The Healing Power of Compassion

There’s a theme that often emerges in therapy and it’s especially strong in overfunctioning women: the impulse to fix oneself; to be “better.”

I see this as the natural growth and expansion impulse of the universe gone awry in humans. 

You see, everything in the universe is in a natural process of expansion and evolution. The universe is expanding. Plants and trees are constantly growing until they die. Every animal species is naturally evolving. Humans are no different. Except that being self-aware makes us eventually want to participate in that growth and evolution process.

We want to acquire skills; be better at things we might not have been good at before. We want to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Think and Grow Rich (1937), we want to master The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), and build Atomic Habits (2018).. Just to name a few of the best selling books of the past century that illustrate our drive towards personal improvement.

However, let me share two illustrations of what often happens at a personal level:

One woman is constantly trying to “fix” herself. She learned to strive for “growth” and “improvement.” The result is that she is constantly dissatisfied with herself and her life. 

Another client has a fierce inner critic. The critic in her thinks that self-condemnation is the way to be better. She feels like an absolute failure at everything in life. 

I’m thinking of two specific women when I write this, but the reality is that they are not alone by any stretch of the imagination. The majority of the overfunctioning women that I help would say they feel the same.

The trap that keeps people stuck “fixing” themselves is that the mindset that says, “I need to be better” is the same mindset that is thinking, “I’m not good enough.” This mindset will have you chasing the carrot at the end of the stick. “Good enough” NEVER comes if you can’t find it right here, right now. 

You don’t need fixing. You need healing. And there’s no amount of shaming yourself, or judging and criticising yourself that will result in healing and real growth. 

Let me say that again: real growth will not come from trying to fix yourself.

So what is the most transformative healing power? 

It’s the opposite of shaming, judging and criticising. It’s compassion.

The parts of you that you want to “fix” most or get rid of are the parts of you that need the most love and compassion… 

• The people pleaser
• The enraged part
• The jealous part
• The anxious part
• The needy part
• The controlling part
• The procrastinating part
• The “good girl”
• The critic
• The alcoholic, the gambler, the overspender
• The part that keeps making the same mistake

What if instead of trying to get rid of (or silence) that part, you asked the question:  What happened to me that made this part necessary?

Another really beautiful question to ask this part of yourself is, What are you trying to achieve?  Or conversely, What are you afraid would happen if you stopped doing the thing you do?

When you start approaching your troublesome parts with genuine curiosity you move into seeing them with kindness and compassion. You come with softness, so those parts of you begin to soften.

In other words, you want to approach those difficult parts of yourself like a mom coming to her crying four-year-old child. Go with the same sweetness, the same curiosity, the same unconditional love. 

I say this to my clients all the time when I start to invite them towards compassion: notice what happens when you take your four-year-old onto your lap and you just hold her with total love. No fixing, no rushing, no telling her to stop crying. Just holding her. You validate how challenging it can be for little kids, and you don’t judge her or tell her how stupid she is for crying. You don’t tell her it doesn’t matter. Instead you might say, “I’m so sorry you’re upset;” “it’s so hard to have big feelings when you’re a little kid;” “I love you exactly as you are;” “you’re going to be ok, but if you’d like to stay on my lap for a little while, that’s fine too.” After a while of sobbing, she begins to melt into your arms and chest. Your compassion dissolves the charge of her upset feelings.

This is the compassion that your parts need.

Inside each one of your problematic parts is a much younger version of you (often a young child) that found the only way she knew to cope and handle life.

An inner critic is usually a kid between 10-14 that either learned from harsh parents to criticise themselves in order to be better; or she learned from other middle schoolers that being critical is the way to be cool. Another function of the inner critic is that “if I criticise myself first it will hurt less when others do it.” And this is the type of little critic that often arises from being bullied.

A part with an addiction problem is trying to numb and quiet the incredibly intense emotions that they couldn’t cope with at the time the addiction started. This is often in teen years. Escaping through substances became the only way to not feel so much pain.

A people-pleasing good girl is often trying to make sure that she’s loved and accepted, because at some point in her early life she started to experience that love had to be earned. Or worse, she was experiencing significant abuse (verbal, physical, emotional, or threat of neglect), and fawning was a strategy that often worked in order to keep the angry parent from hurting her or leaving her.

Can you see why judging and shaming our parts will never work? 

It’s like lambasting a little kid for finding the only strategy that they could come up with in order to cope. It is literally that. You are bashing your own inner little children when you tell them, “you’re not good enough”, “you need to do better”, “you’re just making up excuses.”

The ONLY transformative answer is compassion. 

Compassion is the outpouring of unconditional love. It’s pure, unadulterated loving witnessing and holding presence. Importantly though, compassion is neither pity nor coddling. 

Pity looks down on you. This is why almost everyone bristles at the idea of being the recipient of others’ pity. Coddling is the enabling of the narrative of pain as the only truth. When you coddle, you let someone throw a pity party for themselves while you play the music.

Compassion is entirely different. Compassion validates that the feelings are real (not necessarily that the story leading to the feelings is truth) and it also holds you in a space of knowing that you are capable of moving past this experience. Compassion says, “I see how hard this is,” and “there will be a way for you to overcome this… whenever you’re ready.”

Can you see how powerful that is?

You might be asking, OK, and then what? How’s that supposed to change anything? I can’t just leave things as they are.

To work with compassion as a healing tool, it takes staying with any part in question for some time –sometimes a whole therapy session, sometimes several, sometimes it might just be a morning of journaling. It’s not just a simple statement of compassion. Healing with compassion is the art and practice of steadily holding the part with unconditional loving witnessing, verbally validating that part’s lived experience, and transmitting that soothing balm of loving kindness. 

There’s so much more to share about this but I’m going to leave it at this for now. 

For some of you, I might be opening up the door to some interesting self-reflection for the first time and this will possibly raise LOTS of questions for you. If it does, hooray! Send me a message. Or if you’re reading this on social media, leave a comment below. Let’s have a conversation about it.