Can empathy and self-compassion save us?
Most of my clients come to me saying some version of, “I feel like I am at war with myself.” And they’re right. Most of our parts (identities), or various internal programs, are just battling it out inside our brain, with our wounded inner child hiding for cover.
Now, if I told my clients upfront that love and self-compassion were the answer they’ve been looking for, they might agree (or they’d at least agree self-hate was the problem), but they’d also probably roll theirs eyes, think “love is the answer” is a nice song lyric, and then inquire exactly what they need to do to heal.
And so instead, I’ll do some version of parts /shadow work, helping them see how their inner critic, judge, perfectionist, addict, saboteur, etc, is actually trying to protect them from a painful (emotional) childhood experience and allow compassion to come right on in and do its job. Simple, but not always easy. Some of us have built up a lot of resistance to love.
Let’s look at it this way…
Many militaries train those going to combat by using dehumanizing strategies (I’ve read some cool research being done within the US military, but unfortunately haven’t heard a lot of great stuff from vets I know). If every military taught empathy, how to see their “enemies” by understanding their childhoods via their upbringing (aka programming) (“Oh, no one was ever there for them either? He was abused too?) and that they too, were doing the best they could, how many would still be willing to go into battle? Throw in some self-compassion and self-forgiveness, realizing once again that our own inner demons are just kids doing the best they can to survive in an insensitive world, how many wars do you actually think there’d be?
We live in world of fake enemies, inside and out. Yet when we break it down and remember everyone- that we ourselves were once just innocent little kids wanting to be loved, we can start to soften. Going deeper, we realize all our hardened parts are the result of our little selves not receiving unconditional love and learned to turn towards fear (living in survival mode). From here, we can soften more.
And once we can love those kids, or “inner enemies”, and parts of us that got confused between the difference between love and fear, they heal.
*I was recently in a workshop with Dr. Sue Morter where someone asked what to do with the resistance that came up during a love-based meditation. She said “Just love that part of you” and that interrupts the cycle. I loved that answer too, as sometimes I think we can get stuck try to figure things out , and instead we can just go back to love.
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Previous blog posts on the topic:
A Dog and Her Girl 