A Trauma- Informed Approach to Self Compassion

All of the ways we try to adapt and respond to life are our protective responses to trauma. What is trauma? Research tells us that a traumatic experience is when we are left to make sense of something hard and scary, alone; these things often happen in ways that are too much, too soon, all at once. And, experience hard things alone and having to make sense of them is part of a human experience in some way for each of us; and so, we all have our own protective ways of getting through what our lived experience tells us is hard.

So many things can feel hard: disappointments, rejection, feeling alone, intimacy, relationships, abandonment, leadership, speaking our truth, following our passion, etc.

We all have our own ways of dealing with these hard things: trying to be perfect, trying to get all of the facts before we make a decision, screaming out for help, seeking confrontation, and foregoing your own needs to help others first. These are our protective parts and our past has shown us that we need to show up in these ways to get love/acceptance.

What if we stopped thinking that people needed to learn skills to “better cope” with how they’re feeling and started having conversations about pain and cultivating compassion for our protective parts? To answer this question, we turn to neuroscience….which tells us that you don’t need skills to learn to keep yourself sane or “functional”. You are not dysfunctional. You are stuck in responses to chronic perceived stresses. You have been through hard things and feeling things deeply is part of the human experience.

Love the part of you that is trying to get love and let it know you’re safe.

So how do we show compassion to ourselves? We can begin by noticing our experience, paying attention to how we feel and validating it. And, the truth is that feels scary for most of us that don’t have practice doing this because we are afraid our feelings with swallow us whole. However, research tells us that is far from the truth. Our feelings begin to release when we notice them and keep going, as this slows down our unconscious self-protective patterns, slowly offering ourselves choice to begin doing things differently and in more comforting and align ways.

When we start loving parts of ourselves instead of exiling what others think is dysfunctional we start stepping out of vigilance and into trust; trusting ourselves and how we feel instead of trying to control our experience and fear. When we resist our pain, we create suffering; not because we want to but because how we have tried to protect ourselves has become exhausting for our nervous system. And our nervous systems needs some compassion for how hard it’s worked to keep us safe.

So the next time you notice something feels hard or uncomfortable, I would encourage you to notice and name that is it hard and remind yourself that there is nothing wrong with you for feeling this way. You are simply human and brilliantly self-protective.