Yvonne Spence's Blog
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June 4, 2020
Review of Saving Sara: a Memoir of Food Addiction by Sara Somers
Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction[image error] by Sara Somers is the story of a long struggle to overcome food addiction. In a note to readers she says the aim of the book is “to help people who are compulsive eaters and food addicts, like me.”
Disclaimer: I received this book from Somers’s publicist who asked for an honest review. Although I had the usual teenage angst about weight and dabbled in some unhealthy eating practices back then, I am not a compulsive eater or food addict. Therefore I am not this book’s target audience, and so my review can only speculate on its achievement of its primary aim.
Having said that, I found Saving Sara to be well written and an interesting and compelling read. I appreciated its honesty and Somers’s willingness to take responsibility for her part in conflict and to recognise the suffering her behaviour caused those around her as well as herself. Somers sees her food disorder as a combination of an addictive tendency within her and the way she was grew up feeling invisible and unloved due to her parents poor parenting skills. In her mid-twenties, her father told her two stories from when she was a baby. One of those stories was about a time he was persuaded by friends into not picking her up when she was crying. The friends said it would spoil her. Her father said he’d never forgiven himself.
Somers writes that in telling these stories, it was as if her father said: “You are right, we weren’t good parents.” But while she felt grateful for this confirmation, at that age, she felt it was “too little, too late.” She wasn’t ready to forgive, and spent many more years blaming her parents for her problems. She says, “I tried to convince anyone who would listen just how horrible my parents were.”
Now, while she recognises her parents’ behaviour affected her, I don’t get the sense that she blames them, but that she sees her whole family as having been locked in a terrifying and destructive dance, saying, “My mother confessed to me many years later, well into my adulthood, that she found me intimidating. What an irony, I thought to myself. I was totally intimidated by her.”
Where this book excels is in its honest exploration of what life is like with multiple addictions, and Somers’s honesty and compassion for all involved is clear throughout. She describes many incidents from her colourful life and relationships, including her first foray into stealing to indulge her craving, au pairing in Europe, and travelling with other hippies she met in various places. Among all the chaos, the only constants were her battle with food and weight and low self-esteem. As I’ve already mentioned, Somers writes well, and the story of her life is absorbing to read, with all its risky behaviour, and spells of feeling in love, happy and temporarily free of her habits until the inevitable fallings-out brought the compulsions right back. Amazingly, while still in the depths of addiction, she went graduate school, obtained a masters in psychology and worked as a psychotherapist.
A few of the stand-out passages for me were those in which, like that moment with her father, life could have taken a different turn. For instance, between high school and college, she got an au pair job, going with a family to their summer home. She was, she says, terrible at the job. At the end of it, the children’s mother took Sara aside to evaluate her summer and explained Sara’s many failings. Somers writes: “She wasn’t being unkind, just straightforward––something I wasn’t used to.…I was crying when she told me what an au pair in a family does.”
Yet this painful experience was the first time Sara felt visible, and she felt cared for in spite of the negative feedback. But, she says, some people, “given constructive feedback…are able to start making behavioral changes to improve their lives. Addicts can’t do that. The disease is more powerful than the knowing.”
For several decades, Somers tried various treatment programs and Twelve-Step meetings, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Greysheeters Anonymous (an offshoot of Overeaters Anonymous, which in addition to meetings, gives participants a meal plan they must follow and which demands abstinence from specific food types.) She repeatedly found reasons to drop out. As she says, “Shame…taught me to be afraid of people who would actually help me and to trust people who would hurt me.…It taught me fear, and fear caused me to be wrong about most everything.
Of course, as the title Saving Sara suggests, Somers did eventually recover from her addictions, and the last part of the book addresses that. I was glad of that. No matter how well written, I was beginning to weary of reading about yet another argument with her mother or current lover leading to yet another binging episode. Fortunately, Somers was also beginning to weary of her life. After a drunken party, she’d had enough of drinking. Of the decision to seek help, she writes, “In my life, I’ve had a few moments like these––moments where the fog lifted and I knew the right thing to do to care for myself. Too often, I’ve let them pass me by. I’m not clear why I grabbed this moment, this precious moment, but I like to think that I found the divinity within me and finally paid attention.”
A few days later she returned to AA, but it would still be some years before she went back to Greysheeters Anonymous.
I found the fairly short section on recovery to be less strong than the rest of the memoir. Perhaps it’s not surprising that having been a therapist for many years, Somers seems more fluent when analysing what kept her addicted than she is at describing what set her free. Although she attributes her success to Greysheeters, I found it hard to grasp why having a meal plan and weighing everything she eats made such a huge difference, especially since the first time she tried she only lasted 5 months before binging and took another 22 years to return.
Somers says that in Greysheet meetings she was told she was addicted to sugar and other simple carbohydrates. There is scientific evidence that would agree sugars can produce cravings in some people, so I have no quarrel with her perspective that refined carbs are best avoided, and would go as far as to say that applies to all of us, not just those with eating disorder. But Somers writes that all her life she had been: “counting calories, talking about ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ foods” and I would have preferred a clearer explanation of why weighing food is different to counting calories and banning carbohydrates is different to listing illegal foods.
I also have some concern that someone with an eating disorder reading this book might feel Greysheeters Anon is the only program that works. While that was Somers’s experience, I know of people who have recovered through other methods. While programs with meal plans (such as Greysheeters) work for some people, for others this becomes another stick to beat themselves with. As with any addiction, no one program works for every person.
While I realise this is a memoir so by its nature a personal story, it might have been useful to see some exploration of more recent research into eating disorders that suggest the make-up of gut biome can play a part in sugar cravings––with probiotics and even fecal transfer being used to support people into balance. Throughout the book Somers frequently mentions that people didn’t understand that she had a physical addiction, and that she felt misunderstood and seen as simply greedy or lacking willpower. Some exploration of the physical causes might go some way to helping increase the understanding she longed for in those without eating disorders.
I appreciate that Somers’ relief at recovering from a lifelong food disorder must make her feel passionate about the program that supported that recovery. However, my feeling is this book would be good for helping compulsive eaters feel understood, but I’m not sure if it points to a clear way forward. In the end though, the path from addiction is each person’s individual journey to make and as I’ve already said, even for someone without an eating disorder, Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction[image error] is a compelling read in its own right.
Disclosure: Should you buy Saving Sara via the links in this post, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you do that, thank you in advance!
April 30, 2020
Ways to help you feel calm during the time of coronavirus
If you’re feeling afraid much of the time right now, you’re not alone. Everyone worldwide has been affected in some way by the Covid-19 pandemic. None of us can know how this will end, but we do know it’s causing a lot of fear.
How do we deal with our emotions in this time of coronavirus?
Fear robs us of balance. It hijacks our brains and makes rational thinking hard. We swing between catastrophizing and denial, we blame others, we blame ourselves. Blaming others–like governments or people not following social distancing rules–might make us temporarily feel better, but it does nothing to allay fear or bring peace of mind. Physical techniques such as deep slow breathing or yoga can help short term, but for me learning to pay attention to my mind’s inner chatter and to direct it towards self-compassion and letting go have made by far the biggest changes in my life. The suggestions in this post are all things I’ve used myself and that I find enormously helpful so I hope you will find them helpful too.
Why awareness and compassion are great tools for reducing fear
How are you feeling as you read this post? If you feel anxiety, what’s happening just now, and as importantly, what are you thinking about?
Many of us go through life with a lurking dread that something terrible is about to happen. We’re wary of, “tempting fate,” if things go well. I’ve heard leading doctors and politicians say this lately. Mostly we don’t even notice we’re doing it and don’t realise why we feel so anxious. So the first step is to notice when your mind is in armageddon even as you sit drinking coffee in the morning sunshine. The second step is to be kind to yourself when you notice.
Awareness without compassion is useless. Without compassion, we tell ourselves to stop being so stupid, get a grip. We punish ourselves for feeling scared, which only adds to our suffering. Compassion means when we notice our racing minds, we treat ourselves kindly.
Don’t compare your inside to someone else’s outside, but do share your fears with someone you trust
Fear isn’t bad, it isn’t stupid and everyone feels it sometimes; we all have our own triggers so what makes you feel afraid might not scare me and vice versa. For example, as this pandemic took hold, I was flooded with memories of my younger daughter in intensive care as a baby and my initial instinct was to want to protect her. For a friend, the advice to wash hands regularly brought reminders of her chronic illness as a teenager and how she became obsessed with washing her hands then to try to protect herself. Talking about our responses helps us understand each other.
Focus on what is here now
Recognising that we are responding to memories allows us to have self-compassion and to remind ourselves it’s not happening now. We have little control over what memories come into our minds, but we do have some choice about what we do with them.
Below is a quote from Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor who survived the Holocaust. Every time I read his words and think about what he went through, I feel inspired.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
When you notice fear, in that space between stimulus and response – which might be a millisecond – you have a choice. There is no right way to respond to an emotion. You could deny the feeling, push it away or try to distract yourself. Depending on your circumstances in the moment, any of those may be valid options. However, while those responses might give momentary relief, they will not ease your fear in the long term and so it’s useful to have some strategies that give both instant and longer term relief.
Actually it is okay to love yourself
It took me a long time to realise this, but really, truly being kind to myself has been a far more effective way to change than beating myself up ever did. A lot of what makes us keep doing things we don’t want to do is because we punish ourselves so much for it that our pain feels unbearable – and the only way we can think to ease that pain is to do the same thing again.
Don’t believe me, try it out for yourself. Next time you catch yourself reaching for chocolate to block your fear, or washing your hands for the hundredth time, remind yourself you’re doing the best you can in this moment and that in the next moment you can make another choice. Then, you might still feel scared, but you’ll be on your own side. When we give ourselves a little kindness, our minds have space to come up with different options. Don’t wait till you are perfect to love yourself. Self-kindness and compassion are necessary before we can make other changes.
Self-compassion is not the same as self-pity.
Sometimes we put off having self-compassion because we think it means we’ll indulge ourselves or wallow in self-pity. It’s really important to recognise that self-compassion and self-pity are not remotely the same.
With self-pity, we think: “Poor me, I’m suffering so much and nobody understands.”
With self-compassion we think: “This is hard right now, I’m suffering in this moment. Everyone has moments like this so people do understand how hard it feels. I can be kind to myself, talk to myself with love and reach out for help if I need it.”
Self-pity makes us feel isolated and misunderstood; self-compassion keeps us much more connected not just with other people, but also with this moment rather than letting the mind go running off into scare stories.
What would a kind person say to you now?
If you find it hard to imagine having compassion for yourself, here’s a very simple way to start that I often use. Just ask yourself, “What would a kind person say to me now?”
Obviously, a kind person wouldn’t tell you to wash your hands till they bleed or to eat all the chocolate in house or drink all the beer. But they might tell you that it’s okay to feel like you want to do those things, and that it’s possible to feel safe without doing them, even when this pandemic is still going on.
And they would definitely tell you that it’s okay to feel fear and that it’s possible to let it go.
How to let go of fear
Once you’ve found some compassion for yourself, the most effective way to let go of fear is to stop fighting it, and instead allow it. Fighting it any emotion only adds to your suffering. This doesn’t mean holding onto the feeling, either, you’re not inviting it in forever. Think about it like a cloud passing through the sky. The sky doesn’t try to get rid of the clouds and nor try to make them stay. Our emotions can be like that too, once we stop trying to push them away.
Allowing emotions is the basis of many mindfulness practice and particularly of the Sedona Method, which is an effective way to release painful feelings.
These are four basic Sedona Method questions to ask yourself:
“Could I allow myself to feel this feeling?” (Even more powerful is to ask: “Could I welcome it?’)
Whether you answer yes or no doesn’t matter. Next just ask yourself:“Could I let it go?”
This just means would it be possible for you to let it go in this moment? You aren’t trying to let go forever – but to release its hold on you. If this feels complicated (as it did to me at first) then try this:
i. Notice the sensations in your body that come with the emotion, the sense of contraction.
ii. Is it possible for that contraction to ease? Don’t worry even if your answer is, “No.” Many people get a release even when they answer no.“Would I let it go?”
In other words, are you willing to let it go? Or you can ask, “Would I rather hang onto this feeling, or would I rather be free of it?” If you’d rather hang on, then that’s fine. Ironically, sometimes choosing to hold on is all we need to actually let go.
Finally, if you have answered yes, or even if you’ve answered no, you can ask yourself:“When?”
When would you be wiling to let go? If the answer is”Now,” you’re likely to feel quite a bit of relief just from that. If your mind says, “When this is all over,” then don’t try to force change. The kinder we are to ourselves, the easier it is to let go.
Sometimes, even after asking yourself these questions you might feel stuck. Generally if that happens, it’s because we identify with a feeling, it feels as if it is “me.”
If this happens, you can ask, “Am I these emotions and thoughts, or am I aware of them?” There’s a pretty good chance that as you realise you are not the emotions and thoughts, you will feel calmer. I usually do.
I also notice that even when I feel fear, a part of me is calm. If you can notice that, and allow your answers to come from that part of you, it’s easier to let go.
Ways to help you feel calm(er) during the time of coronavirus: the short version
There is no right or wrong way to feel. We are all triggered by different things, so what you feel anxious about might be different to your partner or friends. That’s okay.Your thoughts and beliefs drive your emotions, not what’s actually happening. Think about a time you went to see a movie and felt really scared. You were safe, but your mind was so involved in what was happening on screen that your body reacted to that. So pay attention to what’s here now, not what your thoughts say is happening.Self-compassion strengthens us and makes it easier to cope with fear or other strong emotions.Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. You know what’s going on inside your own mind, but you don’t know what’s going on inside someone else’s. That cheery neighbour who waves to you might get back inside their house and cry.You aren’t your emotions. That might seem a weird thing to say, but so often we talk about our emotions as we are them. “I’m sad,” we say. Or,“I’m scared.” I’m so angry.” We feel sad. We feel scared. We feel angry. But they aren’t who we are, and so we can let them go. Even emotions that we often have and that feel intense eventually pass. When we allow our emotions, they go.
February 20, 2020
Can we resolve conflict without violence? #1000Speak – 5 years on
1000 Voices Speak for Compassion is five years old.
In the early days of January 2015, as millions of people around the world reeled in shock after Islamist terrorists burst into offices in Paris and murdered journalists at the Charlie Hebdo magazine, another group of Islamist terrorists, Boko Haram, swept through towns and villages in northeast Nigeria massacring anyone who couldn’t run fast enough to escape. Though the murders in Paris were bad enough, it was the thought of men rampaging through villages killing children, women and the elderly that gripped me and that still comes to mind when I consider the questions a Facebook friend, Lizzi, asked in response to the a something I’d posted about Boko Haram.
“Why?”
“What makes someone behave in this way?”
And, “How can we change it?”
Five years ago, I felt hopeful that compassion could create the change we needed. And so I sent out a call asking who would like to join me in writing about compassion on a single day. My hope was that our words of compassion might in some small way aid in creating a more compassionate world.
Five years of #1000Speak, has anything changed?
Five years on, nothing much seems to have changed. Five years on, in the UK we have a Home Secretary who has just proposed new immigration laws that her own parents, who came to the UK in the 1960s, would fail. We have government ministers demanding social media must do more to remove “unacceptable content” after television presenter’s suicide, while the National Audit Office implicates government policies in the suicides of at least 69 benefits claimants. And we have a prime minister who uses the language of war while he claims to be standing up the EU bullies in preparation to “negotiate” an exit treaty. Our country isn’t unique. In the USA, Hungary, Brazil, India and several others, hard-right politicians use inflammatory language to disparage anyone they see as a threat.
A world filled with conflict
Around the world we have the seemingly endless conflict. Wikipedia has a list of worldwide wars (1000 – 9999 deaths in the last year) and major wars (10,0000+ deaths) raging in 2020. Of these, three started in the twentieth century, with the oldest conflict (in Afghanistan) going on since 1978. If you are 42 and live in Afghanistan, you have never known a country at peace.
So are we just beating our heads against brick walls when we write about compassion? Does compassion make no difference? Are those of use trying to encourage its development in humanity just wasting our time? Maybe it’s just human nature to be violent? After all, conflict has been a part of our existence since before history. Is it even possible to resolve conflict without violence?
In spite of everything, I still believe the answer to that last question is yes. And I also believe that the answer lies within everyone of us, not just with governments and leaders.
The answer is inside
This idea, that we hold the answer inside ourselves, doesn’t mean that you have to solve all the problems of the world by yourself. That could lead you to take on too much responsibility and feel hopeless. And that’s not going to help anyone or the planet.
So I’m not suggesting that you or I need to go out personally and convince Trump or Johnson to adhere to the Paris 2015 Climate agreement or to change their policies on immigration. We can only do that collectively, in the same way that, over decades, collectively we have changed perspectives of governments and ordinary people on race, women’s rights, gay people’s rights, the climate crisis and many other issues.
Of course, there’s still much room for improvement, but it’s important to recognise the gains we have made. Take the climate crisis for instance, which is violence against our beautiful planet and which needs to end soon if we are to survive. Decades ago, when I began recycling and eating organic food, I was weird; now I’m becoming normal. It might seem as if Greta Thunberg has run a one-girl crusade against carbon burning mega-polluters , but she’d be the first to say that’s not true. She wasn’t even the first young girl to plead with UN leaders to create change before it’s too late. Severn Cullis-Suzuki did it in 1992. Thunberg’s actions became possible because of those that came before her, because of changes in perspective that had already taken place within Sweden and elsewhere.
And what created those changes?
How change happens
I began recycling paper and cardboard when I lived in a city that had its own paper mill and did a kerbside collection. It was easy for me to recycle paper, and once I’d got into the recycling frame of mind, it wasn’t a huge leap to take my bottles to the bottle bank. But even before that, I’d shared a flat in London with a woman who was a member of Friends of the Earth, (when that was also weird). She had a huge stack of magazines in the hallway that eventually she took to a paper bank. So maybe I was already semi-aware of the issues.
About the same time scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, and pinned the blame on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosol sprays and fridges. Almost everyone I knew stopped using sprays with CFCs.The hole in the ozone layer was scary – but – and I think this is hugely important – we could do something about it. As people stopped using aerosols, manufacturers realised they had to adapt or die, so non CFC aerosols appeared along with pump sprays.
So that’s one way that the power to create change is within us. We make the changes we want to see, and people join us. When enough people do, the general awareness changes. And nowhere does this have a bigger impact than when we change our thinking, and how we think about our thinking.
I’m going to make a bold assumption and presume that since you are reading this blog, there’s a good chance you don’t support the hard-right politicians that are currently running most countries in our world. You may even think that if only we could get rid of them we’ll have peace and harmony, and we will be able to resolve conflicts without violence – because it’s their fault after all, isn’t it?
The problem with that is: the kind of thinking that drives them is in every one of us. To destroy it, we’d have to destroy ourselves.
Physician, Gabor Mate says: “If I see the world as a horrible place… I want to attack before I get attacked. I’ll always be looking out for myself because the world is not to be trusted. So, if that’s the world you live in, that’s the world you’re going to create.”
Who hasn’t felt this way sometimes – that the world is a horrible place and that if you don’t watch out for yourself, you will get attacked? You may even think you’re standing up for others when you reach out to attack the ‘bad’ guys, but the core belief remains the same: “People who disagree with me are bad.” (Mate was talking about what he considers to be Trump’s perspective in the quote above, but I’ve heard many, many people who totally disagree with Trump say almost the same thing.)
A world of outrage
We live in a state of outrage, fuelled by tabloid press and social media. On any given day on Twitter or Facebook, it takes a few seconds to find people raging about something someone has said. A quote will be shared and reshared, showing just how terrible this person is. Often the people sharing the outrageous comment are from a different political party than the person they quote, though it could just be from a different faction of the same party. In this way, “people like us” becomes a smaller and smaller group.
And people “not like us” quickly become inferior, and therefore it’s okay to attack them, either verbally or physically.
In the 1970s, when Philip Zimbardo was a psychology professor at the university of Stanford, he set up an experiment, which consisted of a simulated prison with students employed to act as “guards” and “prisoners.” Within hours, the guards were talking about: “These are dangerous prisoners. We have to show them who is in control.” The experiment degenerated so quickly into sadistic violence that it was stopped after 5 days.
Zimbardo says, “I said, ‘No physical force,’ but I didn’t limit psychological force.” Each day that passed, the ‘guards’ would find new ways to humiliate the ‘prisoners.’”
When a “prisoner’ had an emotional breakdown, Zimbardo’s team released him, but he says, “I thought we’d made a mistake in our selection procedure. He must have been in quote, ‘defective.’”
It was a visit from Zimbardo’s girlfriend that brought the experiment rapidly to an end. She wasn’t the first person to visit from outside, but she was the first person to say what was happening was wrong.
Zimbardo believes that we all have the capacity for violence and that the situation is what causes violence. He cites a study by anthropologist John Watson of 23 cultures found that how cultures go to war has a big impact on their behaviour. ‘If they don’t change their appearance only one of eight kills, torture, mutilate. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13, that’s 90 percent, kill, torture, mutilate.’
Inside the brain of a psychopath
In 2005, neuroscientist Jim Fallon was studying brain scans of serial killers, comparing them to scans of people with various mental health issues and none. Among the “normal” scans was a group from his family, and one of them matched the patterns in the murderous psychopathic brains. Deeply curious, Fallon investigated – and discovered the psychopathic brain was his.
Until then, Fallon had believed that genes make us who we are, but his discovery forced him to reconsider. Now he sees his childhood kept him from what his genes could have had in store. “I was loved, and that protected me,” he says. Someone with his genetic make-up who grew up with violence or neglect would most likely develop full-blown psychopathy. Fallon says that while behavioural training of pre-adolescents with signs of psychopathy “are promising,” he doubts anyone who has reached teens or adulthood with could experience reversal.
However, the youths detained in Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center (MJTC) are teenagers, and its treatment program has had remarkable success. Because punishments didn’t work, the boys were rewarded for even minor positive behaviour, and the “program had the greatest impact on serious violent offenses, reducing the risk of their incidence by about half.”
So, when punishment doesn’t work, it turns out rewards can. And this is true, not just of psychopaths, but for all of us. In most cultures around the world, punishment has long been used to try to keep behaviour in check. But as Fallon recognises and as the MJTC experience shows, kindness is more likely to reduce negative and create positive behaviours than punishments are. This doesn’t mean we release killers onto the streets to kill again, but it does mean we would gain more by teaching them that kindness is more likely to get them what they want.
Jim Fallon spoke to relatives and friends, and learned that though he wasn’t a murderer, he did have many unusual, and psychopathic, tendencies. With that discovery, he made a choice, and began to consider other people’s feelings and to ask himself, “What would a good person do here?” He says his motivation for doing so is not altruism but pride, that he wants to prove he can. I’m not sure that matters.
What this, and the MJTC treatment success indicates is that all the outrage and name-calling our culture is currently obsessed with is a waste of time. We don’t change psychopaths by calling them psychopaths and we don’t change people with different views from ours by tweeting a few of their words, and ranting about how appalling those words are.
Asking, “How?”
Instead, we would gain more benefit by doing what Fallon and Zimbardo did – looking at ourselves. Whether we ask, “How can I be this way?” as Fallon did, or, “How could I have done that?” as Zimbardo did, we need to be genuinely willing to see the answers waiting there for us.
This isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s far, far easier to look outside for someone or something to blame. But in the longterm, that hurts. In The Compassionate Mind[image error], pyschologist Paul Gilbert writes: “…when we give up blaming and condemning ourselves (and others) for things then we are freer to genuinely set sail towards developing the insight, knowledge and understanding we need to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.”
Excuses don’t work, compassion does
This is my experience. The more I notice the urge to punish others or myself, the more I have choices. I can deny that urge, pretend it doesn’t exist, blame it on someone else, point outwards and say, “Well I might have done this, but what about what x did? It was even worse.” This is so common in politics it has a name: whataboutery, but we practice it in everyday life, trying to make ourselves feel just a little bit better. You yelled at your kids yesterday, but at least you weren’t as bad as that woman across the street who smacked her daughter in full view of everyone. I was late for work by a minute, but at least I’m not as bad as that guy who rolled in half an hour late, clearly hungover.
The trouble with whataboutery, is that it doesn’t actually achieve its aim. It doesn’t make us feel any better about ourselves, at least, not for more than a couple of seconds. The reason is simple: we only ever do it if we already feel bad about ourselves and believe what we did wasn’t good enough. It’s an excuse, an attempt to avoid others (or even ourselves) from seeing the badness inside us. You feel hellish for yelling at your kids, and expect other people to judge you. That someone else does something you consider even worse doesn’t take one thing away from your “crime.”
But self-compassion does. Or maybe it doesn’t so much take away from your “crime” as give you the capacity to approach the darker, more disagreeable parts of yourself with kindness. And that in turn gives you the capacity to approach the darker parts of others with kindness.
This is not the same as making excuses for someone. A while ago, I started a new job. The person I most often worked with had been promoted the day I started and from the very first day, she was short and unfriendly towards me. At first, I put it down to her feeling the stress of the new job, and tried to ignore it, but I began to dread going to work.
Then at home one day, instead of trying to understand her or make excuses for her, I allowed myself to fully feel all the hurt and pain inside me.
And then, only then, was I able to see that if she spoke to me like that, the way she spoke to herself was most likely even worse. Suddenly I went from trying to protect myself to allowing myself to feel safe, and from trying to make excuses for her to having compassion for her. And here’s the interesting thing – the next day when I was back at work, she was pleasant to me.
Though Zimbardo’s and Fallon’s work, we see that we all have capacity for violence, and we all have capacity for connection. And as Fallon’s work also shows, we all can make choices. We don’t have to destroy the violence within us to reach compassion, in fact we can’t. If we try to destroy any part of ourselves, we don’t have compassion but internal conflict. That keeps us trapped.
If we truly want to resolve conflict in the outer world, we have to start by ending it in the inner. It’s hard, hard work to look inside ourselves and see the darkness there, and the first instinct may always be to punish. If it is, we can ask something similar to the question Fallon asks, “What would a kind person do now?”
This post is for 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion’s 5th Anniversary. If you would like to read more posts about compassion or to add one of your own to our link-up, click on the button below.
You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!
