Forget Self-Esteem. Try Self-Compassion
Why being proud of yourself should take a backseat to being nice to yourself.
All my life, I have dealt with low self-esteem. I have never been particularly proud of myself or my achievements, despite having many interesting or difficult things that I’ve accomplished in my life. I’ve been like this since middle school, which is when I first encountered bullying and my mental illness began to manifest.
So, throughout middle school, high school, and college, I did my best to work on my self-esteem. It was really hard, and I got nowhere the whole time. It was hard to be proud of myself when it felt like I kept screwing up all the time.
Even after I established a career and became successful, I struggled with my self-esteem. I would relentlessly compare myself to my younger sister and my father, both of whom were more successful than I. My sister had a full-time job in her field before I did, and she’s two years younger than I am. My father owned a house when he was 18, I bought mine when I was 28. Over and over, my accomplishments felt lacking compared to them.
Truly, it seemed like my self-esteem would never be great. I have lots of things to be proud of, but I still consider myself a garbage person with little to show for my life.
Yesterday, I had my biweekly therapy session, and my therapist introduced me to a concept that I hadn’t heard before: self-compassion. This was a fascinating concept: instead of trying to be proud of yourself to build your self-esteem, you should be nice to yourself and understand that you are deserving of compassion.
Self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness vs. self-judgment, common humanity vs. isolation, and mindfulness vs. overidentification.
Self-kindness vs. self-judgment is simple: instead of beating yourself up, be nice to yourself. Understand that beating yourself up over your failings doesn’t accomplish anything, and realize that failure and difficulties are inevitable and you should be gentle towards yourself when you fail. We can’t always get what we want, and that’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
Common humanity vs. isolation is the next step in this process. When you fail and suffer, it often feels like you’re the only one suffering. Understanding that everyone suffers and nobody is perfect can help you be kinder to yourself when you suffer and fail. It’s easier to be compassionate towards yourself when you understand that everyone experiences failure and suffering.
Mindfulness vs. over-identification is the act of treating your situation with a balanced perspective instead of over-identifying with failure and pain. Being mindful that failure hurts while also understanding the first two elements — that failure is normal and everyone does it — can help you feel more kind and compassionate towards yourself without over-emphasizing the failure.
Considering all I’d ever heard about was self-esteem, this was an interesting new perspective for me to consider. Why should I wrap myself up in inflating my self-worth when I can be compassionate towards and understanding of the shortfalls that make me human? I will never be perfect at all things, so why should I beat myself up over it?
Self-compassion is differentiated from self-esteem in several ways. In western culture, self-esteem is often gained by standing out, being unique, being outgoing, or otherwise being above average. This can lead to several bad behaviors, such as bullying others to feel better about ourselves, ignoring or distorting our own shortcomings, or hinging our self-esteem on whether we’ve recently succeeded or failed at something.
Self-compassion, on the other hand, is based on the notion that all humans deserve compassion and understanding regardless of their individual traits. This means that you don’t need to feel superior to feel good. Some of the tenants of self-compassion, such as mindfulness, can also become mechanisms for coping with stress. Finally, and possibly most importantly, self-compassion isn’t dependent on anyone else. You can always be kind to yourself, whether you succeed or fail at something.
Unfortunately, self-compassion is hard for a lot of people, myself included. When you deal with low self-esteem, it can be easy to look at yourself as unworthy of love and compassion. As I mentioned above, I tend to think of myself as a garbage person, despite the people I care about telling me otherwise. Trying to exercise self-compassion is a tough thing to do.
However, a lot of people I’ve met with low self-esteem have a good starting point: they have loads of compassion for everyone else. I may not think I’m a worthwhile human being, but I will go out of my way to help someone I love who is in trouble. I talk up my friends when they’re feeling down, and I literally made a career out of helping people. Compassion comes easily to me.
So, when it comes time to be compassionate to myself, I have a starting point. It helps that I have people in my life to help keep me on track. I’ve developed the habit of calling myself dumb, and my wife doesn’t appreciate it. So, when I do it too much, she makes me play the “three things” game, where I have to say three things that I like about myself or am proud of about myself. It’s a sort of mindfulness exercise, in a way.
It can be easy for me to brush aside self-compassion. I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff lately — a medication change, seasonal depression, some money troubles, and the fact that there’s a pandemic out there — but I have trouble accepting that these things affect my mood. To me, I’ve never let my illness affect my life in such a way that I was unable to function, so why should I let these things change that?
In reality, I need to change my mindset. Being depressed is not an expression of my worth as a person (self-kindness vs. self-judgment). Currently, lots of people are dealing with depression due to COVID and seasonal changes, and plenty of people have money troubles (common humanity vs. isolation). In reality, I am allowed to be depressed, but I also need to avoid wallowing in the depression (mindfulness vs. over-identification).
Being compassionate to myself is hard, but at the same time, I understand that it’s hard for many people. There are lots of people who have trouble assigning any value to themselves as a person, and when you devalue yourself, it can be hard to feel like you’re worthy of compassion from anyone, much less yourself.
Again, I encourage you to treat yourself with the same compassion you treat others with. To me, every human is worthy of compassion, so why should you be the exception? Once you allow yourself to accept compassion from others, it becomes easier to accept it from yourself.
As with anything, self-compassion is a process, and you won’t get there right away. Be patient and give yourself time to accept it. The mere act of being patient with yourself is a good first step.
I encourage you to be more compassionate to yourself, and I hope you can get to a point where you can feel the same compassion for yourself as you do for others.
I know you can do it.
