Healing Your Inner Darkness – Part III

Being self-compassionate is the best way to redeem yourself from sufferings and overcoming your inner demons. But do you know what’s good for you? Take the assessment and learn how to treat yourself even better!

Our Topic Today: Understanding Your Compassionate Self

In this episode, you will find out:

• How compassionate you are towards yourself
• The 3 opposing concepts to self-compassion
• How to obtain your self-compassion score
• The appropriate steps to develop our self-compassion, especially in the area we fall short of/not fully developed

What’s Self-Compassion in psychology?

• kindness towards yourself
• sensitivity to the experience of your suffering, coupled with a desire to alleviate that suffering
  • Self-kindness
  • Common Humanity
  • Mindfulness

3 opposing concepts and response patterns

• Self-Judgement – judging yourself harshly during sufferings
• Isolation – feeling disconnected and left behind by the rest of the world and people around you
• Over-Identification – letting your emotions lead and dominate you in difficult times

The Self-Compassion Scale [11:16]

• Developed by Dr. Kristin Neff
• 26 items
• obtain a self-compassion total score
• 6 subscales in total assessing your self-compassionate self in different aspects: self-kindness, common humanity, mindfulness, self-judgement, isolation and over-identification

How to develop your self-compassion?

• don’t judge yourself harshly for being not good enough/not self-compassionate enough
• know which area has weakened your self-compassion and train yourself in that area
• apply a growth mindset!

Self-Compassion Advice…

• Self-judgement
  • Learn to understand yourself first before making any biased judgement
  • Learn how to calm your inner critic and allow the compassionate self to step in
• Isolation
  • Listen to other people’s perspectives, suffering stories, books and famous public speech about ups and downs to success, and songs related to compassion
• Over-identification
  • Learn to be more mindful by practicing mindfulness, doing body scan exercises
  • Learn how to take a compassionate observer’s spot and giving yourself breaks to examine the suffering

Listen to this episode to find out the exact exercises to develop your self compassion according to your response patterns! 

Words of Wisdom by Kristen Neff

When we give ourselves compassion, we are opening our hearts in a way that can transform our lives

Take-away messages

• Allow yourself to be a slow learner!
• Self-compassion is definitely an invaluable strength that you can work on. Give yourself some time to make your own self-compassion strengthening plan, it will turn into your greatest life skill to rely on!

Resources Mentioned

The Self-Compassion Plan – a tailor-made plan for developing your self-compassion, including a self-compassion assessment, scoring methods and interpretations, a ready-to-use scoring sheet, and a beginner’s guide of practical self-compassion recommendations. All-in-one for you!

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