Self Compassion and Parenting

As many mothers would likely echo, parenting is the most beautiful, exhausting, excruciating, rewarding, triggering and heart expanding experience of my life. And that description doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Now that my daughter is 16, I am challenged by our relationship more than ever. The inevitable messages I receive from our culture is that “this too shall pass” and “raising teenagers is hard”. This may be true, but, I know for sure that the toughest part about my relationship with my daughter is how I am in it.

Every relationship we have, whether a new friendship, a romantic love or a familial tie is a teacher. Our experiences with others illuminate our old wounds, fears and doubt. If we bristle and feel defensive in a conversation with someone, what have we heard that has hit an old place of unhealed pain? Often, the intention of the language in the moment was not to harm, yet, we are hurt because the past creeps back into our present, whether we realize it or not.

We all have a specific lens we view our lives through. Self-study, one branch of the tree of yoga, helps us to witness some of the unconscious layers of illusion that colour our reactions to one another. Through gentle self-inquiry, we can learn to question the thoughts and emotions that arise in our interactions and choose to change something about the way we think and speak, to others and ourselves. A powerful path to change is the practice of self-compassion.

Like “self-love” and “self-care”, a term like “self-compassion” has been referred to ad nauseum in self help and spiritual spaces, and while it is wonderful that many people are waking up to the power of our thoughts and the wisdom of cultivating a kinder inner dialogue, sometimes these phrases can lose their meaning.

In my view, real self-compassion means that we forgive ourselves for not measuring up to the impossible to reach, idealized version of ourselves we think we need to be to be loved and accepted.

This is not easy. And this kind of forgiveness needs to be enacted daily, sometimes several times a day, to challenge our inner critic and our bias toward negativity.

When my daughter tells me that I am a controlling mother and that she feels like she can never be good enough for me, my heart breaks. How can she not feel the depth of my love? How can she not know the deep soul work that has gone into cultivating an unconditional space of love for her?

On some level, I know she knows she is loved beyond words.

But. The critique she has of me as a mother is exactly the opposite of how I prayed she would feel. It’s how I felt at her age and the ache of it is still palpable.

So, I live with the uneasy feeling that I have passed on the shame and the unworthiness that eroded my own self-confidence as a teenager.

I have meditated and visualized her higher self and my higher self communicating on a Divine plane. I have questioned my thoughts and beliefs and done a lot of healing work around my own childhood. I have forgiven those that I had once held responsible. But still, in some moments of vulnerability, if I really allow myself to go there, I will be undone by regret and sadness about what could have been.

If I only knew then what I know now.

If I had known how much my parenting was driven by my own fears and self-doubt.

But going there is pointless. Sinking into the familiar flush of shame disempowers me further.

Nothing outside myself can truly fix it for me. My husband’s assurances that I was present, loving and mindful as a mother soothes me momentarily, but it only delays the inevitable work still to be done.

Forgiving myself.

I haven’t been a perfect mother, no one can be, even though we’ll exhaust ourselves by trying. Our kids will never understand (nor should they, it’s not theirs, it’s ours) the pressure we put on ourselves to be strong support systems and loving guides. And, if we happen to have the natural inclination that most of us do, to please others, to make sure everyone is happy and comfortable, to our own detriment, then when our children lash out at us, it hurts.

I’m supposed to be the adult, to not take it personally, to hold space for her anger and individuation and rise above co-dependency. But, the truth is, I know where my weakness are and I know why. I know that my inner emotional landscape has nothing to do with her, and she cannot control how I feel, just as I can’t control her.

The only thing I can control is how I show up in my relationship with her. And I have found that when I consciously create space to hold myself with compassion, everything changes, without having to involve her at all.

Practicing self-compassion means you practice speaking to yourself like you would to your dearest friend. Consider the quality of the chatter that’s normally in your head, you wouldn’t dream of talking to others the way you likely talk to yourself. We call ourselves stupid, fat, ugly, disgusting and a litany of other insults that are embedded within. Those insults, they’re not you. They’re not your fault. They came from some other place in some other time and they can be purified.

Yoga, meditation or other contemplative practices help us to reduce our internal suffering because we learn to witness our negative thoughts rather than identifying with them and acting based on them.

When you learn to observe your thinking, you can catch the ruminations of the inner critic and choose not to jump on that train.

That’s the moment to reach for the practice of self-compassion. Self-compassion has been defined as “extending compassion to one’s self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering.

Self-compassion has been studied and it’s been shown to be more effective that self-esteem when it comes to creating resilience to anxiety, depression and shame. This fact resonates with me. In my years of recovering from disordered anxiety, I spent a lot of time with techniques meant to strengthen courage and sense of self. Often though, it would feel false, as if I’d slipped on a cloak of confidence rather than embodying any real strength and self worth.

When I turn to self-compassion, I do feel a shift. For me this means coming back to myself as soon as possible after I have been triggered by the words or actions of someone else. The simplest way to gather yourself back into the present moment and into the embrace of the part of you that is compassionate is to receive and release a long, deep breath. One conscious breath can lead us out of the mind and into the heart. 

From here, rather than overcoming anger, doubt and shame, I attempt to allow the negative emotion in and observe it. I observe my resistance to it; it doesn’t feel good. I notice where I feel it in my body to help me to continue to draw myself back to the present (our minds may be chaotically spinning with thoughts, memories and stories of past and future, while our bodies are always present- attending to sensations in the body and deepening the breath offers a moment of clarity in the here and now).

From the present moment, I can begin to speak to myself as if I were speaking to a friend. I might even imagine that friend or loved one to help me overcome the strong urge towards self-blame. Some questions that I will gently ask myself are:

“What are you thinking?”

“What are you afraid of?”

“When did you learn this fear and when have you felt this before?”

“What do you need in this moment?”

Many times, our reactions of blame, anger, shame and fear arise because of our unmet needs. We spend our lives searching for unconditional love, the kind of deep acceptance we all deserve, but may not have received in the way we needed it. Once we realize what we need, we are the only ones who can truly provide it for ourselves.

When I teach teens to empower themselves with stress management tools, I often ask them to consider what kind phrase or words of encouragement they wish they heard every day from their friends and loved ones. Once they come up with it, I encourage them to inwardly speak it to themselves as often as they can.

Try it for yourself. What words of loving encouragement do you wish you could hear from your family members and friends?

When you’ve got it, repeat it to yourself. You might hear resistance from another voice within, that critical part of you that often takes center stage. Override the resistance by coming up with reasons your new loving thought is true.

We can all come up with ways in which we could be better, thinner, richer, smarter etc. Our society is set up to enforce the shame we all carry about ourselves. That’s why we need to consciously decide to challenge the habitual negativity thinking we all experience. You can do this by listing all the ways you are doing well and the things about yourself that you can appreciate.

What you may notice is that when you make the brave choice to speak to yourself kindly and be on your own side, perspectives widen. No longer are we caught in the narrow focus of fear and blame. There’s room to acknowledge that everyone is doing what they can do with the tools they have. There’s room for the realization that just because you’re having a thought does not make it true. There’s room for remembering to be wary of the stories we tell ourselves because we might just become them. If a change needs to occur authentically, it’s much easier to find the energy for transformation from a place of compassion.

When my daughter tells me I’m controlling, I observe the defensive part of me want to push forth to tell her all the reasons this is not true and try to convince her to see me as I want her to. If I bring my self-compassion practice forth, I recognize that as a mother I am many things. I am controlling. And I am accepting, loving, forgiving, friendly, funny, angry, nervous, thoughtful, brave, confident, scared, open, proud and so much more. We’re all incredibly multi-faceted and each one of our experiences helped to shape who we are and how we react to others.

My daily goal is to remember that I can choose to believe that my daughter is meant to have me as a mother as she continues her own journey, and that modeling self-compassion to her may be one of the most powerful gifts I can give her as she grapples with her own negative self talk.

If you are interested in exploring the practice of self-compassion, I’ll leave you with a wonderful example of it in this short piece by writer Jung Pueblo:

I am not fully healed

I am not fully wise

I am still on my way

What matters is that

I am moving forward

I can support you in establishing a self-compassion practice that works for you. If that feels right for you, book with me here.