I’m Learning How to Meet Myself With Compassion

And it’s changed my life

Sometimes, I have been known to get mad at my emotions.

That seems counterproductive, I know. I think it may have something to do with the way I was raised — at times, my emotions were validated and yet at others, I was told to stop feeling and just “get over myself.” In my teenage years, if I was in a mood, I was asked, “What’s wrong with you?” Never a quiet, inquisitive, “Hey, what’s going on?” or “What’s up?” My emotions were inconvenient, so they had to go. Same with grief, if it hit in the middle of a training session, same with sadness or self-doubt or fear.

Most of the adults around me didn’t understand what it meant to emotionally co-regulate, so I was largely left to figure out how to cope on my own. I don’t blame them for this; it’s a skill they were never taught. But it has posed some challenges in the way I relate to myself.

I harboured a lot of hate towards myself for most of my life. Still to this day, it is something I am in the process of unpacking. If I did something I was ashamed of or my emotions got the better of me, I’d blame myself. The first time I was introduced to the concept that we never do anything in isolation — that there is always a myriad of influences and factors contributing to our decisions, from the state of our nervous system to the patterning we watched our parents play out growing up — it felt like a revelation. That there might be reasons why I did what I did, that it was okay for there to be reasons why I did what I did, this felt like an exhale.

“Oh,” I thought, maybe for the first time in my life, “you mean there’s nothing wrong with me?”

You have to learn what to do with how you feel

I recently learned that humans are incapable of emotional self-regulation until we reach a certain level of physical maturity in our early twenties. For women, this tends to be around 23 and for men, around 25. Before this, we are largely reliant upon the other people in our surroundings to teach us how to navigate our emotions and help us soothe our nervous systems, when we get upset.

If you grew up in a home where the adults around you didn’t know how to self-regulate, it’s likely this is something you’ve struggled with, too. It makes sense — if no one ever taught you the alphabet, it’d be a whole hell of a lot harder for you to write or read a book.

Our bodies are no different.

The ways we learn to cope are just that — coping mechanisms. They are our bodies’ way of striving to survive in a sometimes-hostile world. Yet we can be so hard on ourselves about this. One of my closest friends once helped me reframe my coping mechanisms as something to be celebrated: in spite of everything you had going against you, she said, you reached adulthood. Yay you! That’s no small feat. Now that you got here, let’s help you to create systems that care for your well-being so that you might do more than simply survive.

Can you imagine that?

If we taught everyone how to navigate their emotions, both independently and in community with one another, we would be living in a very different world right now. So much of the pain we see playing out on the world stage is simply a reflection of unhealed wounds from childhood — the pain of feeling unseen, insignificant or misunderstood.

Your pain may be more than your own

Trauma gets passed down through the generations. This is a fact we’ve often missed when we look at why some people struggle while others thrive, while others still thrive in spite of their trauma. Some people attempt to outrun their shadows only to burn themselves out. Others struggle to accomplish the simplest of tasks. Both can be dealing with the same pain, only they’ve learned different methods to cope with it.

When I learned the depths of depression my maternal great-grandmother lived with, I understood myself a little better. When I look at what my mother lived through, how my grandmother fought poverty and grew up without a mother of her own, I understand why I experienced my teenage years the way I did.

The women of my lineage have not known the privilege of what it means, to be soft. I am reclaiming it for us.

Enter compassion

These days, I am learning compassion.

My steps are stilted, like a young doe stepping on her own for the first time. Compassion was scarcely modelled for me growing up, though it’s a quality I value deeply so learning it, in a way, has felt like coming home to myself. For an empath, I think it’s the only truly sustainable way to navigate the world.

Compassion differs from empathy in that it comes from a more empowered place. It means we can hold a person in love, we can sit with them in their suffering and honour the pain of this world without physically taking it on ourselves. One of my greatest gifts has always been my ability to put myself in someone else’s shoes, but it has also been incredibly painful. It meant any time I heard a story of illness or loss, I would imagine that I was that person. Movies or television series could be somewhat traumatic for me to watch if there was any kind of violence involved — the images would haunt my mind for days afterward and I felt the energy of it linger in my body.

Then there was the guilt that came with being an empath: if I could imagine the depths to which someone had it so much worse than I did, why was I struggling? Why did that kid get sick instead of me? Why did that person lose their life in that car crash? If I were to live through that event instead, would it take their pain away?

It took me a long time to understand that everyone is on their own journey; sometimes things happen for reasons beyond what our human minds can comprehend. In light of that, my pain may look different from someone else’s but that doesn’t make it any less valid. It’s just different.

A newfound strength

Once I learned to see this, I began to soften. I began to learn how to honour my sensitivity. Compassion gave me a strength that felt more resilient than the rigid stance of my childhood; I felt more like a palm tree ready to bend and sway in the wind yet sturdy enough to still stay rooted, even in the midst of a hurricane.

First, I learned to see my younger self through this new lens, then those in the world around me. Now, I am learning how to apply this lens to my current situation, my current self. I am learning to reach for compassion over judgement, in real time.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been witnessing myself play out a few energy patterns I can see no longer serve me. I felt that rising frustration, the shame of feeling like nothing I do will ever be enough — but this time, I’m meeting myself differently.

I can soften and smile and say to myself, “I’m so proud of you — I can see you care so much. You’re doing your best with what you know and right now, that’s more than enough.”

Mantra: I am choosing to approach this situation with love and compassion. I choose to stay with myself.

As a poet, writer, and artist, Maia Thom works with words to create spaces for people to breathe and come home to themselves. In 2020, she published her first anthology, Kitchen Table Talks: Simple Reminders + Thoughts on Life. You can find her on Instagram as @maia.thom where she shares poetry, art, and practical wisdom to offer daily moments of calm.