Struggling with anxiety? Develop your self compassion
Recommended reading: The Compassionate Mind approach to overcoming Anxiety, by Dennis Tirch
In recent years there’s been a gradual integration of Eastern spiritual practices into the psychotherapeutic methods of the West. Mindfulness and meditation might have once been considered strange and exotic techniques, but they’re now a feature of mental health programs everywhere. Compassion, the subject of this book, is another dimension of Buddhist practice that’s also being integrated into some of our therapeutic methods, and for good reason. While compassion is not the sole preserve of Buddhists, nor the East, it forms a core part of many Buddhist contemplative methods, and the way in which it features in the management of our anxiety is the focus of this useful book.
It’s hard to imagine that the amelioration of any kind of emotional suffering can occur without compassion, but compassion, like many psychological and emotional skills requires development. This kind of development is something we don’t experience much of, and as such there's not a lot of it around. This book is a good starting point for anyone that is interested in how the practice of self compassion can be cultivated to help with them their own mental health.
At first glance it could seem confusing as to what compassion might have to do with anxiety, perhaps a good place to start is to explore the fragmentary nature of our experience to see the way in which compassion features (or doesn’t) in how we deal with ourselves. When we’re anxious, we’re often aware of the anxious part of our experience, but we’re often unconscious of what we meet our anxiety with. Much of what we experience is not only experienced, but it’s also consciously or unconsciously evaluated, judged and assessed. We’re fragmented beings, we have experiences and then judged ourselves for the experiences we have, and much of that judgement is a long way from compassionate. Let me give you some examples of common kinds of judgement that I hear people have about their anxious experiences:
"What’s wrong with me?"
"Why am I so weak?"
"Why can’t I just get over this?"
"Why can’t I control this?"
We often relate to our anxiety like the very experiencing of it is a sign that something is wrong, as if we should somehow only be experiencing good feelings. We also relate to feelings and anxious thoughts like they are things that can just be switched off and that not being able to do so is to be a failure. None of these very common assumptions are compassionate. They’re unwittingly cruel - to assume that the experiencing of an emotion that usefully aids our survival is to be a failure is to set oneself up for inevitable shame and disappointment. To assume that we should be able to switch off our feelings when feelings are unconsciously generated, and without choice, is to expect ourselves to be able to control something that is not within our power to control. Our difficult feelings can be soothed and regulated, but they cannot be switched off at will, which is one of the reasons why we need compassion for the continually difficult aspects of our lives. To summarise one of the books key messages, meeting anxiety with judgment and criticism sustains our nervous system in a chronically threatened state, and meeting anxiety with compassion recruits the brain circuitry that helps to dampen down our anxiety and return us to a state of equilibrium. Our nervous system has the capacity to both perpetuate our sense of threat and alternatively to calm us back down again depending on how we use our awareness of what we experience. Developing compassion is to develop the skill of self regulation to ease our own suffering.
An aspect of this book I particularly like is the way in which it takes an evolutionary perspective to the very existence of our emotions - we often don’t make the distinction that the point of our emotional life is not to make us happy, it’s to help us survive. We’re animals whose purpose, at least from a biological standpoint is to live long enough to reproduce and raise our offspring. It works for animals (whose primary concern is survival) to have a highly sensitive and persistently active threat system, and this is what anxiety is - a threat management and avoidance system. The very acknowledgement of this is itself the beginning of compassion, we didn’t choose to have nervous systems that are hyper attuned to threat, evolution has given us them in the service of the continued proliferation of life. We therefore need every bit of assistance we can in learning how to modulate our nervous systems for a better quality of life, and compassion is a good place to begin.
If you’re struggling with anxiety and you’d like help I offer counselling in Berkhamsted. Please feel free to get in touch with any questions you might have.