You Can’t Hate Yourself into Changing

Self-compassion works better than beating yourself up

My client Sarah had been sober for three weeks when she relapsed. She sat in my office the next day cataloguing everything she’d done wrong and everything she should have seen coming, every way she’d failed herself and her family.

“God, I hate myself. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? I need to try harder, I guess,” she said.

But I’d watched this cycle enough times to know where it went. Sarah would drink, then hate herself for drinking, then drink because she hated herself. Shame was the glue holding the whole cycle together. She thought all that self-punishment was keeping her accountable, but it was feeding the exact thing she was trying to stop.

“I don’t care whether you think you deserve kindness,” I told her. “What I know is that beating yourself up is making this worse.”

You may not relate to Sarah’s version, but I see this everywhere. You don’t text your friend back for a week, you feel like a terrible person, and the guilt makes it even harder to reply. I snap at my daughter, spend the rest of the night spinning about what a terrible parent I am, and then wake up the next day so exhausted that it happens again. We feel disgusted with ourselves and then somehow expect that disgust to motivate us to do better. Instead, it just makes us feel worse, and the cycle repeats.

We think self-criticism is the price of accountability. We think that if we’re hard enough on ourselves, we’ll finally get it together. But beating yourself up is actually a sneaky form of avoidance. You get to feel like you are doing something without ever actually doing anything.

When I suggest self-compassion to clients, the most common response is disgust. They look at me like I just suggested they congratulate themselves for failing. “That feels gross,” they say. Or: “I can’t just be nice to myself when I failed! How will I ever learn?”

But are you really learning when you’re stuck in self-hatred? While you’re tearing yourself apart, are you able to look honestly at what happened, figure out where it went wrong, and make a plan for what you’ll do differently next time? Or are you just suffering and calling it accountability?

Self-compassion sounds soft, like something for people who don’t have real problems. Or for people who have unrealistic expectations of themselves, not for people who make actual mistakes. No wonder so many people hear self-compassion and picture cheesy affirmations in a mirror.

Kristin Neff, the researcher who’s studied self-compassion more than anyone, breaks it into three parts: mindfulness, self-kindness, and common humanity. Mindfulness means you can be grounded enough in the present moment to look honestly at what happened but not drown in self-hatred. Self-kindness involves treating yourself the way you’d treat someone you love. And common humanity helps you recognize that you are not the only person who has ever done this or felt this way.

Kristin Neff

If you are new to cultivating self-compassion, I encourage you to start with common humanity. All it asks is for you to stop acting like you’re the worst person who ever lived. In practice it can sound like: “I’m not the only person who has struggled with this” or “I’m not alone in how I feel.” You don’t have to believe it all the way. Shame depends on isolation to survive, and even a crack is enough.

Sarah didn’t have a breakthrough in which she suddenly believed she deserved kindness. She just got tired of the cycle. She had been beating herself up after every relapse for years, and it kept leading her to the same place. At some point she decided that she cared more about changing than about being right about how terrible she was.

You don’t have to believe you deserve self-compassion. You just have to ask yourself one honest question: How long have you been trying it the other way, and has it worked yet?