In my last blog post, I wrote about the difficulty many of us experience in uttering those three little, but oh-so-portentous-seeming, words “I love you.”
Conversely, how strongly and clearly are you able to say, “I love me?”
It’s my impression both from my years of teaching and clinical practice that many people have as much or more difficulty with these three little words.
However, many in the mental health field, including me, would argue that we can’t love others until we are able to love ourselves.
For a number of years, I regularly taught a university class on myth, dream, and symbol. It would sometimes happen that a class session would fall on Valentine’s Day. Figuring that the somewhat clichéd Valentine heart is a good example of a symbol in everyday life, I devised an in-class exercise in which I asked students to write a Valentine’s note to themselves, declaring their love. I didn’t require them to show their note to anyone else but I did invite them to talk about the sorts of feelings that came up around that exercise. (Just for the record, I participated in the exercise, as well, inasmuch as I believe I should be willing to do anything I ask of them). As I recall, most of the students initially felt pretty uncomfortable doing this exercise, even though it was private. As I recall, I felt a little internal resistance myself but it quickly gave way and I was able to really get into the exercise and shower myself with self-acceptance and love.
Why should this exercise be challenging? Most of us probably received messages in the process of growing up not to have a “big head,” not to be overly prideful, and so on. In other words, we should not be narcissistic. Or at least, not let our narcissism show! On the other hand, most of us have been exposed to exhortations about the importance of self-esteem.
On my Wise Counsel Podcast series, I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Kristin Neff of the University of Texas at Austin about her new book which is titled “Self-Compassion.” In the interview, we had a chance to explore some of these issues. Dr. Neff points out that, “The relentless search for high self-esteem has become a virtual religion; and a tyrannical one at that. Our competitive culture tells us we need to be special and above average to feel good about ourselves, but we can’t all be above average at the same time. There is always someone richer, more attractive, or successful than we are. And even when we do manage to feel self-esteem for one golden moment, we can’t hold on to it. Our sense of self-worth bounces around like a ping-pong ball, rising and falling in lock-step with our latest success or failure.”
According to Dr. Neff, self-compassion is a more reliable alternative to self-esteem in terms of providing a path to happiness. This point of view grew out of her longstanding interest in and practice of Buddhism. During her post-doctoral work she decided to conduct research on self-compassion – a central construct in Buddhist psychology and one that had not yet been examined empirically. In our interview, she told me that she has been researching self-compassion for 10 years. In the process, she has helped to pioneer and define a new field of study within psychology.
Dr. Neff has been a practitioner of insight/mindfulness meditation. Buddhism emphasizes compassion for “all sentient beings,” and therefore, it’s important that we include ourselves in the circle. In terms of her own life journey, Dr. Neff went through a messy divorce after an early first marriage and in her second marriage was challenged by the discovery that her young son was severely autistic. Not surprisingly, she was assailed by all sorts of self-blaming inner voices but she learned to overcome these through her practice of mindful compassion.
I asked her why many of us find it easier to be compassionate toward someone else than toward ourselves? In part, she replied, “Probably the number one reason people aren't more self-compassionate is that they confuse it with self-indulgence. They really think that they need self-criticism to motivate themselves, and that if they were kind to themselves, they would basically let themselves get away with anything. So that's one of my big missions, is explaining why that myth is false and presenting the research that shows it's false.” Much to my delight, I discovered that Dr. Neff has an exercise in her book that is very close to my own Valentine exercise I described above. In her exercise, she suggests that the reader take the point of view of a compassionate friend and write themselves a letter as if it were coming from that friend. About this exercise, she told me, “A lot of people don't know how to be compassionate to themselves because they aren't in the habit of doing so, but most of us do have quite well-developed skills in being compassionate, understanding, kind, supportive to those we care about. So I really try to encourage people to use those skills, draw on what they know, but really turn it around and apply it to themselves. And it's almost easier to give yourself compassion if you're thinking of yourself as someone else. I know it's kind of crazy, but it does seem to work…” This comment about helping a person to step out of their self and view their self with the sort of compassion an outsider would offer brought to mind a very powerful intervention I made in a Gestalt workshop I was leading some years back. I was working with a gay man who had been taunted throughout his youth and had internalized some very painful, harsh judgments. We were getting nowhere until I invited him to close his eyes and to see himself as a young boy and to speak to and reassure that young boy that he was going to make it, that he would end up finding a place in the world and being successful (as, indeed was the case for his adult self). As he got deeper and deeper into this exercise he became very tearful and experienced a powerful emotional release as a result of the compassion and acceptance he was able to extend his younger self. I asked Dr. Neff to comment on the relationship between narcissism, self-esteem, and self-compassion. I put my question in the context of reports that, relative to people in other industrialized countries, our youth has a very inflated sense of self-worth, self-esteem. I seem to recall that on tests of math and science skills, the U.S. students think they’ve done really well compared to those in Europe and Asia. In fact, the people who really did well were those in Europe and Asia, but those students tended to rate themselves lower in terms of their self-assessment of how well they had done.
I also referred to a study cited in the New York Times which reported a statistically significant trend towards narcissism and hostility in recent popular music. According to this researcher, the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there's been a corresponding decline in "we" and "us" and expression of positive emotions. In addition, it was found that narcissism has been rising among our undergraduates since the 1980s, as measured by the Narcissism Personality Inventory.
Dr. Neff concurs, saying “…all this emphasis on love yourself, gold star, you're the best, has led to a lot of ego inflation.” She went on to describe research she conducted looked in Thailand, Taiwan and the United States. She found that people in the United States definitely have the highest level of self-esteem but “in terms of self-compassion, the Thais actually had the highest level, and they take their Buddhism very seriously in Thailand. The Taiwanese have the lowest levels; Confucianism really emphasizes the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. They really emphasize self-criticism. And Americans were in between. So it's really interesting.”
According to Dr. Neff, self-esteem and self-compassion are two different processes: “…even though Americans have high self-esteem, they don't necessarily have a lot of self-compassion.”
So, how does self-compassion differ from being narcissistically self-centered? One thing is that research reveals that self-compassion is associated with mental health: less depression, less anxiety, more happiness, more optimism, more motivation to learn and try out new things. She argues that it is quite different than self-esteem.
