 is the ability to help clients be self-compassionate. You know, it's kind of trans theoretical. No matter what your approach, good therapy and outcome of good therapy is increased self-compassion. You know, sometimes it's explicit, sometimes it's more implicit, but that's what a therapist does, kind of models compassion, models that your needs are worthy of being met, that you're, you know, you're an important person. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I think the other part of the balance that can be tricky is many of us find it a lot easier to be compassionate towards others. So when we think about friends and family members, even strangers we can have compassion for. And as Johnny was saying earlier, you know, having rough and tumble dads who are more of the stick than the carrot, it has been a real challenge to lay off ourselves and not be in a place of constantly pushing towards perfection. Why is it that it's so much easier for us to express compassion outwardly and less inwardly? Yeah, there's a couple of reasons. Some are, some are cultural. There aren't cultural barriers against compassion or race thinking. It's good to be compassionate to others, but there are a lot of barriers to self-compassion. Again, we think it's going to make us lazy or weak or unmotivated. So we aren't taught that it's a good thing. So that's one problem. But there's also something more basic that's physiological. So both self-criticism and self, and actually both criticism and compassion, you might say are kind of evolved responses. So, but compassion mainly evolved to help others. So parents who are more compassionate to their children or group members who are more compassionate to each other, their genes were likely to survive and be passed down. What's actually more natural, and you might say it first with ourself, is when we make a mistake or we fail or something difficult happens, we go into threat defense mode. This is also very natural. We go into fight, flight or freeze. Our amygdala gets triggered. You know, this is a very quick and easily triggered safety response. Unfortunately, when the problem is ourselves, when the threats to ourselves, we fight ourselves with self-criticism, thinking we'll beat ourselves into shape, so we'll be safe. Or we flee into shame, thinking we'll flee from the perceived judgments of others, so we'll be safe. Or we freeze and we ruminate, we get stuck. Also a safety behavior. Now, when your friend makes a mistake, you aren't personally threatened. So it's actually easier to tap into the evolved care response. Whereas when you're personally threatened, basically when we're freaked out, it's a little hard to access self-compassion. And so it's not as... You know, it is a practice for that reason. It's not difficult because we already know how to do it toward others. It's not like you don't have to learn how to meditate or esoteric. It's very simple. It's not entirely natural instinctually. So we need to kind of train our brains, do a little hack, so to speak. So we start tapping into the care system that's normally aimed at others and do a U-turn and aim it toward ourselves. For that caring system, I would think a lot of that is detaching. And as you mentioned from criticism and expectations of others, there's also the criticisms and expectations that you're gonna put on yourself as well. Was that you find in your research any connection between the two? Oh, you mean when other people criticize you and if you criticize yourself, do you mean like developmentally? Yeah, so certainly... So in other words, my son's very self-critical and I've never criticized him and I think it's just because he has a lot of anxiety. So some of it is just natural. It's the way he deals with threat. Probably won't surprise you to know, especially with your parents, that people who grow up with parents who are very critical also learn that as a... So my son finally has gotten self-compassion because I modeled it for him. But if I were, you know, but people whose parents model criticism, then they think, oh, that's the way to be. Also parents who are abusive or insecurely attached or maybe negligent or inconsistently there, that also gets modeled. Like some people who grow up who feel their needs aren't worthy of being met have a harder time believing that they actually should focus on meeting their own needs. So, you know, obviously what's modeled for us by our parents and our early family history effects are... Here's the thing. It affects our ability to be self-compassion in terms of how easy it is. But the really cool thing is what we know is that we can learn to be self-compassionate. We can actually give ourselves compassion for our traumatic early childhood and we can learn to reparent ourselves. Now, typically it takes therapists. And in some ways I think, I really think what good therapy is is the ability to help clients be self-compassionate. You know, it's kind of trans theoretical. No matter what your approach, good therapy and outcome of good therapy is increased self-compassion. You know, sometimes it's explicit. Sometimes it's more implicit. But that's what a therapist does, kind of models compassion. Models that your needs are worthy of being met that you're an important person. So, you know, it does help to have a therapist along the journey if you had an early trauma history, for instance. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Now, when it comes to bringing this into our lives and actually practically using self-compassion, I know many in our audience will often share similar stories of upbringings like me and Johnny and being too hard on themselves and being heavily influenced by their inner critic. Sometimes stuck in that inner critic mode where they won't take action that they want in their life. So, could you walk our audience through how we could bring more self-compassion to life in our own life? Yeah, so it's actually not as difficult as you might think. One really easy way to give yourself compassion that kind of, if you're really stuck and your brain's just in the loop and this thinking loop, you can bypass the brain and go to the body. So putting your hands on your heart or really cradling your face or giving yourself a little hug or holding your own hand. What happens is because compassion is rooted in the care system which is linked to parasympathetic nervous system activity without going into that. You guys have probably talked about that, but like heart rate variability, oxytocin, all those opiates. So we're designed by evolution to respond that warm caring touch is a signal of safety and care. So if you give yourself some supportive touch, your body can respond physiologically. You know, cortisol gets reduced, heart rate variability goes up, and you can actually, you can bypass the brain at least somewhat and that can help set the stage to have your thoughts be more supportive. So that's one easy way. Another very easy way is to say, what would I say to my best friend if they were experiencing this exact same thing? Again, so it's like, well, okay, I actually, I probably wouldn't say what I'm saying now. You know, what would I say that I think would actually be most helpful to my friend? And that doesn't mean sugarcoating thing, like really helpful, warm, kind, supportive, constructive feedback would be most helpful and the feeling that I'm here for you. Well, then you can just do the same thing for yourself, right? It will feel a little weird. You know, I'm not going to lie, if you aren't used to it, it's going to feel awkward at first, but you get used to it over time, right? So that's one thing you can do. And then another thing you can do is, is you intentionally call in the three components of self-compassion. It's almost like baking a loaf of bread, right? You need one part mindfulness, one part common humanity, one part kindness. So what might that look like? It might look like a mindfulness. Wow, this is really hard. I'm hurting. I'm feeling badly. This hurts. Common humanity. Well, I'm not alone. You know, it's not like everyone else in the world is perfect. You know, this is part of being a human being. This, you know, it's nothing wrong with me for feeling this way. This is part of being human. And then one part kindness, again, saying some words of support, encouragement, warmth, care toward yourself. When you, I find in my research that explicitly bringing in these three components all together is really powerful. I think the mindfulness component, we've talked a lot on this show, we've actually had Dan Harris on to talk about that, can be really difficult when we find ourselves falling into these very same patterns over and over again. And we don't even recognize that we're in the pattern. And if mindfulness isn't a big part of our listeners' lives, what's a simple way that we can start working on that first ingredient? There's big mindfulness, which is like really the ability to have equanimity and to really be present with the tough stuff and meditation, which is a whole skill set, deactivating the default mode, all those things. That's big mindfulness. Little mindfulness is just noticing that it hurts. That's all you really have to do to have self-compassion. Just notice that you're hurting and be willing to acknowledge it. So if you notice when you're upset, oh, wow, I'm upset, then that's all you need. That little reminder to say, okay, what do I need? Oh, that's part of what you need, compassion. So common humanity. Well, it's part of being human to be upset. There's nothing wrong with me. It's not like I'm the only one in the world who's experiencing this. What might I say to a friend who is experiencing this? So again, it's not rocket science. It's just, but it is a practice because we aren't raised to be this way and it doesn't come completely naturally. And I'm curious in teaching your son this practice, was there some cues that you brought in to really give him the space to do that? Is there something that he's looking for to bring it into his own life? Yeah, well, it's interesting because he was raised by a mindfulness and compassion teacher and he's also autistic, so it also made a challenge. But if you'd be really upset about something, I try to talk about self-compassion and of course, when you resist being upset, it just makes it worse that he would spiral into these tantrums and I would try to help him, just to acknowledge it and be kind to himself. And quite literally, he would say, don't give me that self-compassion stuff, mommy. I don't want to accept the pain. He's like, I'm going to fight this pain. I'm not going to accept this pain. And it's like, okay, well, you can try. I mean, good luck with that. I mean, what can you say as a mother except he had to figure out himself that that approach didn't work. And now, so now he's 19 and he's been in therapy and he's really doing so well dealing with this. Yeah, so he's put it this way. He's got a few different comorbid diagnoses and I'm just so proud of him because I think I must say probably partly because the way he was raised, he's really willing to look at it. He wants to work with it. And now he will put his hand on his heart and say something like, I'm here for you, Rowan. What do you need? Things like that. He can be warm to himself, finally. But he had to come to it at his own time. He can't shove this down anyone's throat. He had to kind of see that the other way was working for him before he was really ready to try something new. And now he likes mindfulness and compassion and all of it.