A Loving-Compassionate Gaze upon ourselves
Art by Catrin Welz-Stein
Being grounded in a loving softness towards ourselves allows us to gain more energy, to transform what asks to be transformed, to heal what wishes to be healed
The Trap of Harsh Inner Dialog
Do you recognize yourself in this? You want to do something, maybe even start doing it, but then you speak to yourself in such a harsh way that you give up, never reaching the desirable results. Maybe your inner dialog was so rigid you didn't even start what you wanted to do.
Infinite times in therapy and also outside of the therapy room in everyday life, I witness how people’s inner dialog with themselves is unkind. It is quite common to say: “it is all my fault”; “I will never make it”; “from here things will only get worst”; “I am ugly”; “I am stupid”; “I am a terrible parent /partner/ daughter/ friend” etc.
In those moments, when you hear that inner voice, it may sound like the truth, but actually it is self-sabotage that harms your well-being and nothing else.
If it is not useful, why do we do it anyway?
Most of the things we do or think, we started doing them because at the time it was the most efficient strategy we could apply to handle our reality. In some point in life it might be not as aligned with who we are as before, but we continue doing it anyway because we are so used to this strategy of coping or because we don’t know any other way to approach things.
From the therapy room: A young brilliant women who works in her passion, lives in a satisfying intimate relationship, surrounded by friends - has a tendency to doubt herself. She is not sure it is legitimate to look the way she looks, to feel the way she feels and to say what she wants to say. For an outsider it might not make sense because she lives a life many would like to live but inside herself she is not in peace.
So how does it looks in real life?
She might say to her boyfriend ”I am not pretty enough”, hoping he will contradict her. This is looking for external validation.
Or she might think to herself: “the fact that I am upset right now, it is not ok. No one else would feel upset in this situation. There is something wrong with me.” in this case there is a part of her that knows that what she feels is what she feels, it is reality; but she is so worried that other people would think it is not that she tries to anticipate them so that it will not hurt as much when they will think it. It is a way to protect herself from the pain.
But… how would you feel if the other person will not disagree?
Just imagine, the other person answers: “ooh yeah.. you are right, you are wrong (in the way you look/think/feel/behave)”. If it makes you feel worse, it means you give the control of your well being to someone else. This is not an efficient way to fulfill your desires to feel better or to improve whatever you feel needs to be improved. It is not a good way to face the pain reality has in store for us sometimes.
Another reason to talk harshly to ourselves is with the motivation to improve.
An example from my own life: I arrived in Italy to study for an M.A. in psychology. The first period I was expecting from myself to handle things as I did when I was studying in my mother tongue, that is to read 50 pages a day and be able to process that. I had no success. There were days in which I wasn’t able to read even one page. It was awful. I was saying to myself: "You're lazy. This will never work." And found myself do less and less every day.
I had to admit, this way it will not work, so not wanting but understanding it is needed I started to celebrate little victories. I was telling myself: “Today I red whole 5 pages. This is not easy in a language I don’t know well.Good for me!”.
And still self sabotage voices persisted: "You're going too slow. You will never finish a degree like this." How I know it was self sabotage? because it didn’t help. When I would believe I would loose motivation to study for a few days.
I choose to believe this little mean voices as little as possible, I persisted, I deeply desired to become a psychologist. To do that I had to learn to celebrate small victories. “you wanted to finish 10 exams this year and finished only five? that is so good. your advancing. Good for you!”. Did I always believe this encouraging voices? No! but this shift in my inner dialog allowed me to continue, and eventually, I graduated in four years instead of two, with good grades.
Now, I work as a psychologist in Italy and online, using four languages. The mind still sometimes says, "How dare you? Your language skills aren't perfect." But I've learned that what I'm saying is more important than how I'm saying it, and my only prayer is that my words land kindly in the hearts of my clients.
For example, when you say you are not pretty enough and you deeply believe in that, and your partner or a good friend responds: you are so pretty! For how long will you be satisfied? For how long this voice will remain silent? Or lets say, they won’t give you a satisfying answer. How painful will it be? And how will the anger for the fact they didn’t give you what you were asking for will cover the pain that was under that request.
That is, sometimes we can use and outside opinion to have a perspective over a challenge, but if there is a lack of self acceptance, lack of self love and lack of ability to be kind to ourselves, it is impossible for someone else to fill up the space.
Many times the answer people give is that it doesn’t feel like a choice. I would like to speak to myself in a kinder way, but this is reality: “I don’t want to lie to myself. It is true that I behaved in a stupid way/ it is true that I am not loved/ it is true that I will never make it”.
When I a behave in a way or see in myself something I am not totally aligned with or that I wish was different (like yelling at my child stronger then I would like to, seeing a trait in my physical appearance I don’t really like of facing a challenge I have no idea how I will conkver), I wish to tell myself the truth, even if it is unpleasant. This is basically saying: I need to deserve to be treated nicely, if I am not totally aligned with something going on in my life, it is ok to speak myself in unkind way.
We are not just talking here about being nice to ourselves.
The goal of every living organism is to evolve, to grow, to get better, to reach life goals. It is good to remember that, shadows, and talking to ourselves harshly is definitely a shadow, always have some truth in them. If the shadow was just lies, it would be so easy to dismiss it. The thing with shadows is that they also aim to help us to evolve by putting us in contact with parts of the truth (not all of it, that is important to remember), in a painful, contracting and often destructive way.
Art by 𝐓𝐢𝐧𝐨 𝐑𝐨𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐳
Lets experiment… just for one moment, imagine these two options:
you are trying to create something and it doesn’t work out; you speak to yourself nicely about it. You tell yourself that you are wonderful and that the thing that doesn’t work out, it is not your fault. You will think of a better strategy to make it work. Or, as an alternative: it didn’t work out, but it was not mine from the first place. It is unpleasant but for sure not my fault.
things didn’t work out as you were hopping and you tell yourself: here.. you see? It is always like this. You never can make things work. You always destroy everything. Things will never work out for you.
Our most important indication is… what do I feel in my body? in which of the options my body sensations are more pleasant? How does my breath feels? Are my face tense or relaxed? And the shoulders? How does my belly feels? And what is happening in my heart??
Research shows that a balance between stress and relaxation brings to highest efficiency in results.
That is an accurate perception of reality is essential, if we wish to change something or to correct a trait in our behavior, appearance or internal world- to get the best results we can achieve. When the level of stress is too high, though, our body gets contracted. And that consumes energy out of reaching our goal. This is why too high stress levels are counterproductive.
Being kind and soft with ourselves, looks at ourselves with compassionate eyes allows us to gain more energy, to transform what asks to be transformed, the original cause of stress.
HOW CAN WE DO THAT?
One of the way we can use our free will to ground ourselves in love and compassion, first and foremost toward ourselves is a loving kindness meditation
This is a meditation from the mindfulness field of psychology.
It is a field influenced by Buddhism. It suggest to be our own kind friend or loving parent.
This is an opportunity to feel what this kind of inner dialog does to your system.
You can try and lit a candle and maybe also incense as you listen to it.
Probably the best will be to sit and close your eyes and actually do it, but you can also listen to it while doing other things.
Experiment. Explore. How the different words you choose to bring into your inner dialog influence your state of well-being? How do you feel in your body while doing the meditation?
The best way to dicern between when there is a need to recognize reality for what it is, even if it is unpleasant and to do something practical about it and when there is a need for softness to reach the goals you wish to reach is to listen to our body sensations.
The way we feel in our body helps us to realize whether our inner dialog is contributing to our evolution and well being or does it go in the direction of self-sabotage.
Art by Cecilia Reeve
I love to giving examples from my life because everything sound clearer on others. So here is one such example from my personal story.
I’ve arrived to Italy to study for an M.A. in psychology. Well… I imagined myself it will not be easy, but lucky for me I did not imagine how hard it will be. I think that if I would have had a more realistic idea of how it is going to be like, I would never have the courage to do so.
Coming to Italy to study, at first I fixed my goals in a similar that I would when I was reading texts in Hebrew during my B.A- 50 pages from a book a day. I tried.. I really did. I tried the best I can… but I found myself reading hardly one page a day. It felt terrible. I felt lazy and that it will never work. I just wasn’t able to make myself do it. As the days passed it became harder and harder to put myself to read even one page.
Now, you that read this hopefully say to yourself, of course, it is a great challenge to study psychology in a language you hardly know. And yes, objectively, it was challenging. I understood the meaning of the words, some of them I needed to translate with a dictionary (thanks god for the app dictionaries in modern times, because if not…), so it made it all easier, but also more difficult because this way I felt I have no excuse for all this. There is nothing else I needed to do but study and I couldn’t. This inner dialog felt so real!
My first step of being able to be softer with myself was when I realized that the words didn’t unite into a cohesive meaning I could remember. Like, I understood every word but as I tried to get the meaning of the sentence I already forgot them. So I was able to say myself: this is hard. If in what you are facing, you are not sure that it is hard objectively, you can say: this is hard for me.
To understand that was the first step and it gave me a great relief. So I modulated my goal to 20 pages a day. It still didn’t work. And I reduced the daily amount… to 10 pages. The shadows from my inner dialog were whispering: you will never finish the degree like this. What you do is inefficient. Who with a right mind would think to go to Italy to study psychology? A language you don’t know and even worst, a totally different culture then the one you grew up in. And the whispering of the shadows were right… partially. It is the discernment about the constructive part of this inner dialog that make the difference about us reaching our goals, get where we want to get in life.
It is indeed challenging to study psychology in a language and in culture one doesn’t know. But there was a part in me that told me to continue. To see what happens. On a practical level there were some things in my private life that kept me here for a while anyway. So I went on.
And I reduced my daily amount of pages to read to 5. As I did, there were still voices inside of me saying: you are so stupid. But there was another part of me that discovered that if I am not saying to myself: well done! You were able to read 5 pages today. And to interiorize what you red- I am making progress. Small progress indeed, but a progress. When I would read even one page a day and said to myself: only five pages? The next day I wouldn’t be able to read even one page. If I would read one page and say to myself: well done! It is hard to learn in a new language! It makes sense that you are tiered. The next day I could read more.
And like this gradually, in my own pace, in 4 years instead of two I graduated. With good grades. Now I work in Italy as a psychologist. I work also online a lot and I do healing in 4 languages: Italian, English, Hebrew and Russian. I love it.. the fact that I lived in different countries and different cultures, that I can speak with various people in their language allows me to work with people from different parts of the world. That would not be possible if I will not be kind to myself in my inner dialog when the times were tough.
And the mind still tells me sometimes, how do you dare to talk like you do, you’re language is not in a good level. And it is kind of true 😊 except Hebrew, all the other languages I speak in a very basic level.
Sometime, when I guide clients through meditations in Italian I see them smile, and I realized that I used a word in a funny way. But I truly believe it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I do my best and that what I am saying is more important then how I am saying it and that I deeply hope that my words will land kindly in the heart of the listener and this is the essence that I try to get through in my language.
I sincerely hope all I wrote here will open the path towards a more loving relationship with yourself. I really do.
we can always love ourselves a bit more…
If you feel like it, you can write to me, I would love to hear your thoughts about it…
