Day Two Hundred and Forty Four!!!!!!!!!

Self-Compassion


Self-Compassion is about valuing the self. Taking care of yourself, putting yourself first, valuing what you do and who you are, and having love for yourself, realizing you are human and therefore you make mistakes, you learn by struggling and having failures and that even though you may not attain exactly what you are wanting or striving for, that you are okay. 


Remembering that no matter what happens you are learning and growing and becoming and therefore, you are okay, is a way to self-soothe.


Self-soothing is a way to show that you love yourself, “there there, it will be okay.” Self-soothing can also become an avoidance tactic of dealing with bad feelings, and this is when self-compassion can turn into self-defeating behaviour, “there there, it will be okay… it wasn’t going to work anyway. So have a tub of ice cream and make it go away for now.” 


This is where your need for your development of core values comes into play. We are all born with a drive to create value. When you value self, other, or something, it is to hold that up as important and worthy of appreciation, you are willing to devote your time, energy, and effort to it and even sacrifice for what it is that has been held up by you as important. 


Self-compassion and self-value goes beyond basic human physiological and psychological needs such as; survival, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, status enhancement, and defence mechanisms. Most urges to overeat or attack food comes from times in which our motivations are based in these basic needs. These are times in which our self-value is low and therefore we are vulnerable. In order to be able to prevent these drops in self-value so that our self- compassion techniques are not self defeating, we must be able to know what are our core-values even when under stress so that we can get in touch with them, restore ourself to them, in order to have continued and consistent emotional well-being. Emotional well-being depends upon giving ourselves self-compassion, a sense of self-value more than a sense of self-devalue. 


When we raise our level of self-value, our self-compassion increases, this is when we know we are authentic because to be authentic means that we are being true to our deepest values. 


When we devalue ourselves, we lower our value of our own experience, and when we do this we start to become numb. When we become numb or disassociate or freeze it means that we are also becoming indifferent to our true or deepest values of ourselves and our experiences. When we feel shame (I am a bad person) or guilt (I have done a bad thing), this is our felt sense that we have violated our need of being true to our deepest values. The feeling of meaninglessness, in which we feel a sense that it doesn't matter what we do, that we will not succeed, and everything we do is really for nothing, it means that we are out of touch with our deepest values. These are the devaluing feelings felt when disordered eating has a tendency to occur.