The 5 Elements of Self Compassion or Internal Emotional Safety

Hi, this is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my thoughts on how you can gain self-compassion and internal emotional safety.

Maybe at this point you have watched my videos on what I think is the key to personal growth -- emotional safety.  So, perhaps you also accept that you need to be more self compassionate so that you can get unstuck and start to be able to make positive changes in your life.  This mean changing your relationship with yourself so that you have a kind, supportive, encouraging presence within.  But how do you go about doing this?  Good question.  I think there are 5 elements involves in self compassion or internal emotional safety - 2 are steps in the process and 3 are paths to get from step 1 to step 2.

STEP 1: AWARENESS

The first step is awareness.  You can't fix what you can't see, so start investigating.   What are you feeling?  Is it anger?  Betrayal?  Embarrassment?  Shame?  Fear?  Loneliness?  Differentiate between the hard emotions, which are more about power, like anger or irritation and the soft emotions that lurk behind them which are more vulnerable like fear, shame, and sadness.  Usually there is a soft emotion behind every hard emotion.  Just naming these emotions can almost immediately give them less potency. 

• Body awareness - Also, it's important to be aware of where you carry these emotions in your body.  When you are stressed, do you tense your shoulders or grit your teeth (or is that just me??)  Can you feel fear in your racing heart rate or upset stomach?  A lot of times your body reacts even before you are mentally aware of what you are feeling, so let your body be your guide.  If you are currently clenching your teeth, take a minute to reflect on what emotion might be driving that sensation.  Meditation and mindfulness are important ways to become aware of your feelings both emotionally and bodily. 
• Titration and Distress Tolerance - For some people, emotions can be very painful and hard to access -- particularly for those who have experienced trauma.  Exploring those emotions and bodily sensations can be terrifying and can provoke flashbacks and panic attacks.  In this case, it's best to do this in the care of an experienced trauma-trained therapist.  It's okay to take it slow and just explore the very edges of those feelings until you can safely move to feeling more intensely.  This process is called titration - this is the same term that is used for ramping up medication slowly and carefully.  Once you are aware of an emotion and the accompanying bodily sensations, you can move to

STEP 2: ACCEPTANCE

This is always the end game.  It's whole goal of Buddhist meditation, it's the point of the Serenity Prayer, it's the last stage in the grief process.  Emotional acceptance is where we want to be.  You want to be at a point where you accept your thoughts, your feelings, and your behavior.

• Distance/Objectivity - But wait -- what if my thought is that I'm ugly and no one likes me?  I should just accept that?  Isn't that kind of cruel?  Or what if I'm being super lazy and I know that I'm procrastinating.  I should just accept that that being lazy and getting nothing done is my lot in life?  Shouldn't I challenge this behavior and this way of thinking?   The answer is "no" -- not at first.  First -- you need to accept it.  In the first case, you are having the thought "I'm ugly and no one likes me".   You have accept that you are having that thought -- BUT you don't need to believe that it is true.  Just because you are having a thought, doesn't mean you have to believe it, focus on it, or fuse with it.  Just acknowledge that you are having it.  Denying it, challenging it, or suppressing it only makes it more powerful.   And what about procrastinating or being lazy?  First of all, those are negative ways of viewing your behavior, so it's best if you come up with less negatively charged language, but yes -- the goal is to accept all of your behavior: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Again, refrain from moralistic judging -- just accept that this is what you are doing right now and that you are having these thoughts.
• Resistance - The problem, of course, is that we can't have these thoughts or this behavior without the accompanying emotions of sadness, shame, or self anger.  And these emotions are, let's face it, uncomfortable to feel.  Humans beings, like most animals,  naturally move away from distressing things, so it's normal for us to avoid or deny difficult emotions.  This is called resistance.  The problem is that resisting actually increases our suffering.  What you resist -- persists.
• Challenging - It is an incredible challenge to face our suffering head on and accept it.  Not endorse it or wallow in it, but accept that it is the way we are feeling.  Accept our anxious thoughts.  Accept our difficult feelings about ourselves.  Accept that guilt, shame, and inadequacy that we've been pushing down.  Accept it all.  But how do we get to the point where we can accept?  I think there are three paths up this mountain.

3 PATHS FROM AWARENESS TO ACCEPTANCE

I see this as a journey from the bottom to the peak of a mountain.  Awareness is at the bottom, Acceptance is at the peak.  There are three paths up.

• Cognitive (or Insight) - This refers to our intellectual and rational understanding of ourselves, our situations, and our feelings.  It includes what we know about our own families, histories, brain chemistry, relationships, intergenerational patterns, and cultural and social systems.  It also includes rational ideas about our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.  For example, knowing that I have ADHD makes it easier for me to accept that I have a hard time focusing, that I have a really small working memory, and that I need more transition time between tasks than do other people.  I can accept that without feeling much negative emotion because I know this is part of the profile of being ADHD inattentive type.  This can be true of people who know they have a chemical predisposition to depression, people who have suffered from childhood trauma, and people who came from dysfunctional families.  All of these insights can help us to accept things about ourselves that may have been harder before this knowledge.  That said, this cognitive way up the mountain is very difficult and narrow.  It takes forever since you have to pick through the rocks and the overgrowth.  The next way is
• Emotional (or Kindness) - Some of this is going to sound cognitive, but really it is about how you feel about yourself.  Not how you *think* about yourself, but how you feel.  When you consider yourself, do you feel warm and tenderhearted?  Or do you feel brittle, harsh and critical?   Shifting that feeling to one of kindness, warmth, and love will make your journey to acceptance much easier.  It provides a paved road for you use to bike up the mountain.  It opens up your heart to love and care for yourself despite your negative thoughts, behaviors, or uncomfortable emotions.  This relationship towards yourself of love and caring needs to be cultivated daily -- minute by minute.  It is not indulgent or permissive, but supportive, the way you might care for a best friend.  It is an encouraging, supportive, safe relationship where you want the very best life for yourself.  And finally, the third and most efficient path is
• Somatic (or Soothing) - This journey is going to be emotionally rough.  You will poke these emotional memories and thoughts that you have probably avoided for years.  BUT you can use your body and its natural calming system to regulate your emotions so that you will be able to feel everything without your body freaking out and shutting down.   As you are facing those uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, you can tap into your parasympathetic nervous system to calm your body's emotional response.  Processing through your emotions in this way will eventually allow you to access past uncomfortable memories and thoughts without a full body negative emotional charge.  There are lots of ways to activate your body's calming response, but soothing, nurturing activities like slow breathing, warm baths, giving yourself an actual hug, rubbing your arms, and lighting candles are all ways to provide that soothing that your body needs to be able to feel safe enough to fully experience and process unpleasant emotions.   Using your body's calming system gives you four lane highway so that you can drive a Jeep up that mountain to Acceptance.

Sorry about my clumsy mountain metaphor, but the idea is that the journey from awareness to acceptance is hard, but using insight, kindness, and soothing all together will get you up that mountain much faster than using cognitive tools alone.   And the thing is -- there won't be just one journey -- as you might have guessed.  Each time you become aware of another difficult emotion or thought, you are back at the bottom of the mountain navigating back up to acceptance.  So, you can see how much better it is if you can get there faster each time, right?  Also, accepting your big emotions has the effect of opening yourself up to become aware of the deeper seated emotions that lie underneath -- and each one requires scaling that mountain of acceptance.  All of this will make it easier and easier for you to feel and think at the same time, helping you to feel safer with your emotions and make better decisions when you are having them.  Why wouldn't you want to fast track that? 

Let me say one thing about internal emotional safety -- of course it can be enhanced and strengthened by external emotional safety -- and by that, I mean feeling safe in a relationship with someone else.  That is the whole point of the therapeutic alliance in therapy -- feeling emotionally safe enough to talk about all your stuff without fear of judgment or recrimination.  If you feel emotionally safe with a therapist, friend, or partner, or relative, you can learn about yourself (cognitive), feel more loveable (emotional), and even sometimes be physically soothed by a hug or kind touch (somatic).  All of this is incredibly healing, but I firmly believe that until you are able to heal from within, it will only take you so far. 

Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!