127 Self Compassion

Being compassionate with yourself can be the missing key to unlocking permanent changes with how you eat and take care of yourself but it’s not always easy! 

Listen to learn how to cultivate self compassion so that you can enjoy the process of releasing weigh and reclaiming your health and your life. ⁠

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How self compassion is a weight loss tool
• The path to self compassion: judgement, neutrality, curiosity, compassion
• What to do when self compassion feels hard to access

• The full transcript
• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

  Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I'm Paula Parker. I'm a certified life coach and I specialize in food and body. So if you want to release weight, you are in the right place today. I wanted to do the topic of self compassion because it's been a theme that's been coming up a lot recently with my clients.

Which makes it clear to me that it's a relevant topic to do for the podcast. And first I'll just define what I mean when I am talking about self compassion and I'm going to borrow Dr. Kristin Neff's definition, which is compassion turned inward. It's essentially how you treat yourself. How you talk to yourself.

Is it with kindness or criticism? And she provides quite a few free resources at selfcompassion. org. She has videos. She has just a lot of really great resources. If you want to dive further into this work, oftentimes as we. work together when I'm working with clients, clients realize the degree to which they're hard on themselves.

Sometimes we do this in very obvious ways, like thinking negative thoughts about ourselves, like when it comes to weight or eating, it's like, wow, I always do this. There I go again. I just can't get this together. This is pathetic. And sometimes it's more subtle, like I shouldn't have eaten that.  And you might not think that that's a criticism, right?

Or that's lacking self compassion on the surface. But just imagine your best friend told you, Ugh, you know, I don't feel great because I ate all of that. You are very unlikely to say, You shouldn't have eaten that.  Okay, that would be kind of a weird response as a best friend. So you're much more likely to say, yeah, you know what?

I get it. I sometimes overdo it as well. Like it's easy to overdo it with X, Y food, right? Or you might say, Oh, why do you think you had that much? Just from a very neutral, curious place, we would be compassionate with our best friend, right? We wouldn't say to them, you shouldn't have eaten that. Like we say to ourselves, I shouldn't have eaten that.

Okay. But we don't often talk to ourselves in such a compassionate way, which is really interesting. Instead, we make ourselves wrong and we make ourselves not good enough. So you might be critical about food and body stuff in particular, how you're eating, how you look, what you're wearing, or it could be more general things like how you're performing at work.

It could just be a pattern or a habit in terms of how you relate to yourself. Thoughts about how you spend your time, like you're wasting time or all the things you're not doing that you should be doing. It might be how you are talking to yourself about a mistake that you made or something you regret saying or something that you said in a social situation.

Now you're kind of beating yourself up for, why do we do this? Why are we so critical with ourselves? It could be because. It was role modeled by our caregivers. It could be because our family of origin used threats or criticism to try and change our behavior. So this is how we were parented. And I apologize.

There is a building going up across the street. So there's over the course of the next, I don't know how long it's going to take them three months. There's probably going to be some construction noise on this podcast. So my apologies, you might hear that. All right, let's get back to it. So think of something as seemingly innocent or mild as your mom or dad telling you, you know, your grades aren't good enough, or you're not trying hard enough,  or maybe they were critical of your eating specifically.

I don't know how many times I've heard clients say, or even my parents told me, you know, there are kids that are starving out there. need to finish your plate, implying that you are wasteful. If you don't, and I know when it comes to our bodies, you might have heard a lot worse. So it's possible that you've internalized some of this messaging about what's required to change, to change your behavior.

But of course, we know it never works. Shaming yourself will not inspire you to eat better and move your body. Criticizing yourself will not help you eat on point and continually eat that way once you've released the weight, right? It's not going to help you keep going. So when we're critical, instead of self compassionate, We essentially just feel bad.

We feel crappy then because we need to escape from that feeling of feeling so crappy about ourselves and our lives. Then we turn to food more often than we need to. So we overeat and then the cycle continues because then we feel bad about that and blame ourselves. When I worked as a coach many, many, many years ago, my first coach ever, she reframed my overeating as a way to cope.

It was a reaction. a coping mechanism to deal with feelings I didn't know how to handle,  and I didn't have any tools to deal with my feelings. I didn't have any strategies other than trying to stop what I was feeling, that negative emotion I was feeling, by distracting myself with food, being focused on eating, and my body.

But when she said that, I will be honest, when she told me that, in that moment, it didn't really do much for me. Meaning, I didn't really appreciate the gift that she was giving me in that. The understanding my brain was like, yeah, okay, well, that's great to know, but I don't want to eat like this anymore. I want to release weight.

I want to be my dream body. Okay. I was blocked from feeling any kind of compassion towards myself, even though I had this newfound knowledge of why it was happening. I didn't feel safe in my body yet. So my brain turned right back to the problem, to focusing on the food as a way to feel safe, right?

Because that was very familiar for me.  So knowledge is not often enough. It's how we feel in our bodies. That's going to make the difference whether we feel safe or not how we're feeling is what is going to change How you are showing up with food what you're doing with food how you're making your food decisions So whether you're able to get yourself to work out that day move your body in a way that supports you Whether you can allow an urge to overeat When your brain says, you know, let's get a snack.

We could go for a snack, even though you're maybe not even that hungry when you can say, okay, enough now when you've had enough physically, you've had enough dinner, but you kind of want to keep on eating. So my hope is that if you are frustrated or even angry at yourself about your weight and how you've been showing up with food, that you were able to shift out of that a little bit just by listening to this podcast.

And how we do that. is by learning the path of how we get into self compassion. I think of this as cultivating the skill of being compassionate with ourselves. And I want to emphasize here. I think what gets in our way oftentimes is that we think being compassionate with ourselves is going to let ourselves off the hook.

This is not letting yourself off the hook. It is very common for clients to have this thought error. I think of it as like a glitch in our thinking system, that if we're compassionate with ourselves. We'll stay on the couch. We'll have no restraints when it comes to food whatsoever. This is the opposite of compassion.

I'll give you an example. My son, Tristan, just turned four and he had a strawberry popsicle for the very first time recently after recovering from the flu. He got the flu and then I got the flu. So we were, the, the strawberry popsicles were serving us. That was food that served us. But now he knows there's such a thing as a strawberry popsicle.

He knows it exists. And so every morning for the past week, when we say, okay, do you want eggs? Or do you want oats? He says, I want a popsicle. Okay. Now, if you're me as a parent, what is the compassionate choice?  It's not to give him a popsicle for breakfast. No, that's not compassionate at all. It's not kind.

He's going to crash from the sugar. He's not going to feel good in his body. When he gets to school, he might not feel his best. You know, he's not going to feel as good as if he had some eggs or if he had some oatmeal. So giving into what your brain wants for short term pleasure over long term pleasure like feeling satiated and feeling good in your body.

is not self compassionate. The compassionate choice is saying no. And Kristin Neff refers to this as fierce compassion. It's like when you have to kind of do the hard thing, but the hard thing is a compassionate choice. So if you're really interested in this, I encourage you to look at her work and look at that phrase, fierce compassion.

So when I do the compassionate thing and say no to him,  What happens? He has some negative feelings about that. Okay. So he, he gets upset and this happens with us too, right? But we need to do the exact thing for ourselves. When we say no, when we're compassionate, we need to be compassionate with what happens afterwards too.

So your brain is going to have like a mini temper tantrum, just like a four year old. It's going to feel very entitled to have a popsicle whenever you want it, okay, or whatever that food is for you, that your brain is like, I'm entitled to this. Okay. I think of compassion as a literal key and I'm on one side of the door and maybe that's misery.

Maybe, you know, it's just something I don't want. And compassion opens the door to the other side.  My theory is that when we can access self compassion, it creates safety in the body. When we feel safe, we can make decisions that serve us when we relax, when we can respond versus react. For example, if you have compassion for yourself at your current weight with any overeating that you've been doing, you're less likely to react and say, ah, screw it.

You know, just continue overeating and, or heavily restrict. Sometimes we go the opposite way. That's more of a reaction, like a knee jerk reaction to trying to get out of pain. But when we can access compassion for ourselves, we are much more likely to respond. Meaning We say, okay, what will serve me best?

Some self care practices, maybe get support, maybe reach out for help, set up a plan for the day, eat responsibly. It's not even so much what you do, it's how you are doing it. We all know that we can berate ourselves into eating on plan. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is following your plan.

But in a supportive way where you're, where it feels empowering to do it, where it feels supportive, where it feels like you're doing something for yourself rather than to yourself. So you've probably experienced that, you know, where you react to any kind of overeating by getting back on track with eating responsibly and maybe moving your body or exercise.

But when it's in reaction, it's going to feel different. It's going to feel tight. It feels heavy. It feels like a have to or a punishment when These are things you are doing out of self compassion being compassionate, being kind, and it's a loving response. You're doing the same things. You are eating responsibly.

You are exercising, but you feel calm. You feel supportive, easeful. You're doing it with more ease. There's less resistance to doing it. That's a key. And it's just more energizing nourishing. It just feels like you're in alignment. Okay. All right. So. How do we cultivate compassion? Here's the path we take to compassion.

It goes, first we judge, then we go to neutral. Then we develop some curiosity and then we can get compassion. Now, I don't think this is a hard and fast rule. I do have clients that can go right to compassion first and then they can get curious afterwards. But I'll just. Offer this model as a way of thinking about it.

Hopefully it's helpful to give you sort of a path of what most people will follow when we're trying to get to compassion. So let me walk you through it and map out some of the thinking to shift you down that path. Okay, so we start in judgment. We start in blame. We shouldn't have done that or we're disappointed in ourselves.

This is too hard. We're kind of blaming You know, the mechanism of weight loss or blaming life or blaming biology. It's not fair. That often feels very automatic. Like our brains just go there right away. And it also feels necessary. Just feels like we kind of, that's just reality. Okay. But next we move to.

Moving into neutrality. So we're neutral. Here are some thoughts for you to borrow to help you bridge that gap between staying in judgment and moving into neutral.  Some thoughts are this is painful. This is a moment of pain. Okay, you can use the word suffering. If you don't like the word pain, you can use the word struggle.

You can use the word hard. This is hard. This is the hard part. This is the part where it's painful. You can say everyone goes through these things. Or some kind of struggle, everyone struggles in their own way, whether it's their food and weight or something else. Okay. Cause that's being human. What you're doing here with this kind of thinking is you're just acknowledging your experience without catastrophizing.

So sometimes if you have a brain like mine, we will start catastrophizing when it's a period of intense discomfort or pain. I'll give you an example. So, tuesdays and Thursday nights, my husband goes to the gym. So those are the evenings when I'm with the kids by myself. So it's dinner by myself. It's the whole nighttime routine all by myself.

And sometimes it goes great. And it's very enjoyable. And other times, not so enjoyable. And my brain will go to, This sucks. This is really hard. I hate this. Right? Life sucks. This is unfair. It really goes down catastrophizing. Like, life's unfair and life sucks. Just because maybe the kids are resisting what I'm trying to do, get them into the bath or whatever.

Okay. So what we want to do is acknowledge the experience by making it more neutral without the catastrophizing. So I might stay at, you know, this sucks. I don't like this. But it's more of this night sucks. Oh, this is one of the hard nights. Some nights are really great. Some nights are hard, but I'm not going into life sucks.

My life sucks. That's not even true, right? But my brain just has that pattern. It just that's where it goes. All right, so I can learn how to manage it. Fortunately for me, every Tuesday night I have the opportunity, right, of learning how to regulate my nervous system and work with my thinking so that I am staying with, yeah, this is hard.

Everyone struggles. Every parent struggles sometimes. And kind of taking care of myself in that way. Going from judgment, of judging my life, judging the situation, and moving into neutral. From there, then we can get into curiosity.  If you say in judgment, oftentimes it's really hard to access curiosity because it just feels bad and you're kind of in, you're just ruminating, right?

You're still in that, like, this sucks, this shouldn't be happening. It's hard to get curious.  Your curiosity is going to have a really disempowering flavor, like, why is it always like this? Versus, hmm, can I ask these questions from a genuine curious place? Instead of asking yourself, why do I always overeat?

That's coming from judgment. You could instead ask yourself  from a genuine curiosity. Why do I have all this over desire to eat? Why do I have all this intense desire to overeat? So just watch out for any kind of disempowering questions. It just shows that you might still be in judgment. You might still need to spend some time in thinking some neutral thoughts before you can really access curiosity. 

Some more thoughts that you can use or some questions that you can ask when you are cultivating curiosity are What's really going on for me right now? So tuning in. How does this make sense? So maybe for me for the parenting example, how does this make sense? It could be well, you know, Tristan didn't nap today So this makes perfect sense.

It's gonna be a hard night because he's gonna be tired. He's not feeling so good I can have compassion for myself. I can also have compassion for him How does this make sense when it comes to an eating situation? Well, maybe it makes sense because you ate a lot of sugar the night before or the day before, and so now you have sugar cravings the next day.

That would make total sense. You can ask, what is it that I want from eating right now? So if you are wanting to eat between meals, if you are wanting to eat after your dinner, when you've had enough, it might be relaxation. It might be, oh, I'm just bored. Okay, so you want to be identifying what is the true reason.

In what ways is this actually okay? So this is a really helpful one for me. It could be a stretch for some of us. It could be a reach. Okay. But there is usually something that we can find. Where it's just okay. It's just okay that it's like this or it's even good. Like what is the good I can take away from this?

I gave you a parenting example where I can think well, I am learning the process of regulating my emotions  and I am also Learning how to go into neutral with my thinking. So I'm that's a relationship I'm having with myself. These challenging situations with kids is providing that opportunity for myself.

Okay, so maybe that's, I have this challenging opportunity with food and I can reconnect with myself by getting curious and cultivating compassion. Okay, so what is the good I can take from this? What is the self awareness that you can cultivate from this? Then we can find compassion. So finding compassion is thinking in this way.

It's, this is a person, you, who is struggling, maybe who is suffering, who is in some degree of pain. some degree, or discomfort, and who is in need of something. Maybe that's relaxation, pleasure, a feeling of power or autonomy, fun, connection, safety. It's easier for us to be compassionate with others. I gave you the example of, like, if Tristan doesn't nap, it's easier for me to tap into compassion for him than it is to compassion for myself, right?

So I can see, oh, he's someone who's struggling because he's really overtired, okay? He is in pain. He's in need of something, right? He's maybe in need of some connection with me. He's probably in need of some rest. So this is how you're thinking about somebody else. If you can think of somebody in your life where it's just easy for you to be compassionate with them, like a best friend or a pet, even, how can you start thinking in the same way about yourself?

And so here's what might come up for you is resistance. And I just want to offer that it's normal to feel resistance to being self compassionate. It's normal to have resistance come up when you're trying to do that for yourself. You're like, I'm really easy for other people. I can't do it for myself. Why is this? 

Because when we are frustrated, angry, focused on action, this is what I need to do, I just need to summon it up, I need to work out harder, I need to restrict my food more, I need to be more disciplined and more willful, all of that, right, coming from judgment,  there's a false sense of strength.  And that is very compelling, because there's no vulnerability there. 

Asking yourself to be compassionate with yourself can be painful because it's acknowledging that there is pain.  It's asking yourself to acknowledge that there has been a withholding of self compassion, of kindness, of self love. That is painful. To acknowledge that is painful. So often, self compassion comes with a release of emotion, which can also feel intense.

For some of us. Yeah. So  this is something I'm still working on, but when I think back to the past version of myself, so that version of myself that was in that coaching conversation, like 20 years ago, I can now see that I didn't have a lot of practice. of being with negative emotion, of being with my raw emotional pain.

I had never learned. I didn't know very many terms for emotions, right? I didn't even have a vocabulary. I knew just the basics. And I didn't know what to do with that intensity that I had in my body. So instead, of course, I turned to,  you know, the action part. Getting good grades. accomplishment. Maybe it was making my employer happy.

So working longer hours, people pleasing, saying yes to friends when my intuition said no. So being friends with people where I really wasn't in alignment, we didn't have the same values. And for me, above all else was focusing on food, controlling food. You know, researching food, indulging with food, and distracting myself with food, and weight loss, and focusing on my body.

If you find that you are someone for whom being self compassionate is hard, try this. I want you to imagine an infant. I have been fortunate enough to have a recent niece come into my life, her name is Isla, and she's so tiny, and she's so innocent, and so sweet, and so worthy of love and care and compassion, right?

We would never withhold compassion for a little baby, right? As soon as they start crying, we have so much compassion. Our whole focus is on just helping them. What can we do to help them, right? What do they need? Or, you can imagine a child, maybe two or three, they are so worthy of attention, of love, of care and compassion. 

Now, I want you to remember that you were once that baby, you were once that small child.  You were once that beautiful, perfect infant and you  are worthy, just as you were then, you are now worthy of care, of kindness, of compassion. Nothing has changed.  So think of yourself as a child, even as a baby, if you can, how would you treat yourself?

Bring her to mind and see if that helps just wiggle that resistance a little bit. If it helps you channel some compassion.  Okay, I hope that was helpful in terms of how do we get to compassion? Where do we typically start? We typically start in judgment. Why is it important? Because having self compassion is really the key to unlocking safety in our body so that we can, you know, Allow cravings, allow hunger, eat the food that serves us, do the hard work, the fierce compassion, right?

It allows us to access that, take the steps that we want from an empowering place, from a place that's of service to ourselves, not of a place of like white knuckling it or feeling like it's a punishment to ourselves. And then if you have any resistance To, you know, some painful emotions that come up when you acknowledge that you've been withholding any kind of self love or self compassionate.

I just want to offer that's pretty normal. Okay. Nothing has gone wrong. You can think of self compassion as a practice, as a skill that you're cultivating. And it's like any skill, like riding a new bike, you're going to be a little bit wobbly in the beginning. You're not going to be super great at it.

Okay. So it's going to require a little bit of. Practice. So be super patient. You know, it's a bit meta, but be self compassionate  with learning how to be self compassionate with yourself. If you're a little bit resistant, try that exercise of just thinking about a different version of yourself and see if it just helps you get there a little bit easier.

Okay. I hope that helps be kind to yourself. You deserve it. Okay. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.