Self-compassion: The Key Ingredient to Being a Good Friend
Self-compassion allows us to be better partners, better parents, better friends.
Imagine this: Your friend says, “When you were late in sending my birthday card, it really hurt my feelings.”
How do you respond internally?:
”Does she not realize how much time I spent picking out that damn card!”
“If she only knew how busy I was at work that week, she would be grateful!”
“I think cards are a waste of money, but I know they’re important to her. How can she be upset when I spent 8 dollars on this dumb piece of paper…cardboard…cardstock, whatever it is!”
“I’m a terrible friend! She must hate me!”
If we are afraid that our friend’s comment about how our actions hurt her feelings is a reflection on our value or worth as a friend, we may get defensive. This may lead us to respond by deflecting, avoiding our friend’s hurt feelings and saying “I hope you had a good birthday! Did you go to that new restaurant you were talking about,” or we may get defensive by saying “I’m just a terrible friend, aren’t I,” or by experiencing our friend’s comment as a threat and responding by saying “Well do you remember when you told our friend that secret I told you not to tell…”
Any of these responses may indicate that there is something that feels deeply unsafe about our friend telling us we hurt their feelings. Maybe your relational history is leading you to interpret her comment as a threat to your friendship or an attack on your character. Maybe you are internally gearing up to have this friend tell you that she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. Maybe you have learned that you are only safe in relationships when people are completely happy with you, and maybe this has led you to attempt to keep people satisfied with you at all times. Now when your friend tells you that you hurt her feelings, you may unconsciously interpret that as a significant threat. Your heart may race, you might start feeling dizzy, you may feel the urge to avoid, argue or apologize incessantly. You may not have learned that relational conflict can be okay to experience, and doesn’t have to be a threat to the relationship. It may be hard to believe that conflict or emotional honesty and vulnerability can actually be a path towards deeper relationship and intimacy rather than towards emotional or physical danger or abandonment.
If you grew up in a family where you felt it was your job to “keep the peace” or where someone in the family struggled with emotional regulation, this share from your friend of her hurt feelings may trigger feelings of panic. Even though you may cognitively/rationally be able to remember that this is not a friend who screams or lashes out when she is anger and who has only ever been kind and understanding, your body may hold the lived experience of someone being upset (mad, sad, angry, hurt) ,especially in response to what you did, leading to physical, emotional, or relational danger or instability.
This is where self-compassion comes in and can help us to respond in a more effective way to our friend’s hurt feelings. If rather than activating shame or panic (which is often caused by early emotional/relational learning), we can respond to our mistakes with self-compassion, this will allow us to be more regulated and open to hearing the impact of our actions on our friend. Our friend will feel our openness and likely feel safer to be fully honest about the impact of your actions, because she won’t be as afraid of you getting defensive or self-critical in response to her share. If people sense (and this can happen without us having to say something out loud), that their sharing of their true feelings will lead us to get defensive or overly self-critical (such as going down an internal or external road of “I’m such a bad person/parent/friend/etc.” then they may be less likely to share their true experiences with us. On the surface this may look like all is well in the relationship, but this may actually be a relationship that doesn’t allow a lot of space for authentic relational vulnerability. We may find ourselves sharing deeply our feelings about our family, partners, and other friends, but the true feelings about the dyadic relationship itself may go unnamed.
The more we develop deep self-compassion, the more we can look at our mistakes and go “Oof! I wish I didn’t do that. I feel some shame/guilt/embarrassment about my actions and know I am still a good person/parent/friend. I can simultaneously hold that my intention was not to hurt my friend’s feelings and also recognize that the impact of my actions were that her feelings were hurt, and I can be safe enough in my sense of inherent worth and lovability that I can be open to truly hearing how my actions have led to hurt. That doesn’t need to be dangerous. I can hold both truths– that I am doing my best and that there were many circumstances that led to my being late in sending the card and *also* that the late sending of the card contributed to my friend feeling relational pain. I can hold space for her feelings and offer care without needing to fix or change her emotional experience through defending myself or making excuses.”
People often unconsciously sense our level of self-compassion. This may at times be in direct correlation to how comfortable people in our lives feel sharing the ways we have hurt or let them down. The more self-compassion we have, the more people trust that they can share emotional truth with us without us crumbling or lashing out. With self-compassion, we can hold the validity of our friend’s feelings without having to over-personalize them. We can validate our friend’s hurt feelings without validating the story (in either our own or our friend’s mind) that our lateness in sending the card means that we are rude, uncaring, inconsiderate, or selfish. We can hold the nuance- recognizing that the hurt feelings are valid and that our friend may be making a meaning of *why* we sent the card late and what that means about us and our friendship that may have just as much, if not more, to do with the friend’s own relational history than it does about our actual intentions.
As we work to tend to the parts of us that hold shame and trauma and block us from self-compassion, we open up opportunities to provide new, healing relational experiences to our friends. The more we can hold ourselves in love, grace, context, and nuance, the more we allow our friends and loved ones to have the experience of sharing their pain and having it seen, validated, and tended to. This allows us to build and be in community in which it is safe to name what hurts. This is how we help heal each other. Breaking generational cycles doesn’t only happen in the therapy room, it also happens when the work we have done in our own healing carries into our relationships and offers our loved one’s the opportunity to be safe in their emotional truth- even when their emotional truth involves the way they have been hurt by us! And in my opinion, that’s pretty cool shit. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. If you would like support on your journey to developing a deeper sense of self-compassion, contact us, our trauma and attachment focused therapists in Philadelphia would love to support you.