Self- compassion
"A basic kindness, with a deep awareness of the suffering of oneself and of other living things, coupled with the wish and effort to relieve it"
What is self compassion?
Our emotions are governed by three systems known as the threat, drive, and soothe systems, with each playing an important role in regulations our emotions.
What systems balance emotions?
Taking one negative instance and concluding that this applies to everything.
What is overgeneralizing?
Experiencing limited care, kindness and nurturing from others growing up, leaving to the self sooth system being underdeveloped.
What is early life experiences?
The threat system remains active. Emotional behavioral and physical responses continue. We remain stuck in this cycle of self-criticism and can't move forward.
What is consequences?
Not shying away from or ignoring the pain, but meeting this pain with feelings of kindness, care, warmth and concern.
What is kindness in self compassion?
Self compassion is strongly linked to our mental healthy and well-being. Research shows people who are more compassionate towards themselves have less mental heath problems.
What is mental health and well being benefits?
Making global and derogatory statements about ourselves on the basis of our behavior in a specific situation.
What is Labelling?
Some people think being self-compassionate is too touchy feely, and will lead to laziness, self-indulgence or self-pity.
What is negative beliefs about self-compassion?
Lack of Awareness
Positive beliefs about self- criticism
Negative beliefs about self-compassion
What is the root of self-criticism
Focusing our energy on way to alleviate the pain, which may be vis providing further comfort and caring actions, providing a helpful perspective regarding whatever the trouble is, or having the strength and courage to take other necessary actions to address the problem being faced.
What is alleviation in self-compassion?
A protective mechanism that is hard wired in all humans. The human minds default system looking for, paying attention to and repetitively think about bad stuff.
What is the threat system?
Using "should" statements to put unreasonable pressure on ourselves
What is Shoulding?
We can go through life on autopilot, doing what we have always done. We get tangles and stuck in our struggle, never pausing to consciously recognize we are struggling, and that maybe we could deal with this in the same way we might help others deal with something similar.
What is Lack of Awareness?
Situation, thought (memory or past or thinking about future), emotion, physical sensation.
What is trigger?
Recognizing that experiencing this sort of pain is universal. The fact that we experience pain isn't a fault or failing of ours, we are not to blame for our pain, and we are not alone in our pain.
What is normalizing in self -compassion?
The system the spurs us on to try new things, achieve things, set and work towards goals, and feel those ecstatic high five moments.
What is the Drive system?
A thinking style that involves our internal self-talk being highly negative, disparaging and berating. Thinking in this manor can activate the threat system.
What is self Criticism?
Our brain is hard wired to shift into threat mode pretty easily to protect ourselves. Seeing the negative is our default attention bias.
What is the threat system?
Criticize self for the trigger and/or our response to the trigger.
What is self-criticism?
Being attentive or sensitive to the fact that some sort of suffering is occurring. Some distressing struggle with emotional pain, mental pain, physical pain, or all of the above.
What is awareness in self compassion?
The system that is active when we are just chilling out, feeling safe, calm and content. Kindness and care tend to stimulate this system.
What is the sooth system?
Thinking about past or future negative events, or an uncomfortable emotion or physical sensation we may be experiencing, then it quickly and automatically shifts into threat mode.
What is a trigger?
Emotional response- Anger, depression, anxiety
Behavioral response- fight, flight, or freeze
Physical response- arousal (tension, heart rate increased) or De-arousal (tired, low energy)
What is the threat system activated?