Sunday 21st June
Self-compassion is one of the most common suggestions people I work with receive.
Sometimes from therapists. Sometimes from books, podcasts, or well-meaning friends.
And yet, for a certain group of people, it can be surprisingly difficult advice to use.
Not because they won't try it (most of them already have).
It's that the 'instruction' is landing on a system that experiences it very differently from how it was intended.
For someone whose sense of worth has become closely tied to what they produce, achieve, or contribute, "be compassionate to yourself" can register as something more complicated than relief.
More often it registers as a threat. "Lower the bar, go easier, treat yourself the way you'd treat a good friend" reads, at the level where the problem actually sits, as something closer to "become less valuable".
And the body treats that like any other threat: it braces.
This isn't resistance. Given how these structures are often built, it's a fairly logical response. The advice is pitched at one level (yet the problem is living underneath it).
Paul Gilbert built an approach around this exact problem. His starting point, one underneath compassion-focused therapy, was that for people high in shame and self-criticism, compassion can feel frightening rather than soothing.
So the work doesn't open by instructing it. It opens by building the capacity for it slowly, through experience, in a way that doesn't keep tripping the alarm.
In practice that means it rarely uses the word self-compassion at all, at least early on. It stays with what's actually present: the flat feeling itself, negative self-beliefs, what happens between you and the pattern when it fires.
The compassion, when it comes, tends to grow out of that. It rarely arrives because someone told you to produce it.
You can't instruct your way into a feeling your system is currently reading as a threat.
The starting point that does work is smaller than "practise self-compassion," and a good deal less impressive. It's closer to noticing the audit start up, the one that kicks in the moment a week goes flat, and not following it.
This might feel like an act of rebellion or failure. And it certainly won't feel like the answer.
But this is where the work actually begins.
As always, hold it lightly.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand