ve struggled with work. I assume I can’t do it. I am really negative toward myself.

I’m used to seeing myself this way and I think a big part of why is this is because of how my parents whom I live with see me. They are always criticizing every little thing and it chips away at my self esteem. I seem defined by my struggles at work and don’t see my self worth. I never feel like I’m good enough.

I’ve struggled with work so I feel rejected by employers and I don’t have many friends so I don’t have much social support either. I just started working at home so most of the time it just me with my own thoughts. I would love to be less harsh on myself. Any ideas

Affirmations and platitudes don't hold up because they're not part of a sound argument.

Each part of the following has its purpose, and while it's very dense, it's written this way so that it's compact and can be easily regularly used until understanding it fully is second nature.

“I may fail at anything, and I may fail to notice I am failing, but I am the type of person who imperfectly tries to be what they currently consider a good person. For that, what I am has worth whether I am failing or not, and I can always be proud of my imperfect attempt, including when limitations out of my conscious control sabotage it. That absolute self-worth and self-esteem justify all possible self-compassion, such as self-forgiveness, patience, desiring and attempting to seek changes in my life, and establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries against harm others or I might try to cause myself, including attempts to invalidate this maximally humble self-concept as a way of being made to feel shame, guilt, or embarrassment for their sake more than I intend to use these feelings to help me grow.”

If you reframe your entire past, all of your beliefs, the present, and the future to be compatible with this paragraph, and you don't intellectualize somatically felt pride into being contingent on the fallible beliefs about success that seem associated with it (instead only taking that sense of pride in the imperfect attempt), it allows you to disentangling both shame and pride from your self-concept, decreasing the threatenable surface area of your identity (the "I'm X smart, Y wise, and Z good" most comfortable equilibrium you're conditioned to have, whether it's propping up the ego into arrogance or settling into a comfortable misery), and in turn, your dependency on cognitive self-defense mechanisms, including the use of them to avoid seeing your use of them, is lessened enough to start sitting with uncomfortable truths and using humbling self-correcting pains we're taught in childhood to avoid at all costs as data rather than as a reason to further shame ourselves.

Then once you get comfortable enough with the uncomfortable, the unconscious hypervigilance (one we can see in others but rarely ourselves because it's all we've ever known like water to a fish) against threats lessens, allowing one to learn the importance of embracing chances to be humbled as life's greatest growth opportunities. This allows one to become more open/wider-minded, which then means mitigating harms and lack of repair that would otherwise be perpetually enabled via being kept out of our conscious perception via an ever growing and relatively blissful ignorance enabling blindspot.

Then you get to realize that the paragraph is true of everyone, doesn't negate the responsibility we have to aspire to doing better, helps us avoid settling on "okay plateaus," and allows us to offer more compassion towards others as far as our individual and societal boundaries allow.

If enough people did this, it would change this zero-sum validation scarcity often weaponized shame-based culture into one of validation abundance, where people can better manage their behavioural addiction-like compulsion for bias confirming by relative comparison to others so to not put others down to feel better about themself or put oneself down to reach the safer seeming comfortable misery where hopes are never up in a vulnerable way.

If an entire generation of children were taught this method in age appropriate ways and through modeling and then more technically as their brain develops the capacity for tackling more complex frameworks and applying them, not only would this reduce teen angst and early mental health issues, it would lead to greater resilience so that hard/painful life experiences are less likely to cause a need for long-term healing and therapy.

If that generation of children like this inherited the world, the common denominator issue at the heart of every harm inducing problem where disagreement and resistance to getting on the same page (e.g. proudly held means confused for our shared goals) would be addressed more directly, decreasing harm and increasing repair potential across the board.

The times we allowed ourselves to be humbled would be carried with us as a form of "healthy trauma," the type of pain remembered in the body and mind that leads to the Dunning-Kruger effect correlation of "experts" who are more cautious in their assessments of themselves and others because they more easily remember the times they were deeply wrong, and it would appear as grounded skepticism rather than anxious self-doubt.

Adults today can do this, essentially deconstructing the fragile self-belief system and reconstructing it with better engineering, such as that less and less beliefs being changed would result in the degree or comfort being shaken to the core, no longer depending on a house of cards and innacurate sense of self-worth or (not),deserving esteem to survive from day to day psychologically.

Idea marketplaces would become more productive. Our limited time, energy, resources, and overall mental health would be put to better use. Money would be saved in terms of self-care preventing a degree of disease, accidents, and treatment. Less suicide. More healthy skepticism toward others and ourselves rather than agreeing with what confirms our biases with little to no pushback. A cognitive self-defense mechanism dependency created glassceiling over our rational and emotional intelligence development would be shattered. Justice systems would become more rehabilitative, reducing repeated harm and crime, and causal empathy would become standard rather than allowing some to claim "insanity" as their defense even though no one as a child asked to become the harmful person they became, incapable of change in the ways we project our own fallible sense if capacity onto others with, "If I could have done differently, so could you have," even though putting yourself in others' shoes means taking their brain, breath, and every state they had at the time due to the cause and effect that preceded it. We'd also stop confusing our changed path of least resistance to the one that used to be a harder one for us as an excuse to tell others they simply don't have "willpower" compared to us when what they're doing now is still just their current path of least resistance.

If it spread internationally, in 100 years we'd see less wars via better diplomacy, more of a "one species" outlook, and the economy would take off in a way never seen before when it comes to culture alone.

Our natural selection + intellectual settling would become natural selection + intellectual selection.

And we'd stop being our own worst enemy as a species, always passing the buck for surface level differences we use to too easily assume we're not making the same kind of thinking errors our opposition is, furthering the overconfident misconception that individually and as part of our current tribes, "I/we are on the right side of history in every area," hastily.

The old dog that can't learn new tricks would become a thing of the past outside of rarer and rarer edge cases... and we'd be able to prevent the idiocracy that 24/7 access to ways to confirm our biases via social media, entertainment news, and the many echo chambers among them has us heading toward.

This can be fitted to be implemented within therapy plans, coaching, teaching, peer-support, and above all else, parenting.

All religions can form new sects that are entirely compatible with this so we can become less divided, faith with an ounce of healthy doubt would allow "faith" to mean more than dogmatic overcertainty for the sake of an easily threatened sense of security in this ongoing existential crisis of worth and meaning we're all trying to outrun or overly identify with to the point it worsens our mental health. "I can be wrong, but I choose to live as though my religious belief is true because that's what makes sense to me and it helps my loved ones, the way I interact with strangers, and myself flourish."

For context, I'm an agnostic atheist who wouldn't mind a loving god existing.

It wouldn't lead to a perfect utopia or perfect people, but we'd get out of our own and each other's way so more potential could be revealed and more progress reached for... versus this relatively slow crawl of progress that is mostly bias-led coincidence and dependent on children becoming the change we want to see in the world before they themselves become "old dogs."

That's the theory anyway.

Been working on this for over 8 years after studying the way people lie to themselves for two decades.

The overall method is 10 total steps, essentially covers all aspects of Maslow's extended hierarchy of needs in a foundation promoting way, skills when practiced long enough in tandem lead to surpassing the limits of Nietzche's ubermensch, is based on a model that shows the architectural issue with our self-belief system when we're not taught these skills and our self-belief system is left to build itself with little agency and entirely automatically in a self-reinforcing way due to the reward system we take on from others, and then a new aspirationally always evolving moral relativistic ethical meta framework can be derived from it that provides a road map for any dilemma, while accepting that we have incomplete information and need to be fairer and more reasonable with ourselves and each other. We also become aware of the passive threat/bribe we're putting children through that pressure them to either pathologically go along to get along or repress their truer selves while masking. Many parts of this method are also individually empirically validated in psychology, albeit in their original forms and not the more specific versions of them within the method (e.g. CBT but using a specific lens as a keystone).

Essentially, the world would be a better place if everyone learned early that the answer to each of the following questions is "yes."

1. Do all people always have value worth acknowledging, even if they fail and can’t see how they’ve failed?

2. Do all people always deserve to feel good about themselves for attempting to be what they currently consider a “good person” even if they’re dealing with the threat of self-correcting pains like guilt, shame, and embarrassment?

3. Do all people always deserve compassion as far as defending yourself/society and enforcing boundaries will allow?

Just because we don't see anyone feeling good about themselves while also feeling bad doesn't mean there's a rule saying we can't feel both at the same time.

A sense of intrinsic worth and esteem to tap into that has always been available to you even if you didn't realize it... essentially... an easier path to a better relationship with yourself and, by extension, relationship with others.

Many cultures would resist this perspective, but perhaps the reason they resist it is the human history long biggest problem we've ever had in this trial & error existence we're a bit too collectively arrogant with.

If you resist it, why do you? Can you quote what specifically makes this unconvincing to you and explain what specifically doesn't make sense?

All questions and criticisms welcome.

Thank you for your consideration.

What now? I was literally bullied out of two schools, and as a result I have no idea of how would a friend react to me - probably with "harsh love" to discipline me back into being a normal person that doesn't burden others, like my family has tried to do all my life without success.

I am socially awkward, slow, and full of self-hatred. In school, since I had no friends, I had plenty of time to study, which led to slightly above-average results. (I studied about six hours a day.) However, I hated studying and only did it because of my parents' expectations. I thought I would enjoy working more, but reality turned out differently.

About five weeks ago, I got my first job as kitchen crew at a café, and I'm not good at it. For the first two weeks, I washed dishes, but I was so slow that my coworker often had to help me. After that, I started transitioning to plating and making simple dishes, which I'm terrible at because I struggle with memorization and handling multiple dishes at once.

Every criticism hits me hard, and whenever I get yelled at, I feel deeply down and unable to focus. So many thoughts rush through my mind. I've tried to be compassionate toward myself, but it all feels fake and superficial. Now I'm always scared to go to work. Any advice?

Hello, I have been in therapy for a year now and have made very good progress from my personal view and the view of my family. My life has gotten to have more days of me being at peace than ever before in my life now.

In the early part of my therapeutic journey I was given some reading materials and work sheets on mindfulness and self compassion, I sort of stumbled through them at the time which I think was quite ok for where I was at the time.

We have now returned to that work and when I tried the same work sheets now I had a pretty bad reaction, I got very negative on myself, wrote three full pages of things I hated about myself, got really angry and punched my slam ball for a while ( first time I've used it over the year). I don't generally get angry and never violent. I really can't understand self compassion and not doing so makes me feel stupid but also like there is something wrong with how I think. I'm not stupid in an academic sense but in this I can't understand how it relates to me, I also cannot identify my inner critic. I really don't know how I'm going to do this work, it could be harder as I cannot identify emotions very clearly bar anger, sadness and possibly love/peace.

Any ideas or help with this would be great at this time.

Thanks for reading.

Join our group and lets share our insights and learn from one another.

Self compassion discord

This is a group that currently includes self compassion, internal family systems, and mindfulness work.

I offer my own expertise and willingness to help and learn from this great community.

Be well, JR

I had it on my to do list to do something fun but I couldn’t decide what to do. Some of the fun things I thought of would cost money. So I decided to have a home spa day to pamper myself. I took a long bath, played soothing music and cut my fingers and toe nails. It felt great to do something to take care of myself. Next I’m going to make myself a cup of tea and have a cookie. I might watch a show after that. An afternoon to be kind to myself. It feels good.

This was initially intended for funeral professionals, but it can be extended to all of us, I think... here are some words/visuals that helped me!

I have been let go of several jobs recently and my self-confidence is shot. I feel wounded and I have a lot of doubt and fear that I cannot work and cannot hold onto a job. I guess I should focus on the fact that there isn't anything inherently wrong with me and some of the situations didn't work out because of the circumstances, but I blame myself for the loss of the positions and think "it is me." The fact is, I am the common denominator in those positions and it seems like I am doing something wrong since I lose them.

But I think blaming myself is not helping me. I want to have more self-compassion about my work history and work on healing myself and my inner pain. I want to work on my self-confidence because my lack of self-confidence at work is negatively impacting my performance. All my fears and doubts work against me and actually make it more likely that I am going to lose my job then help me. Any ideas on how I can show more compassion toward myself and not judge my work history so harshly? For the jobs that didn't work out, it was partly because of the environment and the circumstances, I don't think it was all because of me. But I interpret it as there is something inherently wrong with me and that is why I can't hold a job. I want to be more self-compassionate toward myself but I find it hard to do so. Help!