Are You Allowing Yourself Enough Kindness?
There’s a time and a place for self-flagellation, and it’s never and nowhere.
I don’t care what you’ve been taught or conditioned to believe. Beating ourselves up has zero benefit.
How do I know this?
I spent decades in a cycle of self-abuse. My weight fluctuated wildly (30-70 pounds, to be precise) while the depression I experience only got more intense.
But oh my God, do you know what happened when I finally started cutting myself some f*cking slack?
My weight stabilized. I’ve lost over 55 pounds and I’m keeping it off.
I’m managing my depression better than I ever have. Is it gone fully? No, because that’s not how this works. But I’m confident that it will be downgraded to “infrequent sadness” thanks to the work I’m doing, and the plan is to eventually not be medicated for it anymore.
And you can do the same thing.
Perhaps you’ve read my other blogs and are familiar with the concept of self-kindness. If so, hooray! This’ll be a nice review for you this week.
But if how to be kind to yourself is a mystery to you, please read on.
Let’s look at your internal dialogue. Do you have an inner critic that shouts, “I’m so dumb!” when you forget to do something? Or is your default thought “I’m so lazy!” when you’d rather zone out to Netflix at the end of a long workday instead of exercise?
Where did that voice come from? I’m willing to bet that it’s a learned thought pattern. We’re not born criticizing ourselves. That’s something we’ve learned through our upbringing, hearing it from our caregivers and/or watching them do it to themselves.
Personally…I’m very careful about that these days.
As I child I learned that a lot of the ways I behaved weren’t okay. Although I grew up in a supportive and loving family, any criticism and negativity that inevitably occurred (because that’s part of life) were what I absorbed the most. And I carried that shit around like my life depended on it for DECADES.
All those negative thoughts kept me from taking care of myself the way I do now.
One of the ways that practicing self-kindness has greatly benefitted me is that (most of the time) when I want to go HAM on something that’s not good for me, I’m able to pause, listen to my body and my thoughts, and redirect myself to a better pattern of behavior.
It takes PRACTICE. Lots of it.
So the first step is to pay attention to your inner voice, because you may not even realize you’re doing it.
Next? Start writing about it. Or talk to a trusted friend or family member about it. Keeping the negative sh*t in your head isn’t helpful…it’s too easy to keep believing it unless you get it out (i.e., process it) somehow.
(Bonus points for hiring a coach or therapist.)
When you begin noticing it and processing it, a shift begins.
This is where the kindness part comes in.
Now, it may be too much of a stretch to go immediately from calling yourself an idiot to praising your own brilliance. Luckily, that’s not what you need to do!
It takes (what?) PRACTICE and patience (and persistence), but what you can do is start catching yourself in the thought and speaking back to it: “No, I’m not stupid. I’m human. I made a mistake.”
And then move on rather than lamenting on what a f*ck up you are for 20 minutes.
If your pattern is to be really hard on yourself, then this’ll be a challenge. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and things you’ve been doing for most of your life won’t change that quickly either.
So try it out and tell me how it goes: dana@revolution-within.com.
Oh, one last thing…start practicing accepting kindness from others, too. No need to argue with people who give you a compliment. (I may be reflecting back to my past self on this one.)
And as always, I’m here to answer any questions you have.
Love & hugs,
Dana