Beating ourselves up results in pain, obviously, so at the same time that we’re beating ourselves up, we’re looking for ways to manage that pain, to make it bearable. Many of us simply get used to walking around in some degree of pain all the time; we consider it normal. It’s the cost of holding on to hope that we will, one day, meet Human Giver Syndrome’s standard and finally, at long last, fully belong in the human community and deserve love.
Sometimes the injuries are so severe that we turn to dangerous measures—alcohol and other drugs, self-harm, disordered eating, compulsive behaviors—measures that may numb the pain in the short term, but ultimately deepen the wounds in the long term.
So here we are, telling you to put down the whip.
Reality check: What would actually happen if we put down the whip, stopped beating ourselves up, and turned toward our difficult feelings with kindness and compassion?
Imagine trying it. Let your madwoman put down the whip.
The next thing that happens is that those wounds you’ve been inflicting and reopening for years…finally begin to heal.
And here’s a fact about healing that most self-help gurus are not honest about: Healing hurts.
If you break your leg, it hurts. And it keeps hurting until it’s not broken anymore. There is no time between the moment your leg breaks and the moment it’s healed when it feels better than it did before you broke it. Because healing hurts. And what do you do about a broken leg? You put it in a cast, to create an environment of holding that will allow the leg to heal.
Once you stop reopening wounds you’ve been inflicting on yourself for years, they finally begin to heal. And it’s a new kind of pain; it can’t be managed by the same strategies you’ve been using to manage the pain of the whip. You were good at managing that old kind of pain, and now you have to learn a whole new way to deal with this whole new kind of pain. As one client of “compassionate mind therapy” put it, if they started practicing self-compassion, they “would open up a well of unbearable sadness.”13
A friend of ours, sex therapist Rena McDaniel, talks about this kind of pain as the sting of antiseptic in a wound. It’s a healthy kind of pain; it helps the wound to heal cleanly. Reframing it this way (positive reappraisal) helps us tolerate it and helps us find strategies for managing it that aren’t numbing or potentially toxic, but facilitate the healing.
Amelia prefers this lobster analogy: A lobster is a squishy animal stuffed inside a hard shell. It grows, but the shell does not. Eventually, it gets too big for the shell, and the discomfort of that confinement leads it to scuttle under a rock, shed the too-small constraint, and grow a new, bigger, thicker shell. The process is uncomfortable, and leaves the lobster temporarily vulnerable, but ultimately it gains new size and strength that it would never have developed if it hadn’t gone through the struggle.
Whichever metaphor you prefer, self-compassion isn’t always a comfortable or peaceful experience, but it does help us grow mightier. Which brings us to:
Self-Compassion Is Hard, Part 3: Strength Is Scary
Imagine that you’ve let go of the desire to meet that external standard. You’ve put down the whip, and those wounds have begun to heal, so you’ve learned new strategies for managing this new, healing kind of pain.
Then what?
Ah. Then.
As we heal…we grow stronger. And stronger. And stronger. Stronger than we’ve ever been before. Stronger, perhaps, than we ever thought possible. We become strong enough not to feel pushed around by Human Giver Syndrome.
And Human Giver Syndrome will fight back. We will feel backlash. We may fear the world’s punishment if we dare to grow mighty.
But sometimes our own strength is scary to us, too. How do you feel about the idea of being that strong?
The truth is, a lot of us are scared of how mighty we might grow if we were no longer draining our energy on managing all the self-inflicted pain of self-criticism.
We know that with greater personal power would come greater personal responsibility, and we’re afraid when we have the greater power, we won’t be able to deal with those greater responsibilities. Let’s say you have a hobby that benefits other people, and you start getting paid for it. It turns into a small business, and that small business grows. Eventually, you’re going to have to restructure your life, learn about marketing and corporate tax liability, meet with potential partners and clients, hire people and be responsible for their welfare, and now it’s not just you and your hobby, it’s other people’s livelihoods on the line. A lot of us have a quiet little voice worrying that we’ll get up in that corporate office and have no idea what we’re actually doing. As a person with a hobby, you’re not ready for all of that now, and it’s difficult to imagine what it will feel like and how ready you could be after you go through the process of growing. The difficulty of imagining ourselves with the knowledge, expertise, and strengths we will gain in the future can stop us entirely from moving toward that future.
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Self-compassion: it’s hard at first. That’s normal. For some people, it stays hard. Also normal. But the result of practicing self-compassion is that you grow mighty. Here’s how:
How to Grow Mighty, Part 1: Befriend Your Madwoman
If you didn’t imagine a persona for your “madwoman,” take the time to do that. Do it now; we’ll wait.
Okay.
The purpose of personifying your madwoman in the attic is to separate yourself from her, to create a dynamic where you can relate to her the way you relate to your friends—with connected knowing. We are, in general, far better at connected knowing with other people than with ourselves.14 Somehow—and it’s not clear why—even the most intuitive connected knower is likely to shift into separate knowing when they relate to their own internal experience. Which is to say, when we think about our lives, we strip our decisions and actions of context and identity; we evaluate them based on the false standards of Human Giver Syndrome. But when we can personify our self-criticism, we can relate to it more effectively. Some form of “personification” appears as a feature of so many different therapeutic modalities, it’s clear that many different people and approaches have recognized the power of stepping to one side of our self-criticism and observing it with friendly curiosity.15
Personifying our self-criticism allows us to apply connected knowing. With connected knowing, you can separate your self from your madwoman and build a relationship with her—maybe even a friendship. This friendship with your own internal experience is powerful. When you’re seriously struggling and positive reappraisal isn’t enough to make the struggle tolerable, self-compassion can help.16 In the animated film Inside Out, Joy can’t cheer up Bing Bong by telling him “Hey, it’s gonna be okay. We can fix this!” Positive reappraisal. It doesn’t work. Instead, it’s when Sadness sits with him and cries with him in compassionate sympathy that Bing Bong feels better. Especially among people with high self-criticism and shame, turning toward your internal experience with kindness and compassion is more healing than positive reappraisal.17
There is and always will be a chasm between you and expected-you. What matters is not the size of the chasm or the nature of the chasm or anything else. What matters is how you manage it—which is to say, how you relate to your madwoman.
Turn toward that self-critical part of you with kindness and compassion. Thank her for the hard work she has done to help you survive.
How to Grow Mighty, Part 2: “Turn and Face the Strange”