Cultivating Gentleness: Resources for Incorporating Self-Compassion into Your Healing Process

During periods of turmoil and distress, it is easy to be hard on ourselves and let our fear and shame dictate our emotions, actions, and thoughts. If you’re like most people, it can be easy to fall into a trap of believing that we’re the problem and that if we only worked harder, planned better, made a different choice, insert your own “should” here, we would be experiencing less emotional distress and greater fulfillment.

Suffering is a part of being human. And being human is hard. It is easy to get swept away in futile attempts at perfection rather than allowing ourselves to be at peace with the reality that life involves suffering and darkness. It is then our job to do what Marsha Linehan, the founder of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, refers to as  “bearing our pain skillfully” rather than pushing it away, avoiding difficult emotions, blaming ourselves, or succumbing to self-doubt. When we experience something that shakes us to our core, an attitude of gentleness and self-compassion is often the most helpful stance to promote healing.

What does it mean for you to be gentle to yourself? For some it may look like reminding ourselves daily that we’re doing the best we can. For others it may mean clearing your schedule in order to spend some time taking care of ourselves, creating more reasonable expectations, or setting helpful boundaries in relationships. Gentleness is the active, intentional choice to treat ourselves as humans deserving of kindness and love, whether we believe that about ourselves or not.

The following resources are designed to help you move away from a mindset of self-shaming and create more space for gentleness and self-compassion.

1)     Insight Timer – Guided Meditations for Self-Compassion: Insight Timer is a user-friendly meditation app that allows you to choose from a large selection of prerecorded guided meditations or use their timer feature to meditate on your own with the option to play various peaceful background noises (nature sounds, bells, etc.). “Five Minutes of Self-Compassion” by Lisa Abramson is a lovely and brief way to ground ourselves in lovingkindness and remind ourselves that we are all doing our best (Dr. Mowrey is also a contributor—check out her profile at https://insighttimer.com/CreasmanCounseling).

2)     The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown -  Brene Brown’s research primarily focuses on shame, vulnerability, and worthiness. In The Gifts of Imperfection she calls readers to move away from our constant need to “perform, please, and perfect” and embrace our own imperfections and failures on the path to living a “wholehearted” life.

3)     The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher Germer – Germer invites us to challenge our inner critic and take steps towards being more present-focused. This book provides a balance of practical mindfulness exercises, scientifically based research findings, and wisdom from Germer’s years as a therapist.

I hope these resources can be good jumping off points for creating a practice of self-compassion. What are other steps you can take towards cultivating gentleness towards yourself? Maybe it’s honoring your body’s physical needs with sufficient sleep, nourishment, and water. Or perhaps it’s rescheduling a social engagement for a time when you know you’ll have the capacity to be present and enjoy it.

I’d love to hear from you! How were you able to cultivate gentleness this week?

 Post contributed by: Kelsey Domann-Scholz, MA, LPCA

Creasman Counseling, PLLC

Practicing patience in tumultuous times

It seems this political season is charged with an uncommon level of conflict and anger.  Maybe I've just reached that magical age when new music sounds awful, I am never without an umbrella, and politics seem incredibly relevant.  It feels like more than maturation, though.  We seem to have reached a social boiling point that I can only hope results in a more unified and compassionate world.  I am absolutely not here to back any particular candidate, but I would like to talk about practicing patience in the face of anger; for working with the energy of anger so that we can make our best choices from our best selves.

The Dalai Lama talks about practicing patience in his book Healing Anger.  He very pragmatically suggests that to work with anger, we have to be skilled in its opposite-- patience.  I don't know about you, but I probably heard "be patient" a thousand times growing up, but no one ever told me how.  As a child, patience was synonymous with waiting, as if there were any other choice but to wait when dinner wasn't ready, or Christmas was still 2 months away. The Dalai Lama provided these step by step instructions:

1) Develop enthusiasm for patience by deeply acknowledging the destructive nature of anger. 
2) Practice patience toward mild discomforts so as to be prepared for more challenging situations.
3) FREEZE

Many of us rely on anger to feel powerful and effective. The energy of anger is useful, the actions of anger are not.  I personally have never acted on my urge to yell at someone, throw something, or punch a wall without some amount of regret.  Even if I felt some mild satisfaction at first, ultimately, acting on anger has left me feeling out of control, embarrassed, and small.  So what does it mean to say that the energy of anger is useful?  Consider the civil rights movement that continues today-- if no one were angry about the unfair treatment of people of color, change wouldn't have happened.  Yet many of those angry people demonstrated peacefully, calling calmly for change.  They used their anger to motivate effective, non-destructive action.  Anger can be the fuel that gets the car going, but it doesn't have to dictate the destination.  When we recognize that acting in anger creates more harm than good, and only serves to increase our negative emotion, we can lean wholeheartedly in to patience.

Just like you wouldn't want to learn CPR at the scene of a car crash, patience as a skill must be learned and practiced for mild discomforts.  We ultimately practice patience by saying yes where anger says no.  Anger tells us that a situation is unacceptable as it is and fights against a painful reality rather than accepting it.  You can't fix a problem you refuse to see, which is why acting in anger is so often ineffective-- anger characteristically refuses to accept what is.  Patience is accepting a painful reality.  If patience could speak to us it would say, "yes, this traffic is moving too slowly for you to get to work on time, and there's nothing to be done about that, so let's watch those negative judgments about how terribly unfair this is without clinging to them, and allow this moment to pass."  When we practice patience for minor problems like traffic jams, we increase the likelihood that it will be available to us when we find out our child is smoking marijuana, or when we see an incendiary post defaming our candidate of choice.  Patience allows us an opportunity to channel the energy of our anger into actions that are based in compassion and kindness.  Instead of telling that so-called Facebook friend how stupid they are, patience creates the space for real listening, real connection, and increases the chances that our actions will have a positive impact rather than deepen division.

When all else fails, when anger has moved our minds towards plans of spiteful, defensive action, FREEZE.  The more mindful we become of our triggers to anger, the more time we will have to interrupt the process of experiencing an event, judging it negatively, feeling our anger, and acting rashly.  We don't have to be levitating, enlightened monks in order to stop ourselves from slamming that door or hardening our hearts.  We just have to become aware and be willing to take three breaths when anger arises.  Freezing and breathing helps us get back in to contact with the moment and out of the story of our anger.  Patience allows us to interact effectively with our anger instead of being pushed around by it.  Patience makes room for our compassion.

"Genuine compassion is based on the rationale that just as I do, others also have the innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering; just as I do, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration.  Based on that recognition of this fundamental equality and commonality, one develops a sense of affinity and closeness, and based on that, one will generate love and compassion.  That is genuine compassion (Dalai Lama, Healing Anger)."

Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills for everyday life, Part 2

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations that feel a lot like emotional quick sand--it seems no matter what we do, we are unable to alleviate our pain.  Painful situations are a natural part of human experience, and are occasionally unavoidable.  For these times when we feel stuck in a miserable situation, Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills of distress tolerance can help us to ride the waves of negative experience without added suffering.

Quicksand Survival 101:  While I have never personally been so unlucky as to find myself in actual quicksand, it seems like common knowledge that the more we struggle against the quicksand, the faster we go under.  Painful experiences such as going through a break up, receiving bad medical news, or financial problems follow this rule as well--the more we fight against the reality of what is, the less likely we are to be effective at managing the situation.  DBT offers four ways of addressing a problematic situation to avoid struggling against painful realities:

1. Solve the problem: Struggling against the quicksand is not to be confused with calling for help, grabbing for a branch, or otherwise maneuvering out of the situation.  The latter options are all reasonable responses that directly address the problem.  When we find out that our spouse is considering leaving, for example, struggling might look like drinking to avoid tough conversations, while problem solving might involve suggesting that our spouse come to couples counseling with us.  Which leads us to...

2.  Accepting the situation: Some level of acceptance is required to address any distressing situation.  We cannot fix that which we do not acknowledge to be real.  When no problem solving option is available however, we can call upon the skill of acceptance to reduce the suffering associated with refusing to acknowledge a problem.  Sometimes just allowing space for all the feelings that show up with a bad situation helps us to move through the problem more effectively.

3.  Change the way you think:  This strategy goes beyond deciding that the glass is half full when it seems half empty.  When we change our perspective on a problem, we empower ourselves beyond the constraints of the situation.  Deciding to see an injury right before a big race as an opportunity for developing self-acceptance may seem superficial, but it can make a tremendous difference in the level of negative emotion we experience.  A change of perspective does not mean that we don't acknowledge the painful feelings that might arise from our initial interpretation of a situation, but rather that we choose to water the seeds of thinking that we feel will benefit us most significantly.

4.  Stay miserable:  The option to keep thrashing against the quicksand is always available to us.  It is important to acknowledge that staying miserable is to an extent a choice, and not a direct result of the circumstances.  Are some experiences inherently painful?  Absolutely!  However, the suffering associated with refusing to acknowledge a problem that is already there is avoidable with the three steps above.