The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion

by Christopher K Germer

  Suzanne’s move toward divorce was the turning point—it gave them “the gift of desperation.” For the first time, Michael seemed willing to explore just how painful his life had become. During one session, when they were discussing a heavy snowstorm in the Denver area, Michael mentioned that his 64-year-old father had just missed his first day of work in 20 years. I asked Michael what that meant to him. His eyes welling up with tears, Michael said he wished his father had enjoyed his life more. I wondered aloud if Michael had ever wished the same thing for himself. “I’m scared,” he replied. “I’m scared of what would happen if I stopped working all the time. I’m even scared to stop worrying about the business—scared that I might be overlooking something important that would make my whole business crumble before my eyes.”

  With that, a light went on for Suzanne. “Is that why you ignore me and the kids and even ignore your own body?” she asked him. Michael just nodded, his tears flowing freely now. “Oh my God,” Suzanne said. “I thought it was me—that I wasn’t good enough, that I’m just too much trouble for you. We’re both anxious—just in different ways. You’re scared about your business and I’m scared about our marriage. I live in fear of our marriage crumbling every single day while you’re at work.” The frozen feeling of disconnection that had separated Michael and Suzanne for years had begun to thaw.

  From the beginning of our sessions, Michael had been aware of his workaholism. He even realized that he was ignoring his family just as he had been ignored by his own father. But Michael felt helpless to reverse the intergenerational transmission of suffering. That began to change when he felt the pain of the impending divorce. Michael accepted how unhappy his life had become, and he experienced a spark of compassion, first for his father and then for himself.

  Suzanne often complained that Michael paid insufficient attention to their two kids. But behind her complaints was a wish—not unfamiliar to mothers of young children—that Michael would pay attention to her first when he came home from work, and later play with the kids. Suzanne was ashamed of this desire; she thought it was selfish and indicated that she was a bad mother. But when she could see it as a natural expression of her wish to connect with her husband, she was able to make her request more openly and confidently. Michael, in turn, found it much easier to respond to these requests.

  A little self-acceptance and self-compassion allowed both Suzanne and Michael to begin to transform their difficult emotions. In relationships, behind strong feelings like shame and anger is often a big “I MISS YOU!” It simply feels unnatural and painful not to feel connected with our loved ones.

  Despite the obvious differences between public-speaking anxiety, back pain, insomnia, and relational conflict, they usually share a common ingredient: resistance to discomfort. Fighting what we’re uneasy about only makes things worse. The more we can accept the anxiety, physical discomfort, sleeplessness, and pain of discon-nection—and the self-doubt that goes along with it—the better off we’ll be.

  You can surely recognize the same dynamic in your own life. How successful is your diet if you’re overly strict and self-critical about it? What happens when you argue with your teenage daughter about her new boyfriend? Where does your anger go when you suppress it? A colleague of mine quipped, “When you resist something, it goes to the basement and lifts weights!”

  At the severe end of the spectrum, trying not to feel ashamed by attacking others, verbally or physically, can destroy relationships and even lives. Drinking to reduce anxiety or block out traumatic memories can take away everything you have or ever wanted to have. Cutting one’s own skin to get relief from emotional pain solves nothing. The challenge is to turn toward our difficulties with nonjudgmental awareness and compassion. This book was written to start you down that more fruitful path.

  FINDING THE MIDDLE WAY

  It’s asking a lot to open yourself to discomfort. When I made the decision to allow myself to tremble in front of an audience, I had to think through what that actually meant. Not just think about it, actually shudder through the scene: people laughing at me, telling one another about my poor performance, turning away in embarrassed dismay. Only then could I see that my life would go on if I were a dud as a speaker. It was a kind of exposure therapy—getting used to it in my imagination; fortunately or unfortunately, I had some actual experience to go on.

  Some people can simply jump in and embrace their emotional distress. Others take a more gradual path. Hurling themselves into those turbulent waters works for some people, but the willingness to do so is no indication of personal virtue—especially if you can’t swim. You must feel safe and competent before taking that first step toward pain.

  Most of us worry about what could happen if we opened up to emotional pain. Depressed people may fear they’ll be overwhelmed and unable to function. Those with anxiety worry that it will set them back, giving them yet another vivid instance of anxiety to remember. People with a trauma background expect scary memories to break through and haunt them during the day. Those in difficult marriages may worry that they’ll have to take action on their relationships if they allow themselves to feel how bad things have become. These are all real possibilities for which we should be prepared.

  The purpose of this book is to teach you the knowledge and the skills to face suffering from a position of strength. What this book cannot teach is intuition about whether it’s safe for you, at any particular moment, to turn toward pain. You have to decide that for yourself. We’re all sensitive beings, even if we don’t show it. We have fragile nervous systems. Learn to use your intuition to distinguish between “safety” and “discomfort.” Feeling vulnerable or uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unsafe; “hurt” does not necessarily mean “harm.” It’s important to know the difference if you want to live your life to its fullest.

  We usually tolerate all manner of difficulties to lead a meaningful life. For example, if having children is important to you, you’ll probably risk the pain of childbirth to pursue your dream. Wisdom is the quality of knowing the short- and long-term consequences of our actions and choosing the path of greatest long-term benefit. Sticking to our deepest commitments and values, despite the obstacles, is wise because it yields long-term happiness.

  It’s best to seek a “middle way” between facing and avoiding your difficulties. You might feel fragile one day and unable to meet your challenges. If so, perhaps they can wait. Imagine you’re on a ski vacation. Some days you may want to attempt double-diamond slopes, and other days you may just want to sip hot chocolate in the lodge. If you try a steep slope when you’re not prepared, you may crash. If you stick to the bunny slopes, you won’t enjoy the thrill of mastery. Given the choice, attempt new challenges only when you’re good and ready. But don’t give up either.

  Some people wonder how antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications fit into this picture. Aren’t they just forms of avoidance, delaying or burying emotional challenges? That may be so in some cases, but generally speaking our problems are unworkable when we’re overwhelmed with fear, sadness, or disorganized thinking. Avoidance is good if it helps us regain perspective. Medication can bring emotional suffering down to a manageable level. Some people may eventually be able to reduce their medication using self-regulation strategies such as those described in this book.

  The mind has its own natural ways of avoiding distress. These are our “defense mechanisms,” such as “denial,” “projection,” and “splitting.” Splitting, for example, refers to the mind’s tendency to see things as black or white when we’re under threat: “He’s all good; she’s all bad.” It comforts us to think that way. Denial is the refusal to accept something that causes anxiety, such as a partner being an alcoholic or having an affair. Projection is when we shift our unacceptable feelings and impulses onto another person to feel better about ourselves, such as “He’s a racist” or “She’s just jealous.”

  Defense mechanisms are essential for a balanced emotional life, so
we don’t want to strip them away willy-nilly. For example, it may be wise to stay in denial about a partner’s affair until you’re ready to deal with it. Becoming overwhelmed and unable to function in daily life serves no useful end. Also, some transitory emotional pain does go away if we block it out of our minds—and if it never returns, so much the better. We just don’t want our psychological defenses to control us or complicate our lives.

  Stepping on the hedonic treadmill of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain may sometimes be a good thing too. For example, if you don’t pursue what you like, how can you ever be happy? Who else will satisfy your needs for you, in the short or long term, or even know what it takes to make you happy? For most adults, the days are long gone when other people can anticipate our needs better than we can. We need to take responsibility for our own happiness, and pleasure points the way. Hopefully, however, we’ll choose longer term pleasures, such as the joy we feel from maintaining a healthy body, enriching the mind, and being helpful to others.

  It’s critical to know when the instinctive habits of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are causing us more trouble than they’re worth. Usually when we engage in these activities, stress is not far behind. We suffer when we don’t get what we want, when we lose what we had, and when we get what we did not want. The ability to see things as they are, with acceptance, gets us through.

  STAGES OF ACCEPTANCE

  The process of turning toward discomfort occurs in stages; there’s a progressive softening, or nonresistance, in the face of suffering. After an initial bout of aversion, we start the process with curiosity about the problem and, if all goes well, end with a full embrace of whatever is occurring in our lives. The process is usually slow and natural. It makes no sense to advance to the next stage until you’re entirely comfortable with where you are at the moment. The stages are:

  Aversion—resistance, avoidance, rumination

  Curiosity—turning toward discomfort with interest

  Tolerance—safely enduring

  Allowing—letting feelings come and go

  Friendship—embracing, seeing hidden value

  Our first, instinctive reaction to uncomfortable feelings is always aversion. For example, we avert our gaze when we see something unpleasant. Aversion can also take the form of mental entanglement or rumination—trying to figure out how to remove the feeling. After a while, when aversion doesn’t work, we enter stage 2: curiosity. “What is that feeling?” “When does it happen?” “What does it mean?” When we know what we’re dealing with, and if the pain doesn’t go away, we may enter stage 3: tolerance. Tolerance means “enduring” emotional pain, but we’re still resisting it and wishing it would go away. As our resistance erodes, we enter the fourth stage—allowing—letting difficult feelings come and go on their own. Finally, as our lives adapt and deepen, we may find ourselves in the friendship stage, where we actually see hidden value in our predicament. The story of a dear friend of mine, Brenda, helps illustrate what it’s like to move through these stages.

  Brenda and her husband, Doug, had two children. Their son, Zach, 3 years younger than his sister, was born with a congenital heart defect. When Brenda’s family traveled to far-off places like Australia and Hawaii, Zach sometimes had a heart attack. He was a joyful, energetic boy despite his heart condition and the medications he was taking, but at 9 years old he died in his sleep. That was 19 years ago.

  Stage 1: Aversion

  The loss of a young child is an unspeakable agony. Although Brenda and Doug knew that Zach might not live long, nothing could prepare them for this. It was an “emotional tsunami.” At the funeral, Brenda’s nervous system was so overwrought that she lost her peripheral vision. She took to her bed after sitting shiva for 7 days, the Jewish custom of mourning. On rare occasions when she went out to the grocery store, Brenda felt like a foreigner, observing in a detached manner how people quibbled on the checkout line when they couldn’t find their favorite type of pasta. Brenda was hiding deep within herself.

  Stage 2: Curiosity

  At some point, the thought occurred to Brenda, “If I just gave up, I could die.” That seemed like a relief, but then she was seized with terror: “What about my daughter? What would she do? I can either succumb to my misery or make a choice.” Brenda was gradually waking up to her predicament. “Feeling bad can be dangerous,” she observed.

  Stage 3: Tolerance

  After 2 weeks, Brenda chose to get out of bed. “I made a choice to live for my daughter.” As a child, Brenda had been her own mother’s caregiver, so she certainly didn’t want to burden her daughter by being incapacitated with grief. “I have to be a mother. Life is for the living,” Brenda told herself. She explained to me later on, “The only salve for the misery was to help other people.”

  Stage 4: Allowing

  Brenda describes herself as an “intellectual sort of person” who solves problems by thinking them through—“If your approach isn’t working, try a new one”—but she was completely unprepared for this level of sadness. She and Doug kept their grief contained at a safe level by going to Zach’s grave no more than twice a year and by occasionally taking out Zach’s belongings and looking at them. “Did you know that the smell of his bathrobe goes away after 5 months?” The couple began allowing in more of the pain as they cried together during these “visits.”

  Psychologically, Brenda kept a loving relationship alive with Zach. She didn’t want to let that go, nor did she need to. Brenda found that whenever she felt grief, she felt close to Zach. She also felt close when she had a wave of gratitude for having known Zach. Brenda was in psychotherapy at the time, so she asked her therapist, “Is it okay to have a living relationship with a dead person?” Her therapist replied, “Why not? Grief and gratitude are forms of love.” Brenda was trusting her intuition to stay in a healthy relationship with Zach.

  Stage 5: Friendship

  When I met Brenda 17 years after Zach died, she said to me, “The pain of Zach’s death has connected me to all mothers since the beginning of time who have lost children.” Two years later, she was on a meditation retreat in which the teacher invited the students to “get in touch with their suffering.” Brenda heard an inner voice that said, “I don’t do that!” Then the teacher said, “If you can’t be fully present with the difficult moments, chances are you won’t be present with the best moments of your life either.” At that moment, Brenda realized she’d been holding on to grief and “Maybe I don’t need that anymore?” Without having spoken a word of this to her now 32-year-old daughter, 1 week later she received a call from her daughter asking for a referral to a counselor to speak about her brother’s death. Not only was Brenda learning to befriend her own pain, but perhaps it invisibly prompted her daughter to do the same. Brenda told me, “It has taken me all this time to realize I can love fully without hurting.”

  This story illustrates what it’s like to gradually soften our resistance to unbearable emotional pain. The stages don’t necessarily occur in linear order; some days we drop back, and some days we leap forward. The deeper the sorrow, the longer it takes to pass through the stages of acceptance. Trying to rush the process is not helpful though, as it’s a sure sign that we’re trying to push away pain rather than cultivate acceptance. This book is designed to show you how to cultivate acceptance, especially self-acceptance, one day at a time.

  FROM ACCEPTANCE TO SELF-COMPASSION

  The mental health field is discovering the importance of accepting emotional pain. Ordinarily, when a person comes to therapy saying “I’m stressed out,” the therapist tries to help him or her reduce the stress, perhaps by teaching relaxation skills. Therapists are very obliging that way. Sometimes they try to change distorted thinking that seems to make a person depressed (for example, “I’m stupid,” or “I’ll always be abandoned in the end”). These strategies fit into the category of “Tell me the problem and we’ll fix it.” In essence, therapists and clients unwittingly join forces, trying to uproot negative ex
perience.

  These approaches have met with reasonable success. Recent research indicates, however, that the healing mechanisms behind successful therapy are not what we thought they were: it’s the process of establishing a new relationship with our thoughts and feelings, rather than directly challenging them, that makes the difference. This new relationship is less avoidant, less entangled, more accepting, more compassionate, and more aware. Leaning into our problems with open eyes and an open heart—with awareness and compassion—is the process by which we get emotional relief.

  What’s Acceptance?

  As discussed earlier, “acceptance” covers a range of experiences, including curiosity, tolerance, willingness, and friendship. The opposite of acceptance is resistance. Whereas resistance creates suffering, acceptance alleviates it.

  Acceptance doesn’t mean tolerating bad behavior. It’s opening emotionally to what’s happening within us in the present moment. If you’re in a painful relationship, acceptance doesn’t mean you’re saying “yes” to the entire relationship. Rather, it means acknowledging “This hurts!” I’ve seen many people make changes in their lives— relationships, eating habits, jobs—when they’re in contact with how bad a situation or behavior makes them feel. Acceptance is not resignation or stagnation; change naturally follows acceptance.

  But we need to know what we’re accepting. Without awareness, we can become overly accommodating in our acceptance, like voting for a political candidate about whom we know very little. Blind acceptance can also devolve into sentimentality—sugarcoating reality. These are not examples of acceptance at all and will eventually lead to more suffering. I use “acceptance” in this book to refer to a conscious choice to experience our sensations, feelings, and thoughts just as they are, moment to moment.