Self-empathy is the process of building a warm and compassionate relationship to your experience. It is an essential ingredient in a thriving relationship. To have a loving and conscious relationship with another, you also need to have a loving and conscious relationship with yourself.

Self-empathy gives you relief from internal conflict, criticism, and doubt. You learn to greet each part of your experience with compassion and acceptance, which gives you access to wise discernment and effective action.

Self-empathy is a skillful means for taking responsibility for your experience. When you can sort experience into categories, such as observations, thoughts, feelings, needs, and requests, it is easier to meet it with equanimity and compassion. In addition, it enables you to stay true to values and be honest with another.

The first step in connecting to your experience is to ensure that you are located in an expansive perspective. This means that you can meet your experience with compassion and hold it in the larger frame of your life.

Engaging an anchor is an essential step in stabilizing and anchoring your attention in this expansive perspective. You likely already have anchors but simply haven’t named them or focused explicitly on them. An anchor is something you turn your attention toward in order to interrupt reactivity and access a non-reactive perspective.

Essentially, an anchor wakes up the parts of you that can access a bigger perspective, begins to calm your physiology, and helps you to engage mindfulness and use your skills.

Read more about Self-empathy in this Connection Gem. Learn the skills of Self-empathy in our pre-recorded course

Skill 1:  Identify the differences between self-empathy and other responses to your experience

Below you will find a list of potentially helpful and unhelpful ways you relate to your experience.

Unhelpful ways to relate to your experience

1. “Shoulding” - telling yourself what experience you should or shouldn’t be having

2. Minimizing

3. Making meaning of your experience that triggers more suffering

4. Shutting down

5. Tightening against

6. Evaluating for validity

7. Denying

8. Collapsing

9. Comparing

10. Shaming or ridiculing

11. Numbing or distracting

12. Arguing 

13. Correcting

Helpful ways to relate to your experience

1. Empathy

2. Grounding or regulation

3. Shared humanity

4. Naming

5. Anchoring

6. Reassurance or self-soothing

7. Find a bigger perspective

8. Setting a boundary

9. Reframing

10. Warmth or compassion 

11. Coaching

12. Analysis

13. Offering security

    
    
    
    

Practice

1. For each of the helpful and unhelpful ways of relating to experience, identify an example of this in yourself or someone else.

2. Which two of the unhelpful ways of relating to experience come up most often? 

• What does self-empathy sound like relative to these two?

3. Which two of the helpful ways of relating to experience are most useful for you?

4. Is there a helpful way of relating to experience that you use habitually, but may not be effective for the situation at hand?

5. Which of the helpful ways of relating to experience would you like to be able to access more?

• What specific and doable action could help you cultivate that access?