My Secret Superpower Self-Compassion

I’m at the Carl Jung Institute in Houston, Texas. I love psychology and have been drawn to it since college. How the mind works fascinate me and gives me tools of how to live. One of the greatest lessons I was ever taught in my life was that you couldn’t control other people or the world, but you can manage your reaction to them.

Control your reaction to situations. It was mind-blowing to me, and I haven’t let go of that as a mantra since. I look over the books, and I want to buy them all, but one, in particular, sings to me. As I pick it up in huge words and a thick book, it says Self-Compassion: The Power Of Being Kind To Yourself by Kristin Neff.

I hold the weight of the book, and it feels like the heavy I carry daily. I moved to a new state and away from family and friends for a relationship. This person tells me every day that I am now so skinny that my bones hurt him. I can’t eat a piece of chocolate because it goes over the calories for the day. I have lost my attractiveness with the weight I had lost over time with eating at home and taking care of myself.

He tells me that no one loves me. That my friends are broken and that they don’t deserve love just like I don’t.

This voice melds with my own that I don’t have any friends, that I am friendless, loveless, unworthy of being around other people. This person repeats this every day, and eventually, I turn mute. I stop talking, stop engaging with fights for my worth. Maybe he’s right. Maybe this is the narrative that I live in now.

I saw that Self-Compassion book and didn’t buy it that day. But I did buy it later, and it sat in my bookcase. I discussed with a friend how I use self-deprecating humor to deflect all the time. They brought up how I use it like a weapon against myself. I thought of the Self-Compassion book that I bought and didn’t read. It felt heavy even sitting in the bookcase. Could I ever enact a life of self-compassion?

It took a hurricane to destroy that book and break free of the relationship to start the journey. It took more than three years trying to break free of the person I was with, he didn’t want to let me go, but I was still was not good enough even to touch. My hair made his skin itch, so I cut all of it off. My lotions disgusted him with the scent, so I removed everything that smelled good from my life. I’m a sensory and aroma-detailed person. I eradicated everything I loved out of my life.

When I finally broke free, it took time to start rebuilding what I had come to adopt as my own. The language that he was giving me had to be evicted out of my body. I remembered that discussion with my friend and knew she was on to something. I returned to finding the Self-Compassion book digitally this time. I started reading it and using the information to rewrite my world. I began to work on my inner voice and how it sounds inside me.

When I took a wrong turn and got lost driving around the city, I stopped saying how I messed up over and over. Instead of trying to tough love myself back into my body when I had panic attacks, I would see what they were. My body is trying to save me from an invisible foe and protect me.

Years later, I admit to my friend that she is part of my head’s new narrative and dialogue. She’s astounded and amazed to be a part of my growth. I find someone I love in my life who says to me to be compassionate living every time I get hard on myself. They remind me how all my emotions matter, even the hard ones. I stop trying to control my feelings so much that they backfire, explode, and cause me more harm than good because they’ve been waiting to be seen for years.

I’m living a life of being kind rather than criticizing myself to hell and back again.