SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi all...

I've seen a few comments now about self compassion and how it's important.... But I'm struggling with how this looks.

Anyone got any tips on how to really practice this?

How do you really meditate and does it really work??

I don't even know where to begin with trying to really like myself after what I've done

Great questions!

I think self compassion comes from understanding your issues. Where they have stemmed from and how you got to where you are. I think it’s easier to achieve when you see those patterns and can start effecting them.

I will tell you what this has been for me, in hopes to give examples rather than the abstract.

I have always down deep felt I was bad. shame is when you believe this and it becomes central to how you operate. For me, this stemmed from many many things in my childhood that reinforced it. My mother always screaming and criticizing me, sexual abuse by multiple people (separate times) made me sexually pecosious and the ways I acted out fermented that shame. I could go on but you get the picture.

So I went through life with a faulty sense of self. I believed people wouldn’t want to hang out with me, that I had to do things that made it worthwhile to them. I did not feel worthy of love because I couldn’t love myself.

Self acceptance is a journey. It’s unpeeling layers. It’s changing the focus to what is good about you combining to do your best every day. When we fail, which we will undoubtedly do, it’s saying okay I will do better next time. What did I learn here? Figure it out and next time do that. We are all fallible.

A big part for me was changing my self talk. I used to say horrible things to myself. And I think this is what meditation did for me. I do not think it’s about emptying your mind. I started for a few minutes each day, and I would start with a few deep breaths and then begin observe what came up without allowing myself to get too invested in it. You do this in a detached way, beginning to notice our thoughts are not truths it’s just our brains babbling filling in the spaces. You are the observer, not the one creating the thoughts.

As I became more practices about being mindful, when the thoughts that were not serving me well would come up I would correct myself. For example, if I ate too much, I would say things to myself like "you are such a fucking hog-it" now, I could see "hog-it" was what my mom would call me. I don’t even relate to the term really, other than it’s like calling someone a pig. I began replacing the thought. "Wow, how lucky I am that I was able to have that great meal." Of course I should note, I don’t have problems with food, if I ate too much it was a rare event and one that is okay to have in our human experience.

If I would fail I would react poorly. "You are such a fucking idiot" or "fucking loser." And honestly because I grew up in a place where unless I was perfect and did everything right, then I was worthless, lazy, stupid, etc. these things we grow up with becomes our inner voice. Sitting for a few minutes a day started a revolution, and over the course of a few months my self tack became more encouraging and I could see that changed my behaviors which influenced my results.

Once you make this shift, you will do it for longer. I stay in that state iff and on for a few hours on the weekend. I will do it in the bath, or out in my hammock, or even while I am quietly taking care of chores.

Another layer to that became a gratitude practice. Again, I was always focusing on the wrong thing, the bad thing because I believed I was bad. When I finished my quiet time of meditation/reflection I started to state 3-5 things I am genuinely grateful for. And it could be anything. It started out with health, my family, having a comfortable home, but soon it was infectious. I am thankful for spending time in my garden, or time spent with friends.

What this does is make you keep seeking more and more good.

Eventually, and it took a while, this practice brought me to see some truths about myself. I am not bad. I actually have a loving and generous heart that truly wants the best for those around me, and this turned into also extending this to myself. I started to believe I deserved good things like I wanted for everyone else.

I could see in hindsight, the shame overshadowed everything. And my actions came from that inner belief and voice. And because I was focusing on the hood, and doing the good, it helped me see this is who I have always been underneath and that my actions came from a a place in me that needed healed.

When we love ourselves, we can believe we are lovable. We can see others as loveable. It opens you up, you don’t feel defensive because you feel comfort in the understanding that we are all fallible. When we are nicer to ourselves in our thoughts, we also have more compassion for those we love.

A book or philosophy that gave me a lot of guidance into doing all this was "the power of now" by Eckhardt Tolle. It’s heavy reading nd may come across as woo-woo, but as you learn from him, it does resonate. He does podcasts and other things but that book was pivotal in seeing my thinking was always the problem, once I learned to change the problem it changed my entire perspective on life. I have read it several times now and each time I get deeper into understanding it.

The thing that helped me understand how shame was effecting my life and relationships is "rising strong" by brene brown.

[This message edited by hikingout at 8:41 PM, Friday, June 6th]

I do not see a stop sign 🛑

For me, self compassion is realizing there is nothing I can do about the past. It is also as hiking out alluded to, that I was doing the best I knew how to do at the time. Those of us who wish to work on ourselves, hopefully grow and change and evolve. I wish you much healing and success on your journey towards self compassion.

Thank you both for your responses and for the time it takes out of your day to write these.

Hiking, I am sorry for what you had to go through growing up. Its interesting as whilst I never went through the experiences you have done growing up with a parent who calls you names or slaps you about (not beaten, just slapped around the back of the head etc) really can dent your self esteem and self belief.

My BS often thinks how could I have little confidence in myself or be the way I have been when I hold such a favourable position and have achieved the things that I have achieved.... I believe its luck or that I'm simply a good blagger as I am sure to this day that someone will find out the real me and ill lose it all.... But another part of me knows that actually I did this all on my own so I do f*****g deserve this and I should stand tall. It's just hard though...

I really did give that Tolle book a whirl on Spotify but I just couldn't get into it.... It was all the symbols being tapped that broke me! I'll have to give it another shot at some point. Brenne brown though, her books are good I agree and am halfway through her daring greatly one.

Thanks though it makes sense, self love and acceptance.... Ill give it a bash, my IC is also trying this with me so fingers crossed as I'm done with the self loathing and projecting

I agree with HikingOut and will also put much the same thing in my own words in case something lands differently. I think self compassion has two sides: forgiveness and love.

Forgiveness comes when you can see and understand why you have done, or feel the urge to do, things that are objectively stupid, harmful, repugnant, etc. I used to lie easily. I used to be able to have sex with virtual strangers with no sense of revulsion. I dealt with those facts by ignoring them. When I couldn’t ignore them anymore, I could either have sunk into despair at the kind of person I was, or come to an understanding that, given the facts of my life to that point, *any reasonable human* might have done the same. That’s a tricky statement to make on these forums, because in reaching for their own self worth, some people will say well I was abused but I never would that done THAT. Or my parents were cold but I never would have done THAT, I’m not that kind of person. It’s understandable that people think that way but it’s not helpful to people trying to change because it is judgement, in a way that has a finality, which takes away the space to grow. So understanding why you ended up where you did, and believing that it doesn’t mean you are condemned, is essential. This is where I find Christianity extremely helpful. This is also helpful in noticing when you have thoughts or urges that do not align with where you want to go. Maybe you get blow up angry about some dumb thing - you can start to be aware of that before it erupts, understand where it is coming from, understand how it was useful and necessary in the past but not longer needed, use self soothing, give yourself a tiny space between stimulus and response, make a different choice. Same for any urge you have - lying, avoiding, blowing up, turning yourself into a victim, whatever. "Oh, I recognize that, that was useful to me once when it was the best choice I had, but now it’s no longer needed, just a habit, I can choose something else." I do know how hard those habits are to put down, they seem like a law of physics, but it gets easier in time.

The second part is self love, and that is not the same as what your wife was talking about (as I understand it). She was saying you have worldly success, why doesn’t that mean anything to you? But I understand completely why it doesn’t. I have all sorts of worldly success, and if it doesn’t touch who I am, what makes me wonderful, it matters zilch, and can actually be counterproductive because you wonder what’s wrong with you. Additionally - those things that DO make you wonderful, you may have been shamed for that. I am a really generous person, I genuinely love giving gifts, of all kinds (not just material but time, attention, etc), I keep no mental record, etc. I can be very creative in gift giving. My husband and I ended with a couple of theater tickets we weren’t using, to a sold out and very popular play, and I knew exactly who to give them to, because of the content of the play, the needs of the two people we gave them to, and the possibility of those two people becoming friendly. It worked! I feel such pleasure in making that happen and have no mental accounting of what they owe me. When I was younger, my mother would shame me for being generous, so I would hide it from my husband! Now, because of him helping me see that this is a gift, and seeing in real time my mother’s weird response to generosity, I love myself for this, instead of feeling ashamed and hiding it and being secretive. This quality is something my worldly success has little to do with.

Can you write a sympathetic portrayal of how you ended up doing what you did? Not excusing it, but with the eye of someone who assumes you are a decent person and curious about what happened? And can you start to identify things you love about yourself?