Love Begins with Self-Compassion

Book: Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion (Korean edition titled Love Yourself)

There is an old Greek saying, attributed sometimes to Philo and sometimes to Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It can be read as a spiritual message, but it can also be used as a modern psychological intervention. Two words in it deserve our attention: kind, and everyone.

Everyone is fighting a hard battle. When we first meet that sentence, we usually think of the people around us, and something in us softens toward them. The behavior we brushed past, the sharp word, the odd manner — seen again, they look like the struggles of someone in the middle of a hard fight, and the same situation reads differently.

But here is the harder question. Am I among the everyone fighting a hard battle? How do I relate to myself? Am I my own steady ally — or my harshest critic?

We all carry an inner critic. Classical psychoanalysis called it the superego; other traditions have named it the bad object, the internalized critical parent, the negative introject, a punitive ego state, a perpetrator-imitating part. Along a spectrum it is louder in some of us and quieter in others, but the voice is there in everyone.

Self-criticism usually grows out of an effort to be more acceptable. “You’re ugly, you’re fat” can mean people might dislike you, so you’d better try harder and become thinner, prettier. The command “I have to be perfect!” can be a maladaptive but protective way of trying not to feel shame. In other words, self-criticism is a kind of safety behavior inside the human group — a way to be liked, to guard our vulnerabilities, to avoid being rejected or left behind. In that sense it comes from an ordinary survival instinct.

What matters is noticing when this voice switches on. Most often it repeats critical messages we took in from parents or others in childhood — messages that are sometimes handed down and repeated across generations.

We tend to know how to feel compassion when we see others suffer, and yet withhold it from ourselves. It was exactly this gap that led Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer to build the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program. The starting point of MSC is to begin again from acknowledging and accepting oneself, flaws and all.

Self-compassion is not self-pity. It rests on three pillars: self-kindness — meeting oneself with warm understanding rather than harsh judgment; common humanity — recognizing, rather than feeling isolated by pain, that others have struggled in similar ways; and mindfulness — holding suffering in balanced awareness, neither ignoring it nor amplifying it.

And self-compassion is not selfish or self-enclosed. Love for others begins in compassion for oneself. In the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness, we start with may I be happy, may I be at peace — and from our own peace the compassion ripples outward, to those near us, to strangers, to all beings.

Love yourself.

Many readers will think first of BTS; the phrase became something of a mantra during their Love Yourself era. Their song by that name says, in essence, that loving oneself may be harder than loving anyone else — and that it is a practice: learning, day by day, to love the self of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow, leaving no part out. That, in the end, is where self-compassion begins.