The Practice of Self-Compassion: Learning to Treat Yourself the Way You Treat the People You Love
Most of the people I work with in Hidden Hills and Calabasas would never speak to a friend, a child, or a partner the way they speak to themselves. They are kind, thoughtful, and often genuinely generous in how they extend care to others. And then they turn the same attention inward and find an entirely different voice: critical, harsh, and quick to catalog every failure and inadequacy. This discrepancy is so common as to feel normal, but it is not neutral in its effects. The inner critic that most people treat as a motivating force is, in practice, one of the primary sources of the anxiety, depression, and exhaustion that bring people to therapy. Learning to relate to yourself with something approaching the compassion you extend to others is not a luxury or a form of self-indulgence. It is a fundamental health practice, and it is among the most difficult and most rewarding work many of my clients undertake.
What Self-Compassion Is Not
Before describing what self-compassion is, it is worth clearing away what it is not, because the common misconceptions are the primary reason people resist it. Self-compassion is not self-pity. It is not lowering your standards or making excuses for genuinely harmful behavior. It is not the same as selfishness, and it does not produce the complacency that people fear it will. Research on self-compassion consistently shows the opposite: people who treat themselves with greater kindness after failure are more likely to try again, not less, because they are not depleting themselves in cycles of shame and self-recrimination that leave nothing available for genuine effort.
Self-compassion is, at its simplest, the willingness to be toward yourself what you would be toward someone you love who is struggling: present, honest about the difficulty, and willing to offer care without requiring that the struggle immediately resolve.
Why the Inner Critic Does Not Actually Help
The inner critic feels useful because it has been framed as a performance tool: the voice that keeps us from getting lazy, that maintains standards, that ensures we take failures seriously. But the inner critic is not a precision instrument. It does not distinguish between a genuine problem that requires correction and a mistake that simply requires acknowledgment and moving on. It applies the same force to both, and it applies it continuously, which means the nervous system is receiving constant threat signals even in the absence of any actual threat.
This chronic internal threat response is exhausting and corrosive. It produces exactly the anxiety, depression, and difficulty regulating emotions that people then criticize themselves for having. The inner critic creates the very problems it claims to be preventing. Understanding this dynamic is often the first step toward being willing to try something different.
Building the Practice Slowly
Self-compassion is called a practice for a reason. It does not simply arrive as a decision or an insight. It is built incrementally through repeated, intentional acts of kindness toward oneself: noticing the critical voice without immediately believing it, responding to your own distress with something more like care than contempt, acknowledging that difficulty is part of shared human experience rather than evidence of personal deficiency.
In therapy, this work is often slow and requires genuine patience with oneself, which is its own kind of irony. People who are hard on themselves tend to be hard on themselves for being hard on themselves, and learning to notice that loop with some lightness is itself part of the practice. What I consistently observe over time is that as the inner critic softens, even a little, the anxiety and depression that it was generating also begin to soften. People feel lighter. They have more access to genuine pleasure and genuine motivation. They are more present with the people they love because they are no longer perpetually at war with themselves. That peace, quiet and ordinary as it sounds, changes a life.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
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Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
📞 (818) 618-4762
✉️ Susie@susierome.com
📍 24933 Kit Carson Rd, Hidden Hills, CA 91302
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