Category: Acceptance

The strategy helps people cope without being defensive.

Treating oneself kindly when things go wrong is one of the best ways to promote emotional healing, research finds.

People who are more self-compassionate experience less negative emotion.

Self-compassion allows people to accept responsibility for bad experiences, while feeling better about them.

Self-compassion is also linked to more:

• optimism,
• feeling alive,
• and energy.

Being self-compassionate involves three components:

1. Directing kindness and understanding towards the self.
2. Knowing that suffering is part of the human condition.
3. Accepting mindfully what is happening.

People who are self-compassionate place less importance on the outcome of events; instead, trying to accept them mindfully whether they go well or badly.

One way of increasing self-compassion is through expressive writing, research finds.

A practical approach to boosting self-compassion is explained in my ebook “Accept Yourself“.

Professor Mark R. Leary, the study’s first author, said:

“Life’s tough enough with little things that happen.

Self-compassion helps to eliminate a lot of the anger, depression and pain we experience when things go badly for us.”

The conclusions come from a series of studies in which people remembered negative experiences, imagined things going wrong and were even given unflattering feedback themselves.

In each case, people who were higher in self-compassion coped better.

Professor Leary explained why self-compassion is beneficial:

“Rather than focusing on changing people’s self-evaluations, as many cognitive-behavioral approaches do, self-compassion changes people’s relationship to their self-evaluations.

Self-compassion helps people not to add a layer of self-recrimination on top of whatever bad things happen to them.

If people learn only to feel better about themselves but continue to beat themselves up when they fail or make mistakes, they will be unable to cope nondefensively with their difficulties.”

Despite the importance of self-compassion, it is self-esteem that is often people’s focus, said Professor Leary:

“American society has spent a great deal of time and effort trying to promote people’s self-esteem, when a far more important ingredient of well-being may be self-compassion.”

However, much of the benefits of self-esteem may, in fact, be down to self compassion, said Professor Leary:

“As you disentangle them, self-compassion seems to be more important than self-esteem, and is in fact responsible for some of the positive effects of self-esteem.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Leary et al., 2007).

Up to 50 percent of caregivers suffer mental health problems themselves in the struggle to help another.

Depression and anxiety do not just place a burden on the sufferer, but also those around them.

Carers for those suffering from mental health problems also feel great responsibility and suffer because of it.

Up to 50 percent of caregivers suffer mental health problems themselves in the struggle to help another.

Compassion is a skill

Research shows, though, that training in compassion can help carers deal with this responsibility, relieving their own depression and anxiety.

Compassion is a skill that involves turning towards other people’s pain.

Similarly, self-compassion involves thinking about the self with kindness, sympathy and compassion, without evaluating or judging the self.

(For self-compassion training, try PsyBlog’s ebook ‘Accept yourself‘.)

The Danish study put 161 caregivers on an 8-week compassion training course.

Those they were caring for had a variety of mental health problems, including ADHD, depression and schizophrenia.

Ms Nanja Holland Hansen, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“After completing the course, the relatives had increased their well-being on several parameters.

They could deal with the illness in a new and more skillful way, and we saw that the training reduced their symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.”

Facing suffering

Central to the training is learning to deal with pain and suffering without confrontation or avoidance.

Instead of trying to avoid the unpleasantness, it is important to look it in the face.

Ms Hansen said:

“The relatives learned that the more they turn towards what is difficult, the more skilful they may act.

For example, relatives often try to ‘fix’ the problem or the challenge – so as to relieve their loved ones of what is difficult.

That’s a huge pressure to constantly deal with, and very few people can bear it.”

Caregivers to those with mental illnesses face considerable burdens, Ms Hansen said:

“Fear and grief are emotions that take up a lot space for relatives of people with mental illness.

For example chronic fear, which is a real fear that parents of a child with schizophrenia have about whether their child is going to commit suicide, or whether a child with autism will ever enjoy a ‘normal life’.

Our suffering is maintained inside of us when we don’t work with it.

To avoid feeling pain, we may resort to behaviour such as working too much or buying things that we don’t need.

It’s therefore in all these everyday actions that our compassion training becomes important and can be used to help alleviate what is difficult.”

Loving kindness

The researchers helped people cultivate their loving kindness, training compassion for their own suffering, for others and for all sentient beings.

Caregivers also received training in ‘Tonglen’, which is Tibetan for ‘giving and taking’.

It is a type of meditation where you imagine taking other people’s suffering away and giving them all that is good in yourself.

The aim is to reduce selfishness and expand the sense of loving-kindness.

Ms Hansen said:

“Not a single person can completely avoid experiencing painful things in their life.

In this way we’re all the same.

But what isn’t the same for everyone is our ability to deal with the pain and suffering we experience.

Training programmes in compassion have been developed because the research shows that we can train and strengthen our mental health.

With systematic training of compassion, we generate more attention – and understanding of – our own thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

And this helps us to develop the tools and skills to engage in healthier relations with ourselves and others.”

→ Read on: how to support a depressed partner.

The study was published in the JAMA (Hansen et al., 2021).

Despite the hardships of ageing, people generally feel happier as they get older.

The secret to getting happier with age is learning acceptance, research suggests.

Part of acceptance is learning to engage with negative emotions, which might seem an odd way of reducing them.

However, older people experienced less anger and negative emotions, the study found.

At the same time, they also showed increase levels of acceptance.

Acceptance, is not about giving up, but about engaging with emotions, both positive and negative.

→ Try Dr Jeremy Dean’s ebook ‘Accept Yourself’.

As the study’s authors explain the…

“…goal of acceptance is not to reduce negative affect but rather to change one’s relationship with negative affect by engaging with all emotional experiences (including negative ones) in a nonjudgmental way.”

The conclusions come from a study of 340 people aged 21-73 years-old.

All were asked how they felt day-by-day and the extent to which they accepted their emotions.

The study’s authors write:

“Although aging is associated with some deterioration and hardship, ironically, people tend to feel better as they age.

[…]

Results demonstrated that feelings of anger and anxiety decreased with increasing age but sadness did not.

Further, increasing age was associated with increased acceptance of negative emotional experiences.”

How does acceptance work?

The study’s author explain how engaging with negative emotions can be beneficial:

“Acceptance is thought to decrease negative affect by two related processes: (a) presenting opportunities to acknowledge and understand negative emotions,
which promotes self-compassion as well as psychological and behavioral flexibility, and (b) reducing rumination, negative cognitions, and metaemotions.

Although engaging with negative emotions may initially increase one’s self-reported experience of these emotions approaching negative emotions in a
nonevaluative way diffuses these emotions relatively quickly.”

The study was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Shallcross et al., 2013).

Working on self-esteem is not the best way to move on from regrets.

“Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this regret from a compassionate and understanding perspective.

What would you say?”

That is the writing instruction used in a study which found that self-compassion helps people move on from regrets.

Being kind to oneself is an excellent way of letting go of past disappointments, embarrassments and failures.

Indeed it may be that with self-compassion, it is possible to feel stronger after life’s inevitable hiccups.

The study’s authors conclude that self-compassion works by increasing acceptance:

“…self-compassion led to greater personal improvement, in part, through heightened acceptance.

Furthermore, self-compassion’s effects on personal improvement were distinct from self-esteem and were not explained by adaptive emotional responses.

Overall, the results suggest that self-compassion spurs positive adjustment in the face of regrets.”

For the research, people were asked to write about regrets they had.

One group were encouraged to think self-compassionately with the following instruction:

“Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this regret from a compassionate and understanding perspective.

What would you say?”

A second group were encouraged to boost their self-esteem with the following instruction:

“Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this regret from a perspective of validating your positive (rather than negative) qualities.”

Both were compared to a control group who did not write about regret.

The results showed it was the people who wrote self-compassionately who felt more self-forgiveness, personal improvement and self-acceptance.

It turned out that accepting your flaws is better than trying to boost yourself up by focusing on positive qualities.

Self-compassion probably works in multiple ways.

Not only does it better allow us to confront our regrets, it also enables us to see them in their true light.

After all, we are all only human.

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Zhang & Chen, 2016).