Forget self-compassion.
I’ve been reflecting on a conversation that we had in my Intro to the Shadow workshop a few weeks back about self-compassion and the Shadow and wanted share my thoughts with you in case they resonate.
It’s a conversation that hit a personal chord for me because, historically, I’ve been hard on myself—to a point that it’s debilitated my ability to blossom in certain areas of my life. I’ve spent a lot of time seeking self-compassion, but it wasn’t until I studied my Shadows that I was able to finally find some relief from my inner judge.
There are many ways to approach Shadow discovery; my specific flavor of it and my intention for why I bring this work to you is because I want to help free you from your inner judge, and ultimately, bring you to a relationship of sustainable self-reverence. Imagine what life would be like if you were to feel confident in your sense of worthiness and belonging.
First, let me introduce a couple terms for clarity:
“Persona” represents how we want to be known.
“Shadow” represents who we think we could never be; the part of us we deny exists and would hate for others to see in us.
Back to my thoughts on self-compassion:
Self-compassion exists because its opposite also exists. Would you agree that the opposite of self-compassion is self-hate?
Consider this: Why do we have self-hate?
When I think about why I would hate myself it is because I am not showing up as the person that I think I am supposed to be (Persona). In other words, I see a behavior pattern that does not line up with how I want to know myself (Persona) and it makes me sick to that that I could ever be the person that behavior pattern represents (Shadow).
Yet, there comes a point when self-hate feels exhausting, so we learn that in order to get rid of the self-hate we need self-compassion. So, here we go piling on more layers to the type of person we think we need to be in order to be loveable (Persona) and then find ourselves disappointed when the unfavorable behavior pattern shows up again (Shadow). This causes us to fall into the cycle of bouncing between having self-hate and using self-compassion to negate it.
What if, instead, we stopped running from the part of us that expresses those unfavorable behaviors and became curious about who that part of us is and what it wants for us? Then, it wouldn’t be about needing self-compassion to cancel out the self-hate as much as it would be about integrating our different dimensions. Then, we can be done with the play between self-hate and self-compassion and be at peace with our fantastic complexity.
If this resonates with you and you are interested in exploring more about this, check out my Shadow Alchemy course on the “workshops” pages. Hear more about why it rocks in the short video below.
