… compared to self‐esteem, self‐compassion might be a more effective way of cultivating a healthy way of relating to one’s self, because it provides a more stable basis for developing a positive self‐image.
– Borderline personality disorder and childhood trauma: Exploring the buffering role of self‐compassion and self‐esteem
With personality traits being such key predictors of human behaviour, it is not surprising to find that compassion shows a positive relationship with agreeableness) while self-compassion appears to be inversely related with neuroticism.
– The relationship of compassion and self-compassion with personality and emotional intelligence
It is not difficult and indeed quite tempting to meld words with associated but different meanings. Two such words are self-esteem and self-compassion. We may look at these words and not think very much of them because such things may be considered luxuries or indulgences reserved for after the war (whatever the goal may be).
It is entirely possible to get exceptional grades and be a cold, calculating person. A cold, calculating person is unlikely to enjoy life very much. For those of a more practical bent, a cold, calculating person is unlikely to enjoy network effects or reception in the marketplace.
It is also entirely possible and we are not unaware of situations of high achievers making dubious choices. Everybody makes wrong choices from time to time but it is possible to live a maladaptive lifestyle despite a range of high quotients on commonly measured scales of fitness.
Students face pressure because it is difficult to believe that education is a life-long journey. Some of the concerns are legitimate. If a student makes a habit of non-exertion, he might lose the ability to change gears when the terrain requires it.
Even so, grades and grading are a very big part of students’ lives more so than for other groups. Numbers lend themselves to comparison which leads to fretting. Feedback on assignments is designed to reinforce desired behaviour. No one, at least no one who is trained, praises the end result (the effort is reinforced).
A student’s life is full of reinforcement mechanisms. This is so because this has been known to work. When approval is withheld for too long or only after someone has jumped through several hoops, the receiver becomes a pleaser or a rebel and adopts some maladaptive behavioural traits.
The rationale for praising effort over end result is uncontroversial. We want students to continue trying to progress. If someone is reliant on approval and children are, and only gets it after trying hard, the message would be, I must work for your approval and I feel comfortable when you approve of me and when you are pleased with me.
Some go the other way: I will do everything in my capacity to ensure you are not pleased. This is a rebel.
Both pleasing and rebellion are maladaptive. The following is an example of how this could play out. Someone has been praised either for innate qualities in relation to others and/or for results in relation to others. This person gets some injury to the ego because of some event which defies the hitherto narrative. Let’s call this person X. X does two things, both in relation to approval. To this person, approval has always been something to be earned by outshining others. Now, X needs to soothe X’s injury.
First, X becomes the giver of approval to those who are in the same boat; that is those from whom approval has also been withheld. X now dishes out the same treatment to others which X received from those X looks up to. Second, X chooses a suitable accessory to buttress X’s public and private image; a thing Y which is highly salient. Now X has reversed roles. X convinces X and others that X is worthy. Y is of course very important in this two step make-over and X is reliant on Y. If Y realises this and there is some leverage placed on X, X would of course, being unable to deal with Y directly, dump any toxicity on those X thinks requires X’s approval so that the status quo is preserved with Y. That is when leveraging Y has its limits.
As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people.
This vicious and toxic chain reaction is not unlike a virus which is contagious. There is a way to be immune to traumatic events so that one does not become a carrier and spreader of hurt.
The answer is not self-esteem but self-compassion.
In Shadow Plays, a short story translated into English from Spanish, the protagonist has a neighbour Jose who has had very high expectations foisted on him. Jose failed four subjects and “that was a real drama in the apartment upstairs” and so had been cooped up in his room ever since “in front of a book”. The protagonist on the other hand, failed his test “But I didn’t care much. I knew I would pass it in the end.” The two form an unlikely friendship through their open windows because it turned out Jose while giving the impression of being hard at work to please his father, was in fact creating shadows of, “Dragons breathing fire, a hunter with his rifle, a princess with her veils, an old man smoking a pipe, a sheep… Everything” on his wall with his lamp and cut-outs for the protagonist.
While it might appear as though the protagonist had high self-esteem and that Jose was indulging in escapism, in actual fact, they were both practising self-compassion.
Self-esteem is “the value a person attributes to one’s self (often in comparison to other individuals) or the extent to which a person likes one’s self” (Pohl et.al., 2020). This has been known to be positively correlated with, “developing mental resilience under adverse conditions and for coping with stressful life events” (Bonanno et al., 2002 as cited in Pohl et at., 2020).
Relying on self-esteem alone to mitigate the impacts of some negative event might result in performance or mastery avoidance. Esteem means to value. There needs to be some benchmark. This requires constant measuring. At higher altitudes, there is less oxygen. Also, the greater one’s self-esteem, the greater the shock might be when the self-narrative is challenged.
This was the conclusion of Pohl and others (2020) who suggested, having high self‐esteem “may not be a protective factor when a person has to deal with a traumatic experience” and that “self‐compassion but not self‐esteem was associated with weaker negative emotional reactions to the negative events”.
Self-compassion or “Extending compassion to the self” refers to “a regulation strategy in which feelings of worry or stress are not avoided but instead, being open and sensitive to one’s own suffering, experiencing feelings of care and kindness to oneself, taking an attitude of understanding and not judging one’s own inadequacies and failures, and recognizing that one’s own experience is part of the common human experience (Neff, 2003 as cited in Fabio & Saklofske, 2020).
Without self-compassion, someone’s dominant motive would be to cause hurt in retaliation or to pass the hurt forward. Such a person would easily perceive actions as hurtful and would at the slightest resemblance of anything attempting to cause hurt, over-react.
Among many other things, self-compassion has been found to have the following benefits: increased performance, ability to overcome mental barriers and aversive thoughts, goal mastery, achievement goals, life satisfaction, decreasing anxiety and depression and subjective well-being” (Fabio & Saklofske, 2020). These researchers also found a positive correlation between emotional stability, self-control and self-compassion.
It adds up. When a negative event which throws into sharp relief one’s inadequacies or what one perceives as inadequacies, occurs, someone who is not self-compassionate would receive the full brunt of the blow. There will be jarring dissonance with the self-image. Extreme negative emotions such as anger might result. Retaliation might be the dominant driver. Extreme emotions are hard to control and one minded enough could well take measures to mock the injurer even if it means hurting oneself. This is not unlike Jin Mao Shi Wang of The Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre practising a highly lethal martial art to get back at Cheng Kun. The practice of this art could help Xie Xun achieve his objectives of revenge but would injure him deeply in the process. He did it nevertheless. Xie Xun, like Joker took to mocking as a lifestyle to function after trauma. Anybody who engaged them after their transformation was merely kindling for a fire started by someone else sometime else.
At the risk of stating what has been said a million times in a million places, we cannot control fire starters. Sometimes a fire starts because the conditions make for the perfect storm.
Ideally, approval should be granted liberally without conditions by primary caregivers. Despite everything, there will be situations which threaten self-image and sense of self-worth. Students should also be equipped with techniques for self-compassion. Lopez et al., (2018) as cited in Pohl et al., (2020) suggest self-compassion requires “educational attainment”. Students would have to be able to critically analyse a negative event and recognise cause and effect. They would need emotional intelligence to know the antidote to bitterness and cold is sweetness and warmth.
Where these are not forthcoming from without, they need to be able to provide it for themselves from within. One way to do this is to imagine someone saying affirmative things to them. This works just like the lemon test – imagine a slice of lemon and then imagine biting into its flesh. Research shows most people felt some salivating. This is an automatic physiological response. In the same way, imagining a warm and supportive voice just after injury, would kickstart an automatic self-healing process at a physiological level.
Self-compassion is a dish best served with warmth and unlike lemons, leaves a sweet taste.
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