Self-Compassion and the Art of Overcoming One's Inner Critic

Abstract

can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection. BuddhaWhile searching topics for my article I read a lot, thought a lot, but what got my attention was a write up talking about self-compassion. I am a person who's non-judgmental when it comes to others, but I am my own critic. And there are many like me. There are number of people who have problem of over thinking, rumination and anxiety, which many a times lowers their self-esteem and self-confidence. There's always a voice in the head criticizing oneself. We all develop an inner guiding voice depending on the environment we have been brought up in and it can be both positively motivating and harshly self-critical. During our early years we were conditioned by our parents and guardians. We all have learned rules of from them. Their manners, their style, with little modification. Depending on which values they lived by, we are most likely to adopt the same ones as a blueprint for understanding the world. Values are a collection of guiding principles and they determine what we deem to be correct and desirable in life (Schwartz, 1992).Values create our subconscious representational map through which we assess and rate others and ourselves as worthy or ideal. For instance, values such as responsibility, openness and respect have the tendency to strengthen relationships and provide a basis for well-being and creativity. We are likely to take the values we grew up with. If our perception of what we are does not correlate with our values, like for example our performance, if one feel one has not done well enough, one will tend to deem oneself unworthy. The subjective and self-critical perception that we have has an impact on our sense of self-worth and that determines whether the voice in our head will be kind and supportive or destructive and devaluing. Also, our perception of ourselves influences our behavior, which means we create our own self-fulfilling prophecy (Schwartz, 1992), never living up to the good enough value. This not only lowers our self-esteem and self-confidence but also compromises our well-being. We all know it's difficult to change deeply rooted values, but we can lessen the impact they have on us by learning to change the view we have of ourselves. This can be achieved through self-compassion.Self-compassion is basically accepting oneself for what you are and treating oneself with warmth and understanding. Its human nature to lose hope and confidence during difficult time and self-blame is common but during these difficult times its utmost necessary to understand and recognize that making mistakes is part of being human (Neff, 2003a). Self-compassion has three main components and it represents a warm and accepting stance towards those aspects of oneself and one's that are unpopular, disliked (Neff, 2003b). First is self-kindness versus self-judgment, second, common humanity versus isolation, and third, mindfulness versus over-identification.If individuals are self-compassionate then, when confronting suffering or failure instead of self-criticism and belittling oneself, they'll offer themselves warmth and non-judgmental understanding. This process of realization also requires one to understand that failure and difficulties are part and parcel of life, it's okay to be imperfect, everyone makes mistakes, it's something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to me alone. Self-compassion requires one to take a balanced approach towards one's negative experiences so that painful feelings are neither suppressed not exaggerated. One should not get carried away by negative emotions otherwise self-compassion will turn into melodrama and all perspective will be lost. Instead, self-compassion requires one to have the right amount of distance from one's emotions so that they are fully experienced while being approached with mindful objectivity. …