We have been looking at compassion and how to increase the compassion you have for yourself. The first article in this series looked at the concept of compassion as a whole, the second explored how to recognize your limits and the third focused on how to have tenderheartedness towards your distress. This article focuses on the final part of the definition of compassion, namely the tendency to pull alongside the suffering with a proclivity to alleviate it (the definition of compassion we are using is: a recognition of pain/distress coupled with a tenderheartedness towards the distress and a tendency to pull alongside the suffering with a proclivity to alleviate it).

Having a tendency to pull alongside your suffering with an inclination to alleviate it means that due to recognizing your limits, you understand the validity of your distress and due to having tenderheartedness you can approach your pain with the intent to do something to lessen it. Phrased another and simpler way, you are willing to get in contact with your hurt.

Due to this willingness, you no longer hold yourself as separate from the distress. You dissolve the boundary between the distress and that which you claim as being “you”. Since your hurt is no longer regarded as being separate from yourself you can get to understand the true nature of your hurt, which in turn allows you to engage in more effective pain-alleviating action. A simple example is a mild pain in your stomach. A self-compassionate stance would begin by acknowledging the pain, after which the pain would be regarded as valid, as worth paying attention to without belittlement or judgment. This openness to the pain – as it is – would enable you to pull alongside it: to truly experience the pain, to feel it’s nuances and thereby to understand it, allowing you to make a more effective determination about what needs to take place in order to stop it i.e. is it hunger pains, indigestion, or the pains of food poisoning, or the flu, etc….

This last component of self-compassion can sometimes be the hardest for survivors of trauma. Unlike the prior components of compassion (acknowledging your pain/distress and having tenderness towards the pain/distress), pulling alongside your pain/distress requires full contact. Acknowledging your pain/distress can be done in a purely logic non-emotional manner and tenderheartedness, though fully emotional, can sometimes be done from a psychological distance i.e. the tenderheartedness is primarily for the pain and not for you, who is in the one in pain. Pulling alongside your pain/distress shatters any and all conceptions that you are separate from the pain. Your relationship with yourself shifts when you erase the barriers between your pain and you. Due to this you will feel your pain, you will experience your distress in all of its nuances, but a stance of self-compassion will not abandon you in this place of hurt.

Before engaging in the work of self-compassion many individuals keep their pain at an arms distance, walling it off – and therefore assume that self-compassion entails an inverse relationship – namely allowing the pain to be all consuming; but this is not the case. The tricky part with pulling alongside your pain/distress is that it requires a delicate balance – neither disowning nor being engulfed by the pain. Using the earlier example of the stomach pains if you disowned the pains by pretending they aren’t there or ignoring them, you will not be able to take action to end the pain; but if you become engulfed by your abdominal pains, you can quickly become helpless and regard yourself as being insufficient to alleviate any of the pain.

Not only does self-compassion stand against being engulfed by your pain, it also stands against inaction. Inherent within self-compassion is the acknowledgment, honoring, holding, experiencing as well as accepting of wounds and the soothing, healing, growing, moving forward, and re-connecting with life. Self-compassion requires both, both a tender connection with every ounce of pain and an unyielding commitment to take action and heal the pain.

I encourage you to practice growing self-compassion for who you are, for who you have been and for all that you have gone through. Feel free to work on whichever component of self-compassion is most appealing to you at the present but don’t forget that all components are fundamental to compassion. As always, reach out for the guidance and compassion of a trained professional – you do not need to go the road alone.