Can We Talk About This? by thepowerofbirth

April 18, 2024 Ep.53 Mental Health Mini Series #6 Make Self Compassion Your Superpower

In the final episode of the mental health mini-series, join host Amber-lee as she explores the transformative power of self-compassion. I delve into the concept of self-compassion with insights from leading researcher Dr. Kristen Neff and discover the key elements of self-kindness, shared humanity, and mindfulness as tools to nurture understanding and care towards oneself. Through relatable scenarios of fictional mothers Kate and Nora, listeners witness the impact of self-compassion on navigating the challenges of motherhood and emotional health. Practical strategies and insights are offered and backed by neuroscience to cultivate self-compassion and reshape inner dialogues. Tune in to uncover the importance of challenging societal stigmas and beliefs to embrace self-compassion as a form of self-love and empowerment, understand why self-compassion precedes gratitude and how practicing kindness with determination leads to personal growth. Self-compassion fosters resilience, enhances motivation, and promotes emotional wellbeing - compassion is not a weakness, in fact it is so powerful it can quite literally transform your brain for the better!

Thank you for tuning into the mental health mini-series! Don't forget to leave a review on whatever podcast platform you are listening on. I appreciate you for being here!

Resources:

Dr Kristen Neff website: https://self-compassion.org/

Kristen Neff self-compassion test: https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-test/

To find out more about the perfect mother myth mentioned in this episode see: https://drsophiebrock.com/

Grab your free self compassion based motherhood affirmations here: https://www.thepowerofbirth.net/

Finding Support in Australia:

PANDA.org.au

1300 726 306

COPE.org.au

Beyond Blue 1300 224 636

Gidget Foundation

Black Dog Institute 1300 851 758

Disclaimer: While the content of this podcast is intended to provide support and guidance, it is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice. The techniques and practices discussed here are general in nature and may not be suitable for everyone.

If you are experiencing significant distress, mental health concerns, or trauma, I encourage you to seek support from a qualified mental health professional. Additionally, if at any point during this episode you feel overwhelmed or triggered, please turn it off and talk to someone or do something that is helpful to you.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the last episode of the mental health mini series, episode six, make self compassion your superpower. There is actual power in self compassion. And if you were anything like me a couple of years ago, and you really lacked self compassion, I hope that this episode just plants the seed of self compassion today I first want to give you a good understanding of what self compassion is. So it's a concept that's gained a lot of attention, but thanks to psychologists like Dr. Kristen Neff, who is now the leading researcher in self compassion. She says it involves treating ourselves with the same kindness, concern, and support we'd offer a good friend when they're struggling. There are three key parts to this. Self kindness. Shared humanity and mindfulness. I did mindfulness a few episodes ago, so make sure that you go back and check that one out to help balance this out a little bit.

And as I have a focus on mothers in this podcast, women's health, motherhood, reproductive health, and perinatal mental health, or just mental health in general. That's because motherhood comes with these incredibly high unrealistic expectations, which then turn, harsh judgments, whether that be from yourself or from others. It's all perpetuated by the myth of this perfect mother, this perfect mother does not exist. And yet every mother to some degree will set her expectations up against her perception of what the perfect mother is. And this myth can make us feel like we are never enough and that we're a bad mom and that we're never measuring up. Self compassion offers us a way out of that emotional trap by helping us treat ourselves with understanding and care, like we would a friend. Some of us are very good at offering compassion to others and not very good at offering it to ourselves. And then some of us are not very good at giving it to others and then in turn, we are [00:02:00] not very good at giving it to ourselves. So be mindful of where you're sitting in this I guess you could call it this spectrum of self compassion where we've got really harsh judgmental criticisms on one one end and self compassion and self love on the other. Where are you?

Are you meeting in the middle? Do you have a bit of both? Are you leaning more to one side than the other? I want you to open up and understand where you're at. Now I'm going to offer two little scenarios here of two mothers. They are completely fictional characters and fictional lives and everything about them is fictional. I've literally made them up. the top of my head. They might feel very real though, and maybe relatable. That's the point. So I'm going to give you these scenarios and I'm going to use these mothers as I guess my examples throughout this episode.

So Kate, she is a 34 year old mother of three all school aged children. She's now juggling a full time career in marketing after taking a break to raise her kids. So she's just getting back into the game and lately, she's finding herself incredibly overwhelmed. She's trying to balance that work home life and is finding it very difficult and often feeling guilty and inadequate. She often finds herself yelling at her kids. She's feeling very stressed in her body and tense. She's not sleeping very well at night because the to do list and tabs in her brain are open all night long. And she often has thoughts of I'm just failing at everything. I'm such a burden. I'm messing up my kids, et cetera, et cetera. Then we have Nora who's 26. She's a stay at home mom who is taking care of her two younger children, including an eight week old baby. So she's fresh in postpartum and has a toddler. She's absolutely exhausted. She struggles to find time for even basic care like shower and food and often feels low and frustrated and is always judging herself harshly. My house is always a mess. I'm disgusting. Why can't I do this? I should be doing this. She's having those kinds of thoughts.

Now, instead of Kate coming home and taking a stress out on her kids or her family, or even on herself with her really harsh critical thoughts. What if Kate took a moment to pause before she walked in the door or before she picked up the kids or whatever she was about to do and just took a breath. So this is the mindfulness coming into it. And what if Kate's inner dialogue was something like, I am feeling really overwhelmed and that's okay because I have a lot on my plate right now and it's normal to have moments of frustration doesn't make me a bad mom. It just makes me human. What would Kate's behavior look like now? So instead of being disconnected from her body and listening to those harsh critical thoughts. What if Kate took a moment to drop anchor, recognize how she's feeling in her body. And talk to herself in a compassionate way.

What would happen when Kate walked through that door?

Now, instead of Nora comparing herself and her house to others and being critical of her mothering and the like, what if Nora changed her dialogue to something like, I am completely exhausted and I haven't slept and it's okay to feel the way I feel right now. I'm still a good mom. It's just really tough right now, but I'm doing the best that I can.

What would her thoughts and behavior look like now?

Just simply having a moment of self kindness doesn't erase our challenges. It just offers us, or in this instance, Kate and Nora, a space of grace, which then helps to navigate your feelings with more gentleness and less judgment. And then in turn, gentleness with others this is the superpower of self compassion.

Now, I know many people struggle with self compassion and that is due to a combination of things like societal influences, depending on your culture, with self expression and expectation, also your personal experiences, maybe your upbringing, how you were spoken to as a child, where you ever offered compassion and just, These really internalized beliefs around strength and resilience and worthiness and productivity and the like.

Which all implicitly discourages expressions of vulnerability or self kindness and deems them as signs of weakness. And from a young age, lots of people may receive messages that value this sort of toughness and criticize emotional sensitivity, which leads to harsh self criticisms.

Often our early life experiences play a really crucial role in shaping how we are compassionate either to ourselves or to others. If you grew up in a home where affection or approval was based on like achievements or how well you suppressed your emotional needs, you might find it particularly challenging to embrace self compassion. And you even might fear that accepting your flaws or limitations could result in rejection or judgment. And that can be a really scary place to be. I just want to acknowledge how that feels. I just want to acknowledge that is reality for a lot of people. If this is really big and really deep for you, I do encourage you to go and seek some other professionals or resources to be able to get past those things so that you can practice self compassion. If that is your goal.

There's also a lot of misunderstanding of what self compassion entails. So many confuse it with like self pity or a lack of accountability, fearing that being kind to ourselves will undermine motivation or lead to some kind of complacency. But research actually has shown that self compassion fosters resilience, lowers emotional exhaustion and can actually enhance motivation by reducing this fear of failure. So individuals are more likely to persist in their goals when they treat themselves with kindness after setbacks rather than harsh criticisms. So if you think of Kate and Nora is struggling to keep up with the demand of having small children and feels like she's failing at it because she's got a messy a house or She didn't make her bed that morning or she's feeding the kids chips for dinner or whatever And then Kate who's Really harsh and yelling at her kids because she's just so incredibly stressed all the time. If we think about those two women in this scenario, how does self compassion reshape their lives?

The last thing I wanted to mention was stigma. We can't get past it when we talk about mental health issues, but stigma exacerbates difficulties in practicing self compassion. So those suffering from mental health challenges like anxiety or depression, they might internalize this societal stigma, which leads them to believe that they are fundamentally flawed or at fault for their struggles and this all comes down to self blame and it makes it really difficult to extend kindness and understanding to themselves when they have this really heavy self blame. And it's perpetuated by that cycle of really unhelpful self talk and emotional distress. So overcoming these barriers to self compassion requires challenging these long held beliefs and understanding the genuine meaning of self compassion and gradually cultivating a more kinder and more supportive inner dialogue and approach.

Learning to be a friend to yourself, if anything. Now, practicing self compassion is not always easy particularly if you struggle with any of the things that I've mentioned but to overcome these challenges, it's important to recognize and question the beliefs that hold us back. And remember that practicing self compassion is about building a healthier, more supportive relationship with yourself. Now, on that note, I wanted to talk a little bit to the neuroscience of self compassion because the brain is incredibly fascinating and it also just makes a lot more sense.

If you've been quite critical of yourself throughout your life, what happens when we have certain thoughts repeatedly is that you've heard the saying neurons that fire together, wire together. Your brain has then created these pathways of thought, and we can call them negative thoughts if you like, or criticisms. It's built these pathways of criticisms. Now doing this over a long period of time, those pathways become really strong. So then it can feel really difficult to think of anything else about yourself. But what self compassion can do is the more you practice this, it can create a new pathway. So a new pathway for compassionate thoughts around the already very strong pathways.

I saw a hypnotherapist a couple of years ago and he explained the process of a new thought or a new pathway as if you can imagine really tall, long grass, and you want to make a pathway through this really tall, long grass. After you walk the same pathway in that long grass multiple times, it's probably not going to be a very big visual pathway, right? But what if you did it for a week or a month or six months? What do you think the pathway in the long field of grass would look like now? Do you think it would be obvious? Do you think it would be flattened enough to be easier to see and walk through? If you're thinking about your brain like this really tall, long grass, and you're trying to create these new self compassion thought pathways in your brain, it has to be practiced regularly so that it sticks – the new pathway will eventually overtake the old pathways.

The impact of self compassion on your brain is actually really profound. It affects both your neurological and your psychological processes and research in the field of neuroscience has began to uncover how self compassion can lead to these positive brain changes and structures and functions, which ultimately influences our emotional regulation, our stress response, and our, Overall mental health. So what they found was harsh criticisms cause high cortisol, meaning it switches on the threat systems. And the more you criticize yourself, the more you create a threat and you get stuck in that stressful loop. A threatened nervous system is one where change cannot occur. So we have to be able to get ourselves out of that threatened state. Kindness tells your nervous system that you are safe. So then you can apply that kindness, that compassion. And when you perceive safety, that's when your body is safe. Can relax and settle you're back in that parasympathetic nervous state It's the rest and digest your mind opens and literally the synapses Open up allowing you to consider process and integrate new information. So practice kindness.

Now a lot of the talk is about gratitude. Gratitude is everywhere you look practice gratitude and oftentimes people will practice gratitude and be like, I feel worse. I never tell people to practice gratitude. And here's why. So when you're faced with life challenges, common advice is just to be more grateful, right? We, I'm sure we've all said that to ourselves at some point. This often exacerbates rather than alleviates the emotional burden you're experiencing in the first place.

And this happens because the emphasis on practicing gratitude often neglects a fundamental prerequisite, which is self compassion. Jumping straight into gratitude without recognizing or validating our pain. But, May inadvertently intensify the feelings of inadequacy or shame or guilt or whatever that feeling is. It's a way of dismissing the genuine difficulties you're already experiencing. And you may just bury those feelings further. If I could give you an example, so we'll use Kate. So she's been struggling with anger and yelling at her kids, which is a really common experience for mothers. And she believes due to these deeply ingrained beliefs about certain emotions, that the solution to her feelings is to just be more grateful, by comparing her situation to those less fortunate, which is often what we do when we practice gratitude and acknowledging the positives in her life, which is just like a positive thought insertion. She just instantly feels guilty and shame for her having those emotions in the first place. And then we'll and suppress her feelings. Never really addressing the anger.

Now, in that same scenario with the same mother, Kate, now imagine she acknowledges her anger and her outbursts without judgment and understanding that it's a natural response to her circumstances. And she reminds herself that it's okay to feel overwhelmed and that her emotions are valid without comparing her situation to others or downplaying her feelings. Just simply accepting and comforting herself. She creates a space to explore the roots of her feelings, helping to create a healthier emotional landscape. I will always say self compassion over gratitude

It's also been found that people who practice kindness paired with determination are people that evolve the most. A great starting point to understand self compassion and identify areas for growth for you is Kristen Neff self compassion test. I will put all of her details and the test in the show notes. Make sure you check them out. Plenty of guided meditations are also offerings that she gives and they're all available on her website. And they're just such a great resource for beginners here. The last thing was affirmations or journaling. I loved affirmations because it helped me flip that script. It reminded me that there are different pathways of thought that I can access. And I've written some affirmations for mums, which are self compassion based. And if you subscribe to my website, the power of birth. net, you get free access to over 30 self compassion based affirmations designed for mothers. And I also have birth affirmations there as well. So if you're interested, make sure you check those out.

I want you to remember that self compassion isn't just a practice. It's actually a journey towards recognizing your inherent worth and your strength. It's about acknowledging the struggle is part of being a human and that you're not alone. I really hope that you embrace self compassion and you reap the benefits of this way of living. Thank you so much for joining me in the mental health mini series. I hope you've enjoyed it.

And until next time.

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