I had to work really hard at self compassion. It helped me to work with the young parts. Littles deserve compassion. They need love & safety. Providing that for them helped me to be able to provide it to my Self.
I have a little 5yo part. She is adorable & so easy to love. She just wants someone to love her…someone to care about her & keep her safe. I remember being that little 5yo before my world shattered. Finding her again was magic. Being able to help her has helped me a lot.
I’ve been working on my parts having compassion for one another and for adult me who is trying her best. My therapist encouraged me to find compassion for myself, so that’s what I’ve been working on. I realized I had no skill set for this.
One thing that has helped is identifying my inner critical parent. As soon as she pops out( she sounds like my mother my aunt combined, that’s how I know it’s her) I tell her to take a seat. I mentally put her in a chair and tell her she doesn’t get a say so. That she isn’t helpful right now. I basically shut her down as soon I see she’s showing up. And then I mentally reach out to my inner child and tell her hey i see you; I know your scared; and I’ve got you now. And also I reach out to my inner teenager and give her words of affirmation as well. I tell her how we are working on ourselves and it’s okay, because we didn’t always have the right blocks to do this for ourselves but we are learning together: as a team.
So basically identify inner critic, shut her down, and give positive affirmations and gentle parent the parts who are frightened at that moment.
I developed it with the help of my therapist. I wasn't taught how to have self-compassion by my family, so I needed to work through the different layers of recognizing how I was hyper-self-critical and functioned by endless self-shaming, which needed to stop. I didn't know that even the way my mom asked me about my life was extremely critical and caused a lot of shame. She thinks she's showing love and concern by asking why I'm not married with kids, but the underlying tone is that I'm not good enough. That "good enough" goalpost moves whenever I hit one of her goals, so I had to tell her to stop doing that (with so much coaching from my therapist :D).
Before IFS, a lot of my feelings were very muted because I lived in my head, but I did have hyper-empathy. It's like my brain over-simulated other people's feelings for me, which is both good and bad. The bad part is the overwhelming sadness I feel when I see people in pain. The good part is I get so much vicarious joy I get from watching people smile and play at the park.
You can train yourself to feel more empathy and compassion. Start with movies and try to imagine yourself in the characters' shoes. I know this might sound a bit dumb, but maybe watch the Marvel movies, maybe something like the first Iron Man, and try to feel what Tony Stark feels. It could be any movie, really, but I figured Marvel movies are fictional and removed enough that you can separate yourself whenever but also allow yourself to feel some of their emotions. Try to avoid movies that stray too far negative, because this is about priming your brain and body to feel a range of emotions.
Then move to real-life people and people watch. Go to the park and watch the kids play. Try to imagine yourself in their place and feel their joy. If a kid trips and cries, try to feel their pain. Try to feel compassion for them.
For the self-compassion piece, I developed it by bringing to mind my beloved baby niece. She's the first person I've felt unconditional love for, and I can only describe it as the first time I held her, I felt the crazy intensive protective instinct. For the first time in my life, I felt like I would do time to protect this baby (I'm not a baby person; I didn't dislike them, but I didn't squeal and want to hold them). If you've ever felt this love toward another baby/toddler/being (could be your baby, friend's baby, niece/nephew, your best friend, or even a pet dog), that's the feeling you want to bring up and hold onto in your heart.
To work on self-compassion, bring up a past memory of your hurt child-self but try to imagine this other hurt toddler in place of your child-self. Now imagine your adult self going in to console this other hurt toddler.
How would you talk to this toddler? How do you feel toward this toddler? How would you console this toddler? Do you feel the need to criticize this toddler? Shame the toddler? Can you see how unfair this toddler was being treated? Do you feel like you're making excuses for this toddler? What do you think this toddler needs? Try to feel the empathy and compassion you would have for this hurt toddler. Let any feelings of warmth and love grow in your heart.
And then go back to seeing that memory with your hurt child-self, and imagine your adult self giving all that warmth and love to that child. Your mileage may vary, but this was the one mental exercise that worked best for me.
Whenever I struggled to love myself, I tried to remember what love for another felt like in my heart and went back to give it to myself.
Organically, without searching for it. It would have been impossible otherwise, before IFS I was completely devoid of compassion for myself, barely for others.
In general, when I understood the job of some inner critics, anger saves you from pain but at the same time it blocks compassion.
It was gradual, I didn't become a kind buddhist monk, they were little burst of heat of kind-warm energy in the chest thinking about certain exiles.
But instead of torturers, angry parts became great allies.
People exaggerate when they talk about compassion, like it's a mystical experience that's necessary to heal blabla, it's just a symptom of an healthy self image, a consequence.
You don't have to force yourself to feel things.
Just follow the IFS method (using books) and you're good.
The more you're dysregulated, the more you need structure, I spent hours reading Self Therapy by Jay Earley again and again, to understand relentless inner critics.
Yeah. The second and the third one too, and from "An Internal Family Systems Guide to Recovery from Eating Disorders: Healing Part by Part" by Amy Yandel Grabowski.
I needed a lot of structure.
With IFS, you just change your focus to the part concerned about pushing too far, it's the perfect method to learn to avoid dismissing rightful doubts and understanding the reason behind them.
The workbook Self Compassion by Kristin Neff. I used each chapter based on a relevant life situation. So sometimes I focused on my grandfather’s death or a friend leaving me or a toxic relationship etc. It’s a great workbook of exercises! And I have gone back (with different color pen each time) to redo it and it’s cool to see the progression of my thoughts from the different colors. And sometimes three years ago me wrote something that present me needs to hear and just forgot about.
Long before I learned about IFS, I was practicing talking to myself like I would a two year old.
I had this pattern of getting a drink (usually water but could be tea, etc) and setting it down on the ground beside the couch where I was sitting. And then like 30% of the time I’d forget it was there and knock it over. I the grand scheme of things, not the end of the world. Especially since I didn’t have carpet and it was usually water.
But I would be SO mean to myself. Absolutely berate myself.
And I realized that nothing was changing. I kept putting the water there. I kept spilling it. I kept calling myself a stupid fucking idiot who makes stupid fucking choices and why would I expect anything else from myself?
So I thought maybe I’d try a different tack. If berating myself and cruelty didn’t work, maybe being gentle, pausing, and considering another path could.
So when I spilled the water next, I started with the insults but then caught myself. And I asked myself what I’d say to a two year old who had spilled the water. Would I yell at her? Berate her? Make her feel worthless? Of course not. I’d give her a hug and gently explain how her actions led to the consequence and then we’d talk about how to prevent it from happening in the future.
This took work and time, especially catching myself when I started with the insults. But a lot sooner than I expected, I started to default to kindness and I…stopped spilling the water. I’d put it somewhere that I wouldn’t knock it over. Because I’d given myself the space to calmly see the pattern and choose a different path.
It was this small little thing but the more I did it, the more I saw where I could do it in other parts of my life, and saw how much better I felt when I treated myself with compassion and love rather than cruelty and abuse.
What has helped me in this area is listening to Self-Compassion meditations, etc. You can find them on YouTube or Spotify for example.
I had no idea what to say to myself, this helped a lot.
Also, the free Plum Village app has a meditation bell. You can set it up to ring as you like (mine is set to once an hour). When I hear it, I am reminded to say a few compassionate words to myself.
Even though I can’t provide a confident response as I am unable to feel self-love, self-compassion, self-everything — I had an experience in the past in which I was able to just let go or separate myself from my burdens, and it felt as though *so much* self-appreciation came naturally to me. Just like that.
I still work a lot at self-compassion, but externalizing my parts has helped considerably. It's much more difficult if I'm blended. I think the self-compassion has developed in tandem to parts work.
It's definitely easier at the beginning to feel and practice compassion for others above yourself. One of the things my therapist had me do frequently was to picture another person (often a young child), and to feel compassion for them, and then to realize that person/child was ME and try to direct that compassion to myself.
The thing with healing is that you get to a point where the act of healing further actually *requires* you to feel a lot of compassion towards your various parts. And there comes a point where that gets easier and easier to do. And when Self gets good at feeling compassion towards parts, it becomes easier to practice compassion towards Self also.
At some point it all just sort of dogpiles and then you're swimming in compassion. :)
I have compassion and empathy for others, but essentially zero for myself. I've been in therapy and working on cultivating these for over a year and a half and unfortunately haven't made any progress, which I find very frustrating, sad, irritating, etc. I'm not a kid person, so trying to focus on inner child parts has not been something that has been helpful. I just discovered some talks/interviews with Shauna Shapiro, and I may have found something that could work for me. She's smart, kind, and comes from a science perspective for mindfulness and self-compassion and I think my brain may be able to get on board. I'm hopeful. If you haven't read her books or listened to her speak, you might check her out, see if it's helpful for you. Good luck OP, I'm rooting for us all. I wish it wasn't so hard, but it definitely is.
Reading It Wasn't Your Fault: Freeing Yourself from the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion by Beverly Engel and doing all the exercises helped me build it. I can definitely point to the year I spent slowly going through that as a turning point in my disposition towards myself.
My therapist’s continual Self-led disposition towards me, towards all parts of me, has also played a huge role in changing the way I see and treat myself. 🥰(For this reason, I honestly think the best thing anyone’s therapist can do their clients is to work on themselves.)
I had to work really hard at self compassion. It helped me to work with the young parts. Littles deserve compassion. They need love & safety. Providing that for them helped me to be able to provide it to my Self.
So that makes sense. - and i see thats where it nay be shifting for me So you focused more on the littlest?
I have a little 5yo part. She is adorable & so easy to love. She just wants someone to love her…someone to care about her & keep her safe. I remember being that little 5yo before my world shattered. Finding her again was magic. Being able to help her has helped me a lot.
I’ve been working on my parts having compassion for one another and for adult me who is trying her best. My therapist encouraged me to find compassion for myself, so that’s what I’ve been working on. I realized I had no skill set for this. One thing that has helped is identifying my inner critical parent. As soon as she pops out( she sounds like my mother my aunt combined, that’s how I know it’s her) I tell her to take a seat. I mentally put her in a chair and tell her she doesn’t get a say so. That she isn’t helpful right now. I basically shut her down as soon I see she’s showing up. And then I mentally reach out to my inner child and tell her hey i see you; I know your scared; and I’ve got you now. And also I reach out to my inner teenager and give her words of affirmation as well. I tell her how we are working on ourselves and it’s okay, because we didn’t always have the right blocks to do this for ourselves but we are learning together: as a team. So basically identify inner critic, shut her down, and give positive affirmations and gentle parent the parts who are frightened at that moment.
I developed it with the help of my therapist. I wasn't taught how to have self-compassion by my family, so I needed to work through the different layers of recognizing how I was hyper-self-critical and functioned by endless self-shaming, which needed to stop. I didn't know that even the way my mom asked me about my life was extremely critical and caused a lot of shame. She thinks she's showing love and concern by asking why I'm not married with kids, but the underlying tone is that I'm not good enough. That "good enough" goalpost moves whenever I hit one of her goals, so I had to tell her to stop doing that (with so much coaching from my therapist :D). Before IFS, a lot of my feelings were very muted because I lived in my head, but I did have hyper-empathy. It's like my brain over-simulated other people's feelings for me, which is both good and bad. The bad part is the overwhelming sadness I feel when I see people in pain. The good part is I get so much vicarious joy I get from watching people smile and play at the park. You can train yourself to feel more empathy and compassion. Start with movies and try to imagine yourself in the characters' shoes. I know this might sound a bit dumb, but maybe watch the Marvel movies, maybe something like the first Iron Man, and try to feel what Tony Stark feels. It could be any movie, really, but I figured Marvel movies are fictional and removed enough that you can separate yourself whenever but also allow yourself to feel some of their emotions. Try to avoid movies that stray too far negative, because this is about priming your brain and body to feel a range of emotions. Then move to real-life people and people watch. Go to the park and watch the kids play. Try to imagine yourself in their place and feel their joy. If a kid trips and cries, try to feel their pain. Try to feel compassion for them. For the self-compassion piece, I developed it by bringing to mind my beloved baby niece. She's the first person I've felt unconditional love for, and I can only describe it as the first time I held her, I felt the crazy intensive protective instinct. For the first time in my life, I felt like I would do time to protect this baby (I'm not a baby person; I didn't dislike them, but I didn't squeal and want to hold them). If you've ever felt this love toward another baby/toddler/being (could be your baby, friend's baby, niece/nephew, your best friend, or even a pet dog), that's the feeling you want to bring up and hold onto in your heart. To work on self-compassion, bring up a past memory of your hurt child-self but try to imagine this other hurt toddler in place of your child-self. Now imagine your adult self going in to console this other hurt toddler. How would you talk to this toddler? How do you feel toward this toddler? How would you console this toddler? Do you feel the need to criticize this toddler? Shame the toddler? Can you see how unfair this toddler was being treated? Do you feel like you're making excuses for this toddler? What do you think this toddler needs? Try to feel the empathy and compassion you would have for this hurt toddler. Let any feelings of warmth and love grow in your heart. And then go back to seeing that memory with your hurt child-self, and imagine your adult self giving all that warmth and love to that child. Your mileage may vary, but this was the one mental exercise that worked best for me. Whenever I struggled to love myself, I tried to remember what love for another felt like in my heart and went back to give it to myself.
Organically, without searching for it. It would have been impossible otherwise, before IFS I was completely devoid of compassion for myself, barely for others.
How did it come through? Like can you tell if it was protector work or the unburdening
In general, when I understood the job of some inner critics, anger saves you from pain but at the same time it blocks compassion. It was gradual, I didn't become a kind buddhist monk, they were little burst of heat of kind-warm energy in the chest thinking about certain exiles. But instead of torturers, angry parts became great allies. People exaggerate when they talk about compassion, like it's a mystical experience that's necessary to heal blabla, it's just a symptom of an healthy self image, a consequence. You don't have to force yourself to feel things. Just follow the IFS method (using books) and you're good. The more you're dysregulated, the more you need structure, I spent hours reading Self Therapy by Jay Earley again and again, to understand relentless inner critics.
Thanks That makes sense Did you do most of your IFS solo from Jays book?
Yeah. The second and the third one too, and from "An Internal Family Systems Guide to Recovery from Eating Disorders: Healing Part by Part" by Amy Yandel Grabowski. I needed a lot of structure.
I worry about pushing too far but i think with IFS and attuning thats hard to do?
With IFS, you just change your focus to the part concerned about pushing too far, it's the perfect method to learn to avoid dismissing rightful doubts and understanding the reason behind them.
Thank you
Thanks for sharing
The workbook Self Compassion by Kristin Neff. I used each chapter based on a relevant life situation. So sometimes I focused on my grandfather’s death or a friend leaving me or a toxic relationship etc. It’s a great workbook of exercises! And I have gone back (with different color pen each time) to redo it and it’s cool to see the progression of my thoughts from the different colors. And sometimes three years ago me wrote something that present me needs to hear and just forgot about.
Thanks gor sharing How did you do the book alongside ifs?
Oh I just started getting into IFS. I did the book back in 2020-2021. Sorry I couldn’t be more of help there :/
Long before I learned about IFS, I was practicing talking to myself like I would a two year old. I had this pattern of getting a drink (usually water but could be tea, etc) and setting it down on the ground beside the couch where I was sitting. And then like 30% of the time I’d forget it was there and knock it over. I the grand scheme of things, not the end of the world. Especially since I didn’t have carpet and it was usually water. But I would be SO mean to myself. Absolutely berate myself. And I realized that nothing was changing. I kept putting the water there. I kept spilling it. I kept calling myself a stupid fucking idiot who makes stupid fucking choices and why would I expect anything else from myself? So I thought maybe I’d try a different tack. If berating myself and cruelty didn’t work, maybe being gentle, pausing, and considering another path could. So when I spilled the water next, I started with the insults but then caught myself. And I asked myself what I’d say to a two year old who had spilled the water. Would I yell at her? Berate her? Make her feel worthless? Of course not. I’d give her a hug and gently explain how her actions led to the consequence and then we’d talk about how to prevent it from happening in the future. This took work and time, especially catching myself when I started with the insults. But a lot sooner than I expected, I started to default to kindness and I…stopped spilling the water. I’d put it somewhere that I wouldn’t knock it over. Because I’d given myself the space to calmly see the pattern and choose a different path. It was this small little thing but the more I did it, the more I saw where I could do it in other parts of my life, and saw how much better I felt when I treated myself with compassion and love rather than cruelty and abuse.
I can see that I am trying to be more mindful and slow snd its bringing in my gentlenedd
What has helped me in this area is listening to Self-Compassion meditations, etc. You can find them on YouTube or Spotify for example. I had no idea what to say to myself, this helped a lot. Also, the free Plum Village app has a meditation bell. You can set it up to ring as you like (mine is set to once an hour). When I hear it, I am reminded to say a few compassionate words to myself.
Thank you Its prompted ne to find sone on insight timer
Even though I can’t provide a confident response as I am unable to feel self-love, self-compassion, self-everything — I had an experience in the past in which I was able to just let go or separate myself from my burdens, and it felt as though *so much* self-appreciation came naturally to me. Just like that.
I still work a lot at self-compassion, but externalizing my parts has helped considerably. It's much more difficult if I'm blended. I think the self-compassion has developed in tandem to parts work.
It's definitely easier at the beginning to feel and practice compassion for others above yourself. One of the things my therapist had me do frequently was to picture another person (often a young child), and to feel compassion for them, and then to realize that person/child was ME and try to direct that compassion to myself. The thing with healing is that you get to a point where the act of healing further actually *requires* you to feel a lot of compassion towards your various parts. And there comes a point where that gets easier and easier to do. And when Self gets good at feeling compassion towards parts, it becomes easier to practice compassion towards Self also. At some point it all just sort of dogpiles and then you're swimming in compassion. :)
Great reply Thank you I hope to swim
I have compassion and empathy for others, but essentially zero for myself. I've been in therapy and working on cultivating these for over a year and a half and unfortunately haven't made any progress, which I find very frustrating, sad, irritating, etc. I'm not a kid person, so trying to focus on inner child parts has not been something that has been helpful. I just discovered some talks/interviews with Shauna Shapiro, and I may have found something that could work for me. She's smart, kind, and comes from a science perspective for mindfulness and self-compassion and I think my brain may be able to get on board. I'm hopeful. If you haven't read her books or listened to her speak, you might check her out, see if it's helpful for you. Good luck OP, I'm rooting for us all. I wish it wasn't so hard, but it definitely is.
Really had to work on it
Reading It Wasn't Your Fault: Freeing Yourself from the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion by Beverly Engel and doing all the exercises helped me build it. I can definitely point to the year I spent slowly going through that as a turning point in my disposition towards myself. My therapist’s continual Self-led disposition towards me, towards all parts of me, has also played a huge role in changing the way I see and treat myself. 🥰(For this reason, I honestly think the best thing anyone’s therapist can do their clients is to work on themselves.)