Mindful Self-Compassion, Fall 2023
Week 7: November, 2023
“Exploring Challenging Relationships”
Home practices:
Compassionate Friend
Compassion with Equanimity
Video with monk Matthieu Ricard, explaining the difference between empathy and compassion
Challenging Relationships
To be self-compassionate, first we need to make contact with our pain. This week we'll be shining a spotlight on relational pain – both the pain of disconnection and the pain of connection. We will be learning to meet relational pain through the power of mindfulness and self-compassion, rather than using these tools to fix relationships.
All human relationships include pain from time to time. As adults, we can learn to respond to relational pain in a new way. Since we know better than anyone else what we need and when we need it, we can and should try to meet our own needs directly - with self-compassion.
We are more likely to open to relational pain when we realize its universality.
Sartre (1989) famously said, “Hell is other people.”
We are all so different—our genes, culture, age, gender, family background, dreams and aspirations—sometimes it feels like a miracle we get along at all!
Also, that there are at least two types of relational pain:
The pain of disconnection—when we are rejected by others, or feel distant or alone.
The pain of connection—empathic distress, when we experience the difficulties of others as our own.
We'll be exploring both of these this week. The purpose of our work this week is not primarily to heal relationships; it is about contacting relational pain more precisely – with deeper understanding - and holding it with mindful awareness and self-compassion.
The Pain of Disconnection
A common type of pain experienced in relationships is the pain of disconnection.
Disconnection causes a host of emotions to arise, both hard and soft.
Anger is a common hard feeling directed at those who have harmed us through disconnection.
Anger
Anger isn’t necessarily “bad” – when it arises in the service of yang self-compassion, it has some positive functions. On the discussion board, please discuss these two reflection questions:
What do you feel is the function of anger in your relationships?
How is it useful?
Here are some possible benefits of anger:
Anger gives us information that someone has overstepped our boundaries and hurt us in some way.
It can provide us with the energy needed to protect ourselves or take action to make a change.
Anger can be wise if it reduces harm to ourselves or others. This is known as “fierce compassion.”
Anger can support our general wellbeing if we don't suppress it or turn it against ourselves in harsh self-criticism.
Like all emotions, our relationship to anger is what determines if it is harmful or helpful.
Here are some possible harmful effects of anger:
Anger is bad for our health [by raising blood pressure, etc.].
Anger can destroy relationships.
Anger takes us out of the present moment.
If we continually harden our emotions in an attempt to protect ourselves against attack, over time we may develop bitterness and resentment.
Anger, bitterness and resentment are “hard feelings” (Christensen, Doss, & Jacobson, 2014). Hard feelings are resistant to change and we often carry hard feelings around with us even when we don’t need them anymore. Unfortunately, as the sayings suggest:
“Anger corrodes the vessel that contains it.”
“Anger is the hot coal we pick up to throw at another person.”
“Anger is the poison we drink to kill another person.”
Meeting Anger with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion
If we decide that anger is not helpful to us any longer—that it isn’t protecting us but has hardened into bitterness—we can explore it and learn to respond in new ways. The following sequence can open the door to self-compassion when we experience unhelpful anger or bitterness in relationships.
Validating Anger
First, we need to fully validate our anger before we can do anything about it. Many people know that they are angry, but they still subtly criticize themselves for being angry. This is especially true for women, and other groups that experience discrimination, for whom anger can come at a high price.
Validating anger has a yang-like quality. It means that we support the truth of our anger, the logic of becoming angry when we are hurt, and the worth of ourselves when we feel angry.
Soft Feelings
The next step is to identify soft feelings behind the hard feeling of anger. Often anger is protecting more tender, sensitive feelings. Teachers can ask students for examples of soft feelings against which anger might serve as protection, such as feeling scared, lonely, or lost.
Unmet Needs
Behind soft feelings are usually unmet needs (Rosenberg, 2015). Examples of unmet needs are the need to be seen, heard, validated, connected, respected, or known.
The most universal need is the need to be loved. This unmet need often lies at the bottom of anger.
“Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding.” -David Whyte
Self-Compassion
Validating anger, finding soft feelings, and discovering unmet needs are all mindfulness skills that enable the last step—a compassionate response. It is easier to evoke compassion for ourselves when we are no longer frozen in anger and we understand that our unmet needs are universal, legitimate and worthy. Self-compassion is finally giving ourselves the love and compassion we may have been yearning to receive from others for many years.
Pain of Connection
Another important source of relational pain is the pain of connection. This is the pain we all feel when someone close to us is suffering. The pain of connection is based on our human capacity to resonate empathically with others.
Our Brains are Social
The human brain is highly social (Adolphs, 2009; Lieberman, 2013). We appear to have neurons dedicated to feeling in our own bodies what others are feeling - mirror neurons (Gallese, Eagle & Migone, 2007; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996). Furthermore, similar neural circuits related to that emotion are stimulated when people watch others express emotion as when they experience their own emotions (Decety & Lamm, 2006; Keysers, Kaas & Gazzola, 2010; Lieberman, 2007). For example, witnessing another person in pain activates similar brain structures in the observer as in the person in pain (Bernhardt & Singer, 2012; Decety & Cacioppo, 2011; Saarela et al., 2007).
Our capacity to empathically resonate with others is evolutionarily adaptive. Not only do we require this capacity to raise our young but we also need to understand and cooperate with one another to survive. Although “the survival of the fittest” is generally attributed to Charles Darwin, he actually considered cooperation to be the key factor that helped a species to survive—“survival of the kindest” (Keltner, 2009, p.52).
Emotions are Contagious
Emotions are contagious (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993; Nummenmaa, Hirvonen, Parkkola, & Hietanen, 2008; Wild, Erb, & Bartels, 2001). Most parents have seen how their children mirror their moods, and they can also regulate their child’s emotions by changing their own emotions (Calkins, 1994; Morris, Silk, Steinberg, Myers, & Robinson, 2007).
Emotional resonance also occurs in intimate partner relationships. For example, imagine your partner has returned home is a good mood, but you are in a bad mood. You try to hide your mood and don't say anything about it. “What’s the matter with you?” your partner asks, now grumpy. And you say, “Me? What’s the matter with you?”
Despite our best efforts, it is difficult to hide how we really feel because empathy is preverbal. We are influenced by micro-communications such as a twinkling eye, a long sigh, or a slight shift in the tenor of a person’s voice.
While others are partly responsible for our state of mind, we are also partly responsible for their state of mind.
Downward and Upward Spirals
Our contagious emotions can send us into to a downward spiral in which negative emotions trigger negative thoughts and appraisals in one person that can lead to similar or worse thoughts and feelings in another person (Fredrickson et al, 2008).
The good news is that compassion can interrupt a negative cycle and start an upward spiral instead. When we cultivate compassion—engendering feelings of kindness and concern for ourselves or others—our improved attitude leads to positive thoughts and interactions with others.
The tone of our conversation—the underlying attitude—is the main message that we convey to others.
Power of Goodwill
The easiest way to have good relations with others is to have compassion in the face of suffering—for our own suffering or that of others.
Positive emotions flow from good will, and positive interactions flow from positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2004).
The more we cultivate goodwill toward ourselves and others, the better our relationship interactions will be.
Loving-kindness and compassion training cultivates good will.
On Equanimity
An important skill for dealing with the pain of connection is equanimity.
Equanimity refers to maintaining mental balance in the midst of opposites such as pleasure and pain, success and failure, or joy and sorrow.
Mindfulness leads to equanimity which leads to wisdom. Mindfulness gives us the space to see the complex, interdependent causes and conditions that make our lives as they are, and the wisdom that we have limited control.
Equanimity is not cold detachment, but arises from deep understanding of the transient, interdependent nature of reality. It is a different kind of caring, based on both emotional intimacy and wise discernment.
Equanimity can be cultivated using language. An example is the Serenity Prayer penned by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1943:
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Equanimity gives us the emotional space to be compassionate while remaining in connection with others—engaging fully, but understanding the limits of our capacity to control the outcome of our actions.