I'm Dustin Grinnell and this is curiously today we have a
fascinating conversation ahead with an expert in the field of
self compassion. But before we dive in, I want to
share a personal story that led me to explore the power and
potential of self compassion. About seven years ago, I found
myself in a frustrating and painful situation.
I was dealing with low back pain that just wouldn't go away.
Despite trying everything from physical therapy, the
chiropractic work, and various other treatments, It was the one
physical problem I couldn't seem to solve and it was taking a
toll in my life. Then I learned about an 8 week
clinical study at Mass General Hospital that investigated the
role of self compassion in alleviating lower back pain.
Curious and somewhat skeptical, I enrolled in the study and
attended A1 Day Workshop on Self compassion, not knowing what to
expect. The workshop was led by two
incredible individuals, doctors Chris Germer and Kristen Neff,
pioneers in the field of self compassion.
To my surprise, the path to healing began with simple acts
of being kinder and gentler to myself.
Every day I listen to Chris's recordings, which encouraged me
to say soothing and nourishing phrases to myself, like may I
know that I am safe and may I know that I'm doing the best
under these circumstances, and may I know that I'm a good man.
As the weeks went by, the pain began to dissolve and I felt a
deep transformation taking place within me.
It was incredible how acknowledging and embracing my
own humanity, flaws and vulnerabilities played a pivotal
role in my recovery. Gradually I returned my old self
motivated, optimistic and physically active.
Now, years later, I have the privilege of talking with Doctor
Chris Germer, who's a world leading authority on self
compassion. Chris is also a licensed
psychotherapist who practices mindfulness and compassion based
therapy in Arlington, MA. He's also a part time lecturer
on Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a founding faculty
member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and
of the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion.
His books include The Mindful Path to Self, Compassion, Wisdom
and Compassion in Psychotherapy and Mindfulness in
Psychotherapy, Doctor Germer lectures and leads workshops
internationally, and you can find more of his work on this
website at www.chrisgermer.com. In this conversation, Chris and
I delve into the science behind self compassion, address some
common misconceptions, understand its applications
beyond physical pain, and explore how it can positively
impact our mental and emotional wellbeing.
So without further ado, let's welcome our esteemed guest and
explore the world of self compassion.
Chris Germer, welcome to curiously.
Thanks. It's great to be here.
So yeah, I really appreciate you coming on to talk about the
field of self compassion. You're an expert in that field.
And I figured before we start unpacking this subject a bit
more, if we could just kind of start off with some key terms
and defining some words that will be helpful in our journey
and exploring self compassion. So how do you?
Define self compassion first. Sure.
So we could say there's an informal definition and there's
a formal definition. The informal definition, which I
might share with somebody over a cup of coffee, is when we
suffer, treating ourselves with the same kindness and
understanding as we would treat a good friend.
And this isn't something we ordinarily do.
Usually people are much more compassionate toward others than
toward themselves. And when we suffer or fail or
feel inadequate, we usually beat up on ourselves.
We isolate ourselves in shame, and we also kind of ruminate.
So treating ourselves with the same kindness and understanding
as we treat a good friend, that's the.
Informal definition. And it's also helpful, by the
way, if you want to be more self compassionate, to just ask
yourself when things go wrong, how would I treat a good friend
right now? And inevitably it's a little
different than what we might be doing in that moment.
And then seeing if we could actually talk to ourselves in
the same tone. If we could take ourselves for a
walk, if we could prepare some healthy food, if we could listen
to some good music rather than beating up on ourselves.
So it's not only a definition, but it's even a guide or a
prescription. So that's the informal
definition. The formal definition was
created by Kristin Neff, my dear friend and colleague, back in
2003 and she is a research psychologist and.
She defines self compassion for the research as having three
components. One is mindfulness, or knowing
what we're feeling while we're feeling it, particularly knowing
that we're suffering when we're suffering.
Part 2 is common humanity, which is a kind of awareness that when
things go wrong in our lives, that this is part of the human
condition, then we're not being singled out necessarily.
That's really important. To stay connected with others in
order to be self compassionate. And then the third part is self
kindness. And that's really the part that
most people think about when they think about self
compassion. They think about being kind to
ourselves. But actually self compassion is
all three. We need to be aware of what's
going on, we need to feel connected and we need to be kind
to ourselves. And then when all those three
things come together, makes a big difference in our lives.
Why don't you think we act this way toward ourselves anyway?
Like, why is it that we seem to have a bias toward self judgment
or harshness toward ourselves versus the way we seem to
automatically act with a friend, which is the opposite?
Is there an understanding of why that is?
Yeah, so there isn't a scientific understanding every
that question often comes up and.
The answer is probably more opinion or conjecture.
So I can give you my opinion and it's really twofold.
One is culturally we are really discouraged to be kind to
ourselves when we suffer and you know, we hear things like, you
know, don't be so full of yourself, think about others and
so forth. So we're really strongly
encouraged. Culturally, and this is in every
single culture that I've visited around the world, and I've been
teaching self compassion on every continent.
You know, most cultures really have a bias toward compassion
toward others and attempt to block or exclude ourselves from
the circle of compassion. And that certainly occurs at our
own peril, as we can talk about later.
But the other thing, Dustin, is that the answer might be purely
physiological. So when we feel threatened, the
body goes in fight, flight or freeze, and that's when we're
threatened from the outside, in particular physically.
But when we're threatened from the inside, the same kind of
Physiology occurs when we feel bad about ourselves or we
criticize ourselves. The same Physiology occurs.
If we have shame, the same Physiology occurs.
We feel threatened and then instead of fight, we turn it on
ourselves into self criticism. Instead of flight, we flee from
ourselves. We abandon ourselves.
We lose a sense of common humanity and instead of freeze,
physically freezing like a deer in the headlights.
We get stuck in our heads and we just ruminate, you know, we kind
of get frozen and thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.
So we could say that the opposite of self compassion,
which is self criticism, isolation and rumination, is
pretty closely allied with the physiological threat state
turned against ourselves. And that suggests the reason for
the benefits then, right? Yeah, that's a great.
Observation. We sort of this harshness toward
ourselves is is a threat. It's a psychological activation
of the fight or flight. And now is the opposite at play
when we're being kinder or gentler with ourselves.
Yeah, So there appears to be a Physiology of compassion, A
Physiology of care and connection and self compassion
is all about care and connection.
Connection with our selves and. Caring for ourselves.
And so the Physiology of care and connection seems to be kind
of anchored in the hormones of oxytocin, which is the love
hormone and the endorphins, which is kind of a feel good
hormone, whereas the Physiology of threat seems to be more
linked to adrenaline and cortisol.
So if we can actually shift. Our Physiology in that way, from
cortisol and adrenaline to oxytocin and the endorphins, we
have a much better chance of actually treating ourselves
psychologically and emotionally in a kinder way.
And there are some people actually doing work like this.
I have a colleague named Ina Kazan who does biofeedback for
what's called heart rate variability, which is.
A measure of safety and connection.
And she's doing a study now where she's teaching people how
to shift their Physiology using biofeedback and seeing whether
that actually increases A person's ability to learn self
compassion. So shifting the foundation, the
physiological foundation. Can you share maybe an example
of what someone who's suffering or struggling may actually say
or do? To themselves when they're in a
period of of struggle in order to activate these these
benefits, to practice self compassion.
Sure, yeah. So there are many different, you
know, pathways to self compassion.
One of the simplest ones, which actually the research shows
decreases cortisol, is to put a hand over one's heart, like
physically to feel the touch and the warmth of your hand.
In the chest region, and even if you wish, making gentle, you
know, gently massaging one's chest or making little circles
or back and forth movements. So the physical experience of
touching or gently massaging our chest decreases the stress
hormone cortisol, and it's easy to imagine this.
You don't have to imagine, you can just do it.
But also this is the kind of thing we might do.
With a young child who is, you know, suffering, you know, a
parent by just sort of gently rub the child's chest and has
enormous impact. So we can actually do this for
ourselves. So that's a pathway to
experiencing self compassion, particularly a physiological
change through touch. But there are other things you
can do. For example, right now as you're
listening, if you were thinking of a problem in your life, you
know, maybe. Physical problem or relationship
problem. And then you know, inevitably
you would be ruminating about it, having cranky thoughts.
But if you imagine that a person who really loves you and knows
you were to walk into your room right now and where to say
something to you that you really need to hear, and that would
make your heart rest, it might make you say thanks, I needed
that. What would those words be?
In other words, what words would land really well for you when
you're struggling? So you can actually ask yourself
that you know if something bad happens, you can ask yourself,
what do I really need to hear right now?
So you might just think the words like I love you or I
believe in you or I trust you or you've got it you you've got
this or or or. You're trying your best and.
You're you're trying your best. You know and and it's enough.
You are enough. Words like this are such a
comfort when we feel like we've failed or we feel overwhelmed.
So those are two pathways, touch and voice.
But there are probably umpteen other pathways.
And there are also daily practices.
The thing I wanted to say before too is that this is really like
a gives credence to the my body connection.
It it really is a practice that. Activates physiological
mechanisms through the power of one's thoughts and perspective.
Yes. And that's really amazing.
To think hand over the heart or saying you're good enough in
your imagination changes the levels of actual chemicals in
your body and causing a behavioral change.
That's wonderful. Yeah, yeah.
Well, the mind and the body are very linked right now.
If you were to think about something horrible, you know,
like think about war in Ukraine and think about it in detail,
your system is going to amp right up, you know, and during
the pandemic, I mean everybody was their systems were amped up.
So what we think about has a huge impact on the body.
And this is sort of providing it an intervention.
Of sorts, it's taking control, taking reins.
And so if you're in the moment, if you're struggling, you can
provide yourself comforting touch or say soothing or
comforting words. But there are also practices
that you've written about in your books, and I'm sure you've
done in workshops that you give. What are some of those daily
practices that people can do and to help practice self
compassion? Yeah.
So just to give you a sense of the whole spectrum.
So there are formal practices which you're talking about,
which is like sitting down for 20 minutes of self compassion
meditation. And then there are informal
practices, which is when we experience stress in daily life,
we do something right then and there, sort of on the spot in a
minute. Type things and these are mind
training practices. And then there is also
behavioral practices like how would you treat a friend?
Maybe you'd go and listen to music together.
Well, can you put on some music? So that's behavioral so.
But what you're asking about right now, Dustin, is mind
training practices that are formal mind training practices.
So like meditation. So one meditation which is
really quite simple, which is? Similar to breath meditation,
which probably many of your listeners are familiar with, is
called affectionate breathing. So in affectionate breathing,
we're meditation. We're not just paying attention
or noticing the breath going in and out of the body, We're
actually feeling the gentle rhythm of the breath.
In particular, the way the breath is internally caressing
us, internally comforting and soothing us by its gentle
rhythm. And this is a very interesting
shift. For example, many people don't
like meditation because they say I can't concentrate because they
think there's just supposed to be focusing on the breath.
But if you think about the practice differently, it's still
about the breath. But.
Imagine you're not doing the meditating.
Imagine your body is continually and rhythmically rocking you
from the inside, and all you need to do for meditation is to
feel the rhythm and allow yourself to be internally rocked
and caressed by your breathing. And when your mind wanders, it
doesn't mean you've failed in concentration, It means you've
just missed the chance to be rocked and caressed by your own
breathing. And this really changes the
whole context of meditation from work where you kind of want to
build concentration and focus, to a self compassion practice
where you are actually being nourished from the inside.
So that's one formal meditation practice.
There are quite a number of other ones, but they all have a
similar intention, which is to shift our attitude, shift the
internal tone, you know, from coldness to warmth, and to give
us a sense of being connected with ourselves in an
affectionate and friendly way. Rather than in opposition to
ourselves. Yeah, I I think this is a good
spot to maybe address some common objections people may
have. Because I think what you're
saying is obviously we'll talk a little bit about the research
that has been done in this field, the explosion of research
in that a lot of what you're saying is evidence based.
And yet still whatever those forces are, whether they're
cultural or personal, I can hear.
People in my life saying nourishment, like soothing
words, affectionate breathing, like come on like what is this
stuff? It's it's too soft.
You know, it's And then that's sort of harsh way of putting it.
But others may just think I'm not really allowed to be kind to
myself. You know, others may think like.
Being harsh and self critical is the path to achievement, you
know? Sure.
So how do you deal with that? What I imagine are very common
objections that these people have?
Yeah. Yeah, so there are four or five
he objections. Misunderstandings really because
the research really shows that these misgivings are
misunderstandings are misconceptions, you know?
But first of all, Dustin, when people hear the term self
compassion, they're like. To cringe because self makes
them think, oh boy, that's selfishness.
Why would I want to practice self compassion?
Because then I'll be more selfish.
That's one worry. The research shows the opposite.
And then the other is the word compassion, you know?
I mean, compassion is it's associated with weakness, you
know? Martin Luther King said many
times that love and compassion are actually a strength of
force, you know, particularly when put into action as he did.
But compassion is often associated with tenderness.
And when people hear about compassion and growing and
compassion, they just think, oh boy, I've got enough of that
already. It's just going to make me more
vulnerable or more sensitive, you know.
So those are two just the term self compassion freaks people
out. So first of all, I, I you think
it's better often to call it inner compassion, You know,
because compassion is internal and external and we just don't
want to exclude ourselves. So there's that.
But the main misgivings, what number one is selfishness.
But the research shows that those who grow in self
compassion are actually become more compassionate toward others
and. In relationships highly self
compassionate people tend to be more accommodating, less
aggressive and so forth. So self compassion practice will
make you less selfish not more. Another concern is weakness.
Like I said before, some people think compassion is weak.
But what we've learned about self compassion, In fact, the
5000 articles on self compassion show much of the same thing,
which is that self compassion is an internal resource or strength
or skill that supports emotional resilience.
So for example in the research people who are highly self
compassionate and they experience divorce or severe
illness or war trauma, they're way more likely to bounce back
and to cope and to not get post traumatic stress disorder.
So it's actually a strength rather than a weakness.
Another concern, big concern people have is that, and you
alluded to it as well Dustin, is that it will decrease our
motivation. You know, we think that being
critical of ourselves actually motivates us.
And the research interestingly shows that people who are high
in self compassion are more motivated to reach their goals,
not less. And the reason is pretty obvious
because when you are self compassionate, you motivate
yourself with encouragement and kindness rather than with
criticism. So anybody who's had an athletic
coach, for example, if your coach said, you know, wow, you
know, you're not doing very well today, you know what's the
matter with you? I mean, you're you're weak.
It's not going to motivate us to do much.
You know, We'll just want to say, you know, I'm out of here.
So I have a a trainer, a young gym trainer who I was doing
pushups and I collapsed and his response was excellent.
Chris working to the point of failure and I completely
reframed it. I was thinking, damn, I'm too
weak. I I couldn't produce enough
pushups and he was saying no, no, no, this is great, you know
you're really you're you're working up to the edge of your
capacity. I really appreciate that.
That's called motivating and what's the difference?
Difference is attitude. So when our internal attitude is
encouraging and is warm, we're actually more motivated to
achieve our goals and the research shows that.
And then there are some other concerns.
One is that it's going to make us self indulgent that we're
going to, you know, just lie around and eat bonbons and watch
TV. And quite the contrary, people
who are high in self compassion, they're they have healthier
lifestyles, they exercise more, they eat less, they drink less,
things like that. And perhaps the last of the main
misgivings is self pity. People think oh if I become self
compassionate and then something goes wrong, I'm just going to be
kind of curl up into a little ball and be you know, just feels
feel bad for myself. You know, I won't be able to
step out. I'm going to just be you know,
full of self pity. And the research shows that
actually people who are self compassionate ruminate less.
They have less self pity, not more.
They're more likely to have perspective on their problems
because they have this common humanity aspect.
So in a nutshell, Dustin, all the misgivings that people have,
the research shows not just that it's not.
So the research shows the opposite.
Yeah. And talk about the research a
little bit. You know, what have the last
couple decades or or more shown? And I understand there's been
somewhat of a explosion and research in this area.
And who's doing that work? Where is it being done?
How did it get going? And and maybe most importantly,
why isn't it more mainstream like given given the amount of
work going on? Yeah, those are all great
questions. So back in 2003, there was one
research article in the academic literature and that was Kristin
Neff's conceptual article. And after soon after came her
her scale to measure self compassion.
So she defined it and measured it 20 years ago.
And that's when the field basically began.
That doesn't mean that self compassion wasn't understood
prior to that. You know it Many people,
particularly in the Buddhist world, understood that
compassion goes in all directions and you don't want to
exclude yourself. In fact, by including yourself,
you will increase your compassion for others.
So it wasn't a new idea, but in the research, it started with
Kristen's work in 2003. And yeah, as I mentioned there,
well over 5000 articles now and almost every day new articles
come out in the research literature.
But I have to say that recently I it hasn't been super
interesting because, you know, just about every article shows
that self compassion is good for you.
In fact, there's a professor at Duke University, Mark Leary, who
who said even 10 years ago that the research is getting a bit
boring for this reason. You know, because self
compassion is associated with just about every measure of
mental well-being and inversely related to distress.
So self compassion is associated with, you know, really diverse
things like wisdom, optimism. I mentioned, you know,
psychological resilience, so many different measures,
anything you can think of. Grit is a big one nowadays, and
it decreases in stress and anxiety and depression, and it
decreases in suicidality. The research basically is
uniformly positive for self compassion.
So what's happening now? In the research, initially, it
was mostly just seeing okay. What can we say about people who
score high on Kristen's self compassion scale?
But now we're discovering and learning?
Actually, what happens when we teach self compassion to people?
Can we increase the amount of self compassion that they have?
So it was actually for this reason that Kristen and I
created the eight week Mindful Self Compassion Training Program
in 2010 to move out of simply correlational research into what
happens when we teach. And indeed most of these
measures of positive mental health increase when people
learn self compassion. So the research is doing a
number of things. It's just it's going into new
areas. So for example, with specialized
populations such as diabetes or right now there's some research
going on in quality of life for people with cancer, many
different projects. I could could, I could spend all
day answering that question. But what I think is most helpful
going forward, and I I hope that this work is actually happening,
is can we bring self compassion to underrepresented populations
or populations which don't usually have access to training
like this? And particularly populations
that are marginalized or oppressed who have been taught
culturally and societally to feel shame.
Self compassion is a really powerful antidote to shame.
So I would love to see self compassion going to marginalized
communities. And I also like to see self
compassion going into the workplace where there's a lot of
suffering. You know, you can't talk about
it in the workplace, but there is, and there have been efforts
to do that. And generally speaking, women
tend to prefer self compassion more than men.
Men are really caught up a lot in these misconceptions that we
were talking about a moment ago. And so for self compassion to go
really mainstream, like you were saying, why hasn't it gone
mainstream yet? 5000 articles has been 20 years,
Why isn't it mainstream? I think the main reason is the
misconceptions actually, and in particular I think
misconceptions that men have. A lot of the research is now
being actually conducted by women.
So in order to have a broader reach, I think we need to reach
men as well. Men need to see that self
compassion will make them, as the research shows, better
leaders, that self compassion will make their relationships,
their intimate relationships, easier and better.
Men need to see the benefit of self compassion, and so that
might take a little longer, but you know it's starting to
happen. Is there a just to continue with
that for a second is is there a an example of maybe a man from
your workshops or in the book or in your practice who was really
skeptical or was really attached to these misconceptions and yet?
Through their work were able to increase wellbeing, deal with
pain, become more resilient. Was there like a guy who was
really hard and came in and and and and and figured out how to
be a little kinder, a little gentler?
And it actually worked because I I do think maybe men in
particular kind of have to be a little more practical.
Like, you have to really get us to do it and feel it, and then
we'll we'll buy it. Well, yeah.
I mean, so once somebody comes through the door, they're
already open minded, right? So the reason why men I, I
think, haven't quite adopted as much as women is because they
don't know about it. They don't know what it is, you
know? But what gets men through the
door? Often desperation.
There's a thing called the gift of desperation or creative
hopelessness. And both you and I, Dustin, I
think, and we are men. We have personal stories.
You know, For me, I suffered for 20 years from public speaking
anxiety and in desperation I learned self compassion
meditation. And it within four months this
public speaking anxiety disappeared And that's actually
what turned my career. It was in 2006.
From being more focused on mindfulness and psychotherapy, I
became interested in self compassion, which I've been
doing ever since because it's so profoundly transformative.
But this arose out of duress. I don't know, Dustin, if you'd
be willing to share a little of your own experience.
Yeah, of course. And thanks for sharing your
story too. I mean, the reason why we had
met is because I think it was seven years ago, I was
experiencing some low back pain, not some.
It it was, it had turned chronic.
It had been lasting for six to eight months or so.
And talk about self judgment, right?
I was really beating myself up. You know, this was a problem of
physical pain syndrome that I could not solve and I threw
everything at it from physical therapy to psychotherapy to
pills. Topical solutions, Every type of
like ergonomic solution you can imagine, right?
And I read books and what is going on and I started to just
get into the spiral of beating myself up for not being able to
solve this chronic low back pain issue.
And then I saw a study at MGH that you and Kristen were.
Part of was a study on how self compassion I believe can
influence chronic back pain and I signed up and your
intervention was a I think a sort of a day long workshop
where we learned what self compassion was.
We practiced some of your practices and then we made-up
our own sayings to ourself things we could say to ourselves
to increase self compassion. And over the period of think 8
weeks, I. Every day listen to recordings
of you saying self compassionate remarks.
You had a three, five and 15 minute recording and like I
said, I'd thrown everything at this problem and I'm quite
certain that you're on Kristen's workshop and practices had a
really strong effect on lowering my low back pain.
And then within a year it was gone and it has never come back
and I. Even still, to this day can find
myself skeptical about self compassion for all those five
main misconceptions you laid out so nicely.
And it's sort of remembering to remember that it works and
picking it back up. And I even think some of the
things you shared earlier, like putting a hand over your heart
or imagining a friend coming in the room and saying something to
you that is supportive or nourishing.
I'm going to bring that back in to my life.
And I was wondering, maybe since we're on the personal, you know,
you talked about what you did to get better at public speaking.
What actually did you do? What were the actual concrete
practices? Yeah.
So for 20 years prior to that, I had been practicing my fullness
meditation, mostly breath meditation in the traditional
way of just bringing your attention back and, you know,
developing concentration and also opening and noticing what
else is in your mind. So I've been doing that for a
long time, but I had also, I have a PhD in clinical
psychology with a specialization in anxiety disorder.
So I was pretty aware of everything that the field knows
about managing a problem like my own.
But nothing worked. So then four months before, I
learned self compassion meditation.
In particular, I learned loving kindness meditation for myself.
So this was interesting. I've never done that before
because I it uses words which have meaning, like saying
phrases to yourself, like may I feel safe, may I be healthy, may
I live with ease, things like that.
So saying nice things to yourself basically.
And I never liked that idea too much.
I preferred just working with awareness and consciousness and
meditation. But I was on a meditation
retreat four months before a big conference at Harvard Medical
School that I had Co organized and I knew I'd have to speak.
And so at this retreat, meditation teacher said why
don't you just sit on your cushion and love yourself.
In other words, just say these kind words to yourself.
And what was different about it, Dustin, is that I did that and I
wasn't saying these things in order to have less anxiety.
I started saying these things because I was kind of a broken
individual who really had no clue how to manage public
speaking anxiety. And this horrifying event was
coming up in four months where I would have to stand up in front
of 600 people and something had to come out of my mouth and I
didn't want to be shaking like a leaf.
So this was really the gift of desperation.
And here's the key part, Dustin. I just started to love myself
because not in order to reduce anxiety, but simply because I
was a broken person and couldn't do anything about it.
And when I did that, just open to kindness in this way, to kind
words, to saying really kind things to myself over and over
and over again, like every morning for four months before
this conference. May I be safe.
May I be peaceful. May I be healthy.
May I live with these, just saying this over and over again.
And then whenever I thought about the conference, rather
than kind of seizing up, I would just say, oh, may I be safe, may
I be peaceful, may I be healthy, May I live with these.
It just kind of loved myself like I was instructed.
And then when the conference actually happened and I was
introduced and I got up to speak, I panicked like usual.
But there was a new voice in the back of my mind which said, oh,
may it be safe, may it be peaceful, may it be healthy, may
you live with these. And it was also in that tone.
You know, it wasn't like, may it be safe.
May it be, you know, like it wasn't combative.
It was just sympathetic. It was compassionate.
And it was, it had a tinge of what else are you going to do
just anyhow? So this new voice was there and
I got up and then the amazing thing happened is that my fear
disappeared and I felt this upsurge of excitement and love
and I looked out over the audience.
And usually the audience is the enemy when you have public
speaking anxiety because they can judge you, you know.
But I I just had the same thoughts.
Like, you know, in my head was, oh, may you be safe, may you be
peaceful. I was just looking out the
audience and just wishing that everybody would be safe,
peaceful, happy. There was just, it wasn't
conscious. It wasn't with words, but it was
just this goodwill that I'd been practicing for four months just
started to overflow and be directed outward because it was
inside, you know, it was inside. It was directed toward me.
And it was just, you know, basically the the state of mind
of loving kindness and compassion.
When we're in that state of mind, it just flows in many
different directions. Real compassion is
omnidirectional. And so I had that experience
right then and there, and from that day onward, I've had no
more public speaking anxiety. If I have a little twinge, I'll
just once again repeat the phrases, not to make anxiety go
away, but just to love myself, because this is my Achilles
heel. This is my weakness.
And so when it's done in that spirit, it's profoundly
transformative. We actually have a the saying in
the Mindful Self Compassion Training program, what we call
the central paradox which really makes a difference whether or
not people benefit from self compassion.
And that is when we suffer, we practice not to feel better, but
simply because we feel bad. So it's not a slick new strategy
for combating what we might be feeling difficult emotions.
It's a way of loving ourselves in the midst of difficult
emotions. It's a way of loving ourselves
because we have difficult emotions.
It's like a Mama taking care of her child just because the child
is suffering, not taking care in order to drive it away, you
know, just spontaneous expression of kindness.
And when we do that, it changes our Physiology, it changes our
thinking, and it changes our behavior.
So in many respects, the practice of self compassion is,
there are certain lots and lots of techniques.
But as important as the techniques is the reason we do
it. The motivation, the attitude.
And that is love. For Love's sake.
Because we're broken. Because we're suffering.
Not to make ourselves into a better person, not to manipulate
how we feel. Just to love ourselves for its
own sake. And that makes all the
difference. Yeah, I think the central
paradox does seem to be maybe one of the biggest barriers
here, because the benefit of you being more confident as a public
speaker was an indirect byproduct of learning to love
yourself when you're in a very low place.
But I think we're trained to mostly wanna go at problems
directly. Yeah, like, how do I solve my
anxiety? Or how do I get out of this
depression? But this is really an indirect
thing. It's the central paradox.
Yeah, and we all come by it over time.
So people who are listening right now to your podcast and
think, oh, self compassion might work for me.
And then you read a workbook or, you know, listen to some tapes
or something and start to practice, you know, it's quite
likely you'll feel a lot better pretty soon.
But. What happens over time is that
it doesn't work and there are three, what we call stages of
progress. The 1st is striving, which is I
want to feel better and I want to be a better person or I want
to, you know, improve as a person.
The second stage is disillusionment, which is when
we discover actually I'm the same person and I still feel bad
on occasion. But we have this little bird in
our head that says, yeah, but you felt really, really good
when you first learned this. So the second stage is
disillusionment. And disillusionment is actually
really a good thing because it begins to change our motivation.
So when we discover this isn't working, then the magic can
occur because then we can love ourselves because it's not
working. We can love ourselves because
we're suffering. We can love ourselves because we
are imperfect beings. As Jack Cornfield says, the
purpose is not to perfect who we are, but to perfect our love to
get better at being kind to ourselves no matter what's going
on with us. And that brings us to the third
stage, which is called radical acceptance, which is precisely
what I described. You know what?
What we like to say is that radical acceptance is being a
compassionate mess. In other words, we're still
human. We're still.
Flawed. We're still uncertain.
We still suffer all these things.
We still experience the human, the range of human emotion, but
we do it really compassionately. This is the third stage.
This is radical acceptance. So when we have the gift of
desperation, that's actually disillusionment.
It's like nothing worked. You know I'm a expert in anxiety
disorders and nothing worked. I was.
I was actually disillusioned. I wasn't disillusioned with self
compassion, but I was really open to just loving myself for
its own sake. And then it worked.
It really worked. And so over time we go through
these stages and sometimes we cycle through these stages again
and again and again. But if you notice that you're
disillusioned and then you just love yourself for that reason,
bang, you're in radical acceptance.
When you're in radical acceptance and you say, oh cool
man, I got this down, you know, I am the most self compassionate
person in the world. Then immediately we're back in
striving, thinking, well I just got to do more of this and then
I'm going to be perfect. And then you're like no longer.
No. Anyhow, the point is that we
bounce in and out of these stages.
But to know overall, to love ourselves just because we're
human, in other words, to give ourselves permission to be a
compassionate mess, is what. Makes all the difference.
You know, it's I'm thinking if if I were to turn it on the TV
and see an ad for a drug or something, and it said they're
pretty much no downsides, there's no side effects in all
of these upsides that we're talking about.
And to wellbeing and psychiatric problems, pain problems, the
benefits that you've laid out, If there was a drug for this, I
mean it would be a billion dollar pharmaceutical.
I mean doctors wouldn't be able to you know that.
You'd be booked out for years. I mean, and you, you literally
cured public speaking, your public speaking anxiety through
self compassion. So.
Once I was once. I was desperate.
The creative hopelessness, That's a very interesting
phrase. Or the gift of desperation,
That's interesting. You know, I remember in your
workshop when you were saying aloud some of the phrases that
we could practice or that you said to yourself, you did say
things like do you send nourishing phrases?
May I be kind to myself? May I accept myself and may I
know that I'm trying my best things like this.
This was my first experience with it.
And I thought, yeah, you know, that's nice that.
I guess that's nice. Yeah, it is.
It is. It's nice.
You know, I was skeptical and there was a guy next to me who
thought it was just complete, like, hogwash.
She you should have heard what he said when we got on the
elevator. He's like, this is a joke, you
know? And and I got it.
I got his perspective. But I was more open.
I was a little bit more like I said to him, I said, well,
haven't we tried everything else.
Yeah, exactly. So talk about being at the
lowest point, right. You know, and it's kind of
unfortunate that people entered your field through that level of
desperation. But what I wanted to say is
another phrase that you said aloud was may I know that I'm a
good man, and I remember that one because it's stuck with me.
But I also remember that one because I felt like you had a
lot of emotion behind that one. Does that does that phrase mean
a lot to you? What does it mean to be a good?
Man, you know that you were very sensitive.
You picked up on that. Yeah.
So, you know, when I think about my deepest aspirations, I would
like to be a good man. You know, I don't need to be,
you know, rich or famous. I'd like to be good.
And I'm a man. And, you know, men, particularly
now, are a bit beleaguered and battled.
You know boys are in trouble. So the for me, being a good man
is really important. And you know, how many times
does somebody say to us, you know, you are a good man and
they might think it, but they don't necessarily put language
for it. But you know, I suspect there
would be a lot less political turmoil in this world if a lot
of people felt. Like they were good.
And you know what? Most people are actually better
than they think, You know, when things go wrong, they think
they're bad, you know? So it is important to me to be a
good man. Yeah.
This just occurred to me. There was a movie, a really
great movie called Shame with Michael Fassbender.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
I haven't seen it. It's really good.
It it's it's sort of a profile of a of a sex addict, I think.
And you know, it's a man who's very isolated and he's a loner
and he's really like white knuckling life.
You know, he's isolated from his family and he watches
pornography all the time and and lives the very, you know,
isolated existence. And what's interesting is that I
remember hearing an interview with the screenwriter and she
was a playwright and she said in order to write the movie, she
met with a group of sex addicts. And she said the reason why she
titled the movie Shame is because that's what she felt
when she met with all these men. She felt the weight of shame.
Yeah. And it's because of the trauma
that they had earlier in life and the isolation they were
experiencing in the weight of shame.
And it seems like self compassion is an antidote to
shame. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think if self compassion is nothing else, it's an
antidote to shame. And in the field of clinical
psychology, we've really never had as.
Targeted an intervention for shame as self compassion.
And so toward that end, some colleagues and I have created an
8 week training called self compassion for shame.
So even though self compassion alleviates shame, the research
shows as people increase in self compassion, they automatically
decrease in shame. But if we intentionally target
shame with self compassion, and we practice self compassion for
shame. In my view, self compassion goes
deeper. It goes to the very origins of
of our personalities. You know, where shame first took
hold in our beings, you know? And so when we practice self
compassion, that kind of thing starts getting unpacked.
And it's easy to imagine because shame is an attack on the self.
It's a self attack, you know. Guilt is.
I did something wrong. Shame is.
I am wrong. It's a sense of self that's
under attack. And so when we practice the
opposite, in other words, when we say may I accept myself just
as I am May I love myself just as I am may I.
You know, when we're kind to ourselves in some way, we're
actually giving ourselves the opposite message.
And that's just verbally. But behaviorally too, if we're
suffering and rather than being engulfed in shame, we start to
treat ourselves. As we would like to be treated
or as we would treat a good friend.
Usually we're not shaming toward our friends when things go
wrong. How would it be like if we treat
ourselves kindly when things go wrong?
Like, oh, this is really tough, have a cup of tea, let's take a
little walk. You know, so everything about
self compassion is actually reverses the shame process.
But there's another point to this, Dustin, which is really
key. You were you were saying
earlier, you know, if this were a drug?
You could make a ton of money selling it in a drugstore, so
it's not as easy as taking a drug.
And the reason it's not as easy as taking a drug is because of
what we call Backdraft. And that is, if I say to myself
something like may I accept myself as I am.
Immediately we start to actually think about parts of ourselves
that are unacceptable or ways that we have been treated.
Unacceptably in the past. And I suspect that that guy in
the elevator who you were with was already having backdraft
when he thought, oh, this is a crock of shit when, if you know,
may I accept myself as I am? He was probably starting to feel
bad about himself just thinking about that, and in particular
the backdraft was very likely shame.
In other words, what is shameful about me?
What is unacceptable about me? So this comes up absolutely
reliably when we practice self compassion.
When we practice self compassion, we actually contact
shame. And when we experience shame, we
can either go after ourselves with a vengeance or we can go
after others. In other words, this program is
a bunch of bunk, you know, very likely coming from shame, very
likely coming from backdrop, very likely coming from actually
considering. The possibility of accepting
ourselves just as we are. But here's the good news that
when we start to practice self compassion and we have
backdraft, we start to remember times when we were not treated
well or parts of ourselves that we find unacceptable.
We can actually be with ourselves and those parts of
ourselves, and even with those memories that are arising, we
can be with old wounds. Now, in the present, in a loving
and kind way, as we would have wished we were treated in the
past, we can be compassionate with ourselves because we are
adults and we know ourselves in a far more effective way than
our caregivers or people in our culture were with us, You know,
we were not treated compassionately and mindfully.
Back then, therefore, we were wounded.
But when these old memories come up, because we begin being kind
to ourselves, we can be kind to ourselves in the midst of those
old wounds and transform those wounds.
So this is actually how self compassion heals.
It is not as easy as taking a pill.
It's a process and there is some pain involved.
There are side effects, but these side effects when we work
with them are actually the mechanism or the vehicle through
which self compassion heals. So one of our participants, self
compassion Practitioners, said it feels like kaboom, but it's
really kaboom and the the really fascinating thing.
Dustin is you know we say self compassion is not therapy per
se, but it's very therapeutic because if we practice self
compassion consistently and we experience old wounds over and
over again and we are the muscle of self compassion is really
strong and we can see those old wounds and we can be.
Kind toward ourselves, reflective in a kind way about
these old wounds, they actually heal.
They get transformed. So we can actually reparent
ourselves as adults, no matter what happened to us in
childhood. We can reparent ourselves
through the power of self compassion.
And that doesn't mean we have to do this all ourselves.
We can do this with a therapist. But when we cultivate the skill
of being kind to ourselves, no matter what arises, especially
shame, we can at some point actually feel like I am a good
man, I am a good person. We can dismantle shame and we
can begin to treat ourselves with the same kindness and
understanding as we wished we were treated or as we might
treat a friend, Right. Yeah, that makes sense.
We talk about another powerful barrier.
It's Backdraft. It's the stuff that comes up
when we start, which is that maybe it worked for someone but
not me or I'm really a piece of crap.
So this isn't gonna work. Or, you know, this happened to
me in the past. And it's interesting too,
because you said one of the byproducts of self compassion
practice is perspective. And it seems like perspective is
quite helpful in like, what you said too.
It's like we're adults. We can take a new mindset on
what happened. One of the things I was
wondering if you'd be up for is maybe just to do a quick series
of phrases maybe like one minute 2 minute practice to let people
hear how it works. Is yeah, there like a common
one. Maybe it's just a series of
phrases and and I even remember, like, you know, listening you,
you talked about the words like, you know, using hmm or ah,
whatever that I noticed that, yeah, this is quite helpful,
yeah. Yeah, well, we could do a a very
brief self compassion break. It might be more like 5 minutes.
Do we have 5? Yes or yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we can, you know, just get
comfortable and and bring to mind a difficulty in our lives
right now. It might be a health problem or
a relationship problem or work problem.
I also choose one that's not too big, kind of small, so that we
can stick with it, not get overwhelmed.
For example, maybe you have a health issue that you're going
to get checked out by the doctor, but you're not super
concerned about it. And then the first part of the
self compassion break is mindfulness.
And that is just to recognize, you know, this is difficult for
me just to validate that actually this is stressful.
It's a concern. So just validating it for
yourself as you would for a friend.
This is hard. Then the second part is common
humanity, and that is to recognize that others actually
in the same situation probably feel similarly, that this
particular difficulty some other people also have, even if we
don't know them. And that stress has many forms,
but stress is a part of the human experience.
So just getting a sense of the size of the cloth, as it were,
that were all humans and all human beings struggle from time
to time. And now, if it feels right to
you, you can take a hand and you can put it over your heart, or
you can put it on your cheek, where you can massage the back
of your neck but offer yourself some soothing or supportive
touch. Can even gently massage that
part of your body. And again, we're doing this not
to change how we feel, but just as a expression of sympathy.
Because life is tough. And then, as we did earlier, you
can continue holding your hand on your body somewhere.
But also imagine that a very loving and understanding person
may even be somebody you know. Were to walk into your room
right now and were to say to you, maybe even whispering into
your ear, say something to you, that would be a great comfort
right now. And this person wouldn't be
denying what's happening or, you know, just trying to cheer you
up, but saying something truthful like acknowledging,
yeah, this is hard, but you know.
You'll get through this. Or I'm here for you.
I love you. I believe in you.
You've got what it takes. What words might allow your
heart to rest just a little bit more.
Just a few words. And now I'll see if.
You, at the same time, can offer yourself some soothing touch as
we did before, feeling your hand on your body, and then also just
allowing these words and maybe even an image of a good friend
to just roll through your mind a bit right now.
Again, we're not trying to manipulate how we feel.
We're just taking a moment of self compassion, a moment we're
just receiving for a moment a bit of kindness through touch
and words. Just allowing the words to be
there and noticing what that's like for you.
OK, And so now you can release that practice if you like,
knowing you can always return to it.
Three parts, one is validating. Second part is calm humanity.
Third part is some kindness. And you can do that anytime,
whenever there's any difficulty in your life.
It's called the. Self compassion, break and then
if your eyes are closed, open your eyes And as we rejoin
Dustin in our interview. That was nice.
That was comforting. Reminds me.
What occurred to me is how seldom I am doing something
that's comforting toward myself. You know, often pushing quite
hard and striving, but just to sit and be still, it's quite
nice. And to hear about all the
potential benefits of self compassion, it's actually
exciting, you know, to be great to to get some of those benefits
in the one's life. Yeah, I think that if they're
for me anyway, if there's like one inner resource, one skill
that we could practice, that would have an impact on many,
many, many different areas of our lives, the research shows
that this is it. I mean, there may be other
skills that we can practice that influence all areas of our
lives, for example getting strong physically.
But when it comes to psychological training, this is
a very central resource or mechanism.
And so if you don't have a lot of time and you can only learn
one thing, this is a good one. I guess as we kind of think
about coming to the end of the conversation, I always like to
broaden it as much as we can. And in in this subject area, it
seems that there is another barrier, there's another
headwind and you've talked about it a little bit throughout,
which is the cultural barrier. It's it's that Western culture
doesn't necessarily promote self compassion as a virtue.
And I think people, many people, Americans, harbor a deep
suspicion about being kind to ourselves and what what's going
on? Maybe we think about the US or
just the West in general. What don't we get about this?
Why we? Why we?
Yeah. Well, it's not just the US.
There are differences between cultures.
Kristin Neff did a study in Taiwan, Thailand and the US and.
Found that people in Thailand were a little more compassionate
than people in the US, who are a little more compassionate than
people in Taiwan. But the big difference, Dustin,
is not between cultures. The big difference is between
how we treat ourselves and how we treat others when things go
wrong. That's huge everywhere.
And culturally, people often look for explanations like why
Thailand may be a little more than Taiwan, right?
But I think this is, it's just speculation because personally,
I've been in China and they say we're not compassionate with
ourselves because we are Confucian and I've been in South
America. And they say we're not
compassionate with ourselves because we're Catholic.
And I've been in Minnesota and they say we're not compassionate
with ourselves because we're Lutheran.
And so every culture has its own reason.
But my guess is that the bigger issue is how to turn it around
and include ourselves in the circle of compassions.
What I like to say is that self compassion is is really a humble
enterprise where it's not about selfishness, it's about just
including ourselves. Maybe even in the bottom right
corner of the picture, you know of of self compassion.
Just adding ourselves, not systematically excluding
ourselves. Because if we, if the research
means anything, if we deny ourselves self compassion, we
are making ourselves suffer unnecessarily.
When I was reading your workbook, I think it's called
the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook.
Is that it? Yeah, There's this quote that
really I found kind of staggering.
It was from Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers is a psychologist or
psychiatrist. He's a psychologist, right,
Right. So he said.
The curious paradox is that the more I accept myself just as I
am, the more I can change. Yeah.
How do you interpret that? That's really staggering.
It it feels very true as well. And yet it is a paradox.
Is it? Yeah, so actually that quote was
printed slightly wrong. What Carl Rogers actually said
was the more I accept myself just as I am.
Change occurs on its own, change occurs on its own and and many
people notice that when they practice self compassion.
What happens is when we fight with ourselves, it's very hard
to change anything. But when we accept ourselves as
we are, then we more naturally change things.
So to give you an example, every year in around January 1,
Kristen and I get a flurry of requests for interviews to talk
about New Year's resolutions. But one of the funny things
about New Year's resolutions is that within three weeks 60% of
people abandon their resolutions.
Why are they abandoning them? It's because they are doing
these things, often driven by shame and not accepting
ourselves. And then when they start to
fail, they beat up on themselves even more.
The same motivation just becomes more intense. i.e.
Shame. But if we put all self
improvement on the foundation of self compassion and self
acceptance, then when things go wrong we don't necessarily give
up because we're not blaming ourselves.
We're not shaming ourselves. We get curious like, oh jeez, I
wanted to exercise more and now I I noticed I'm not exercising.
When we're really friendly with ourselves, we can say something
like. I wonder how I can do this, that
I enjoy it a little more. That's very different than
beating up on ourselves. And then lo and behold, we do
something and we enjoy it and we're, you know, after three
weeks we're still exercising more because we are encouraging
ourselves in a positive way. So this is self compassion.
So why does change happen on its own?
Why is it more easy to change when we accept ourselves?
Because we have a new attitude. My last question is, what do you
think our world, our society, civilization would look like?
If we're all just kinder to ourselves, less critical and
judgmental of ourselves, what would that world look like?
Well, I think there's no doubt that generally we would have
better mental health because as people increase in self
compassion. Mental health gets better and
better and as people decrease in self compassion they feel more
and more shame. And shame is associated with
just about every form of mental distress.
So there's no doubt that if people had the fire of self
compassion inside, if they could recognize in an open hearted way
when they're suffering, if they could not feel so alone, and if
they could be kind to themselves, they would suffer
less. That's the first thing that
would happen, but the second thing that would happen.
Is they would be kinder to others.
And so from my experience, and this happened really in a
nutshell for the first time at that conference that I mentioned
when I had public speaking anxiety very easily self
compassion translates into compassion for others.
And so we are now living in a world where we have global
problems that cannot be. Solved in an insular way by 1
nation. We need to do this together.
We need to solve, you know, global warming.
We need to solve the problem of wars.
We need to solve social injustice.
How do we solve these really global problems, problems that
require everybody to participate?
The answer in my view is we need to have more fellow feeling.
We need to have more compassion. And then the question is how do
we grow in compassion, especially when people are
frightened and afraid and they shut down, How do we grow in
compassion? Well, the easiest way to do it,
I think is to grow in self compassion when we feel the pain
of these global problems. We first step is we be kind to
ourselves. We recognize our own suffering,
we attend to our own suffering. We change our Physiology and
then our heart will open toward others.
We will feel more like a global community and it be more
motivated to make a change. So in a nutshell, the easiest
way to grow in compassion for others, I think, is to fall in
compassion for ourselves. And when we do that, we have
created a foundation for working together to solve problems that
are bigger than any of us. That's great.
Before I let you go Chris, where can people go to learn more
about self compassion and to maybe do some practices
themselves? How can they start small?
Where does someone go right now to learn a little bit more about
your work, about the field, about how they can incorporate
self compassion into their life? Well, I would say some written
material and some links. So the book you had mentioned,
the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook is available on Amazon.
It's coauthored by Kristin Neff and myself and it's extremely
popular book. It's been selling like crazy for
the last five years. So that's a place to start.
And if you want to listen to guided meditations and other
practices and self compassion, you can.
And learn all about, you know, different opportunities for
learning about self compassion in a classroom setting, online
or in person. You could go to the to the
website centerformsc.org, which means Center for mindful self
compassion Center for msc.org. Or you can go to my website
chrisgermer.com or Kristen Neff's website which is self
hyphen compassionself-compassion.org.
And there's a ton of stuff on Self compassion online.
Well, I should say thank you for the workshop you gave seven
years ago where you completely took away my lower back pain.
I never got a chance to thank you for that.
So I so appreciate it. Yeah, I'm.
So glad to hear that Dustin. And you know, thanks for giving
me some time and sharing your wisdom and your expertise.
I can't think of a better topic to make more mainstream and I'm
and I'm glad that we we were able to to talk together and and
hopefully people can take something away from this.
Well, I I really appreciate that you're doing this work and thank
you for joining the chorus. And I personally, I really
enjoyed the interview and personally thank you, grateful
to you, Thank you. Thanks so much.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Chris Kerman.
Stay tuned for more conversations with people and
meet along the way.