Hi ,
So often I see reminders to be kind and gentle to ourselves on these boards. I often also see questions on how to improve self-compassion, self-soothing, self-acceptance, self-esteem, or just how to stop being so critical of ourselves and be kinder to ourselves. Other times, I see posts on how to reduce toxic shame.
I've found these issues to be interconnected: self-compassion, self-soothing, self-acceptance, and self-esteem all work to help us feel better about ourselves and our life, and to take care of ourselves and be kind to ourselves. Toxic shame seems to have the opposite effect, destroying our self-esteem and often causing us to treat ourselves poorly.
Many of us have grown up in dysfunctional families and have never learned about self-compassion, self-soothing, etc. In a way, we were taught to depend on others to do these things for us. Toxic shame and treating ourselves poorly is what we were taught. Others have been treated poorly in their relationships with the BPD (w/NPD traits)s in their lives and have lost or forgotten about these things.
I have found that it was hard for me to improve other things about myself until I overcame my toxic shame and learned self-compassion, self-soothing, self-acceptance, etc. Plus, just learning these skills has helped me a lot with living and feeling better.
These same issues also affect our ability to self-validate: So many of us come to bpdfamily.com wanting some
validation about what is happening to us. The problem for me was that because my self-compassion, self-soothing, etc., skills were poor, I couldn't self-validate very well. Now, having learned these other skills, my ability to self-validate has also improved a lot.
These skills have done a lot toward filling that "hole" or emptiness that I was wanting somebody to fix for me when I met my BPD ex. I suspect that if I didn't have this "hole", I wouldn't have gotten involved with my BPDex. That was a major need my BPDex filled.
I thought it might be good to start a thread on resources for helping us learn to have self-compassion, how to self-soothe, etc., beginning with the link that ClearMind posted about a series of videos on these topics:
The Self-Acceptance Project
Finding Our Sense of Fundamental Worthiness and a link to a web page of the first speaker of this project, Kristin Neff:
www.self-compassion.org. I have found her web page packed with useful information for developing self-compassion, such as exercises and guided meditations (I recommend both!).
Additions to this list of resources, feedback is greatly appreciated.
We are all worthy!
AnotherPheonix
