Self-Compassion With Dr. Jerrod
Title: Dr. Jerrod Self-Compassion
Hi, Kathleen Guire here. Welcome to this episode of Trauma-informed Parenting. Dr. Jarrod Brown is back as a guest again today. Thank you for joining us.
You’re welcome, Kathleen. Thank you for having me back.
You’re welcome. And we are going to well, he is going to talk about self-compassion, like being compassionate it to yourself, which we all need. We all need to give ourselves grace and space, correct?
Absolutely. It doesn’t matter if you’re a parent or a nonparent. Having more self-compassion is really linked to so many health benefits. Brain-based health, body, emotional, social, and the list goes on. We can’t go wrong with infusing these principles into our day-to-day life, for parenting, for family, friends, on the job, and whatever we do. I think this can enhance our overall health and well-being and outlook on life. I agree.
And I will say as a mom and talking to many, many other moms, moms really suffer from mom guilt, especially when they take time to take care of themselves and they’re not very compassionate towards themselves. I think parents do this a lot. Not just moms, but dads too. And that is why I really wanted you to talk about this topic. It is so important.
Yeah. I really do think this is an antidote to so many threats to our emotional and behavioral health. By no means am I saying it’s going to heal everything, but I think it can definitely take the edge off on a lot of things, including just how we manage our stress. So this is a big component of having good stress management as well. And then for feeling better, we have more self-compassion. What do you think happens? We now have more compassion for other people. It can build our resilience. We typically sleep better. We have more hopeful thinking or just better to be around. To be honest with you, I really believe it. The research is pretty clear on that too.
Well, and it sounds kind of backward because I think in my brain I’m thinking, okay, if I just serve others first and put others first and don’t care for myself, then I will be more loving and caring. But it kind of backfires on me.
Yeah. I think if we’re always externally giving to everybody else, thinking it’s going to come back at us, it might not. I think there has to be a balance. Of course, we can’t always be self-focused all the time. We have to have a balance of self-focusedness and then giving to others. There’s a lot of research out there in the benefits of volunteering that’s been shown to lead to so many good health outcomes. But then if we’re always go, go, giving, giving to everybody else, we’re much more likely to burn out and be tired and get sick and have colds and flus and we might even put on weight and spike up our insulin levels in our body, our inflammation or depression or anxiety. So, like everything, I think we have to have some balance here and boundaries too.
And it’s okay to take time for ourselves as well. Right? And I think what you were saying is volunteering is wonderful. It’s great. But I have fallen into that trap before of only volunteering and doing things for other people. And then you can get stuck in that trap of resentment because like you said just a few minutes ago, it’s not coming back to you. It’s not you’re wondering why while I’m doing all of these things, why am I not feeling great and why are other people not reciprocating? And that can be a really difficult place to live.
Yeah, nature can. And it can result in just classic symptoms of burnout. So we hear about burnout in the workplace, but there’s also parental burnout, and that’s a real thing. And parental burnout has actually been linked to an increased risk of engaging in child abuse and maltreatment. Now, by no means am I saying if a parent is burned out, they’re going to abuse their child, but people who abuse their children are more likely to be dealing with some burnout symptoms. So this has a lot of implications on many levels in trauma-informed parenting, let’s say, because burnout is real.
When you are parenting a child with a trauma history or a child who has a capital letter syndrome, FASD ASD, ADHD, like, the list goes on forever. It’s very easy to get burnt out. And so how would these parents practice this compassion towards themselves?
Well, are you okay if we start with kind of what this is so your audience knows the dimensions of it and how we define it, what it looks like, and then I’ll definitely move into some strategies and what that does, but really think of self-compassion almost as the opposite end of the spectrum, as self-criticism. So if you start infusing self-compassion into the equation, in theory, it should bring down self-criticism. And if we have less self-criticism, hopefully that will help us not have guilt and shame. In theory, too, it should help improve our resilience and self-confidence and lead to overall increased happiness and physical and emotional well-being. So if you look at various definitions of self-compassion in the research literature, it really talks about just being kind and understanding to ourselves. So think of it almost as like self-directed empathy or self-directed warmth to ourselves. Like the way we think of ourselves, the way we talk about ourselves. If we think of ourselves in a very positive manner, even when we mess up or make a mistake or just something bad happen, if we can practice self-compassion, we’re much more likely to handle failure and criticism and disappointments and setbacks way better than if we don’t ever practice this. So if someone harshly judges themselves and just looks in the mirror all the time and just has negative thinking and I should have done this better. Why did I say that? I’m stupid. That is not good. It’s not healthy. Obviously, if we can practice the self-compassion, hopefully that’ll bring that down. If you look at the self-compassion literature, I would encourage you to look at like Kristen Neff’s work. She’s kind of the guru in this area. Lots of videos on YouTube workbooks, good website, all that stuff. But three basic components really fall under the umbrella of self-compassion. Self-kindness is one. So we’re really thinking about just having greater kindness for ourselves and having increased understanding for ourselves. The other component is common humanity. So we really see that our experiences are really part of a larger group of what we experience. We’re not alone in this. We all feel this way from time to time. And if we can have that common humanity, we realize that we’re not the only ones that have guilt or shame or we feel embarrassed or we should have done this differently. If we really recognize that it kind of externalizes the problem. And then we take a hard look at why we have those reactions. And a lot of times if we dig deeper, not everyone has this. But you look back at childhood and did we grow up in a home where there’s a lot of shame or criticism and a lot of these things may start in childhood. And then the third area is mindfulness. A lot of us here like mindfulness-based parenting, learning how to really hold those feelings and thoughts of painful emotional experiences in more of a balanced manner so we have more self-awareness. And when we can do that, we can engage in more self-reflection. Maybe we journal about it, maybe we talk to loved ones about it. We’re not stuffing our emotions. The last thing we want to do is have a long-term pattern of stuffing our emotions and just telling the world everything’s fine when it’s not. Because eventually, those emotions are going to catch up to us. And if we stuff our emotions over and over and over again over time, it can come out sideways as. Somatic symptoms such as like headaches, back pain, chest pain, anxiety, skin disorders, blood sugar, dysregulation, the list goes on. So the three big components of self-compassion are self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. So I’ll stop there for a second, Kathleen, before I move into kind of like what the research says about the health benefits of engaging in this behavior.
how to have peace
WHEN YOUR KIDS ARE IN CHAOS free guide
Well, I wanted to say about common humanity is like I think that when you’re very self-critical that you isolate yourself and then you begin to believe that you are the only one, you are the only one that is struggling with this. You’re the stupid one, you’re the one that always messes up. Everybody else has got it all together. So when you engage in that common humanity and community, whether it’s with friends or family or you join a support group, then you begin to understand that your struggles are common to humanity. And it makes it easier for you to have self-compassion knowing that others have the same struggles that you do. At least that’s what I have found in my life.
Absolutely. And that’s why a lot of people may enjoy joining a support group, because if you share these common experiences, you know you’re not alone. And that can be a major piece of the healing process and coping and doing things in isolation. If you look at the research on social isolation, long-term isolation, it can lead to premature death. On the worst end of the spectrum, it’s been linked to depression, anxiety, irritability ness, sedentary behaviors, addiction, so social belonging, being in a group, especially if the group has your best intentions in mind, you trust the group, you’re vulnerable. All of these things can help enhance health and wellness and you know you’re not alone. So common humanity is a big, big thing.
Definitely. Right? And when you were talking about childhood messages, I was just talking to Tina from the Burnt Bean, she’s a parenting coach. And we were talking about the fact that you don’t have to have a big T trauma in your childhood for you to have wrong assumptions about the world or to have some beliefs that are not compassionate toward yourself or others. It can be like getting these little you get these little paper cuts in your childhood and you don’t think that they are anything serious and they’re not. But when you become an adult and you’re acting upon those assumptions, like you said, maybe you were in a home where there wasn’t as much connection as you needed or there wasn’t an adult that you felt was meeting your needs even though they were doing the best they could. That can contribute to this self-criticism.
Yeah, it sure can. Thanks for mentioning big T traumas. So in the trauma literature, you have big T traumas, simple T traumas. A lot of times when people hear the big T, they think that’s always the worst. So a big T trauma could be like a really bad car accident, maybe getting assaulted violently one time, very bad. Don’t ever want to minimize that. But the little t traumas, like you said, little paper cuts, it’s talked about in the literature and they can have a cumulative effect. So a good example with that of little tea traumas would be emotional invalidation. You grow up in a home and you’re consistently minimized or dismissed or maybe you’re not abused physically or sexually or there’s neglect directly or anything like that, but you can feel it from your parents or you feel it from your siblings that they’re just annoyed by you. They think that maybe you’re not that intelligent. Those things over a long period of time and grow and grow and grow and have a snowball effect in those little T traumas, there could be thousands or tens of thousands of those over a course of childhood, or teenage years. And the research too is clear. Kids that had these numerous little T traumas like emotional validation, dismissive behaviors, and just not feeling heard, noticed, or valued, they’re much more likely to grow up and have depression, anxiety, sleep problems, sometimes higher levels of eating disorders, and addiction problems and trust issues and intimacy problems. So they’re a real big deal, those little T traumas, as well as the big T traumas, right?
But I think, like you said, not to minimize the big T traumas. I think when you have a big T trauma like you had a house fire, then you’re more likely to say, you know what, we need to get some counseling, we need to get some therapy, we need to deal with this. But with the paper cup cuts, the little T traumas, we often just ignore them and we don’t deal with them.
Very true. We might minimize those little ones. Well, it wasn’t as bad as my neighbor who lost their wife or husband to cancer. So we don’t want to self-minimize too. And what happens too for some of these people with little T traumas, they’re very hard to detect by professionals on face value. So in some cases, they may fly under the radar. And people don’t really connect the dots that these little t traumas are maybe the driving factor between why this person has so many physical health challenges, why they maybe turn to drugs and alcohol, or why they just never sleep, or they just seem to be checked out and they have empathy deficits, they just can’t get along with people in a crowd, or all of these things can happen as a result of these little t traumas that again have kind of that cumulative snowball effect. And part of it too is with these traumas the timing has a lot to do with it. So if the traumas happen earlier on in life, especially during critical stages of development, it can impact the developing brain way more than maybe the trauma happened to someone when they were a teenager or adult and who committed the trauma. It is very clear from the literature that if the trauma was perpetrated by parents or a caregiver, typically the outcomes are worse than if the perpetrator was a stranger or the trauma was a result of a fire flood. And then after that the caregivers came around and were appropriate and helpful and encouraging and loving. People typically do better after a trauma, obviously when people support them and love them. But if the perpetrator was the parent or someone that child trusted, that’s a type of betrayal trauma that might be the worst kind of trauma of them all because it fractures that child’s sense of safety. And now they go through life thinking the world is not safe. How can I trust anyone else when my mom or dad or someone close to me did something terrible to me? So that’s kind of just a broad spectrum overview of like simple T trauma, big T traumas, and just developmental trauma, complex trauma, and betrayal trauma.
Well, and you get the betrayal trauma. A lot of those kids become foster kids and so then whenever they are in a foster placement, maybe potentially to be adopted, then they’re not trustful of the new people in their lives, the new family structure. So that makes it difficult. And I know that’s what a lot of our listeners are dealing with because they’re foster parents and adoptive parents. And so I know I’m getting off topic here, but yeah, no problem. How do you deal with that?
Well, I think finding again a network, you can’t go wrong working with professionals who understand these topics. Self-care is so important. Learning how to self-manage, self-soothe, self-regulate, take care of our sleep, getting exercise, eating healthy, all the basic things. Sometimes people might do well with animal assisted therapy, or art therapy or music therapy. There’s so many things we can do. Psycho-education can be helpful just learning about these things, especially if it’s a caregiver or a newly adopted parent or foster care parent. Just educating yourself about all these topics can actually help increase or help motivate us and it can empower us and it can help us look through a different lens and really have more compassion for that child and for ourselves. So I find it helpful. Just learning about these things is a good starting point. Understanding the terms, the research, and just the ins and outs of the causes, the consequences and the solutions around all these topics.
I agree. I think that learning about these things from the very beginning after we adopted them and I just started researching and studying things like attachment and I already had a degree in education, so I’d taken some childhood development classes, but just digging into those more helped me so much. Like, oh, this is why this is happening, or this is why he is responding this way. There’s a need behind that behavior and that helped me to parent from that empathetic approach instead of I’m doing everything wrong. So it does really have to do with our topic, self-compassion. Because if you are not educated in these things and you don’t know what’s going on in their brain, their body, their biology, their behavior, their belief system, all of these things, then you’re going to feel like it’s all your fault because you don’t know how to parent. So you’re going to be self-critical. But the more you learn, the more self-compassion you can have for yourself and say, oh okay, so now I know why. Now I can approach this differently and it’s not me, it could be his past or something that happened or I need to change my parenting.
Absolutely. And this is a great segue into the benefits of self-compassion. This, hopefully, is a buy-in for everyone to learn about this topic and implement some of these strategies. Because if we consistently practice self-compassion, it has been linked to reducing symptoms of various kinds of illnesses. So our body just works better if people have, like, pain-related problems. There’s been studies that have shown that self-compassion can actually help reduce physical pain in our body, which makes sense if our bodies are working better, our inflammation is down, and we’re getting better sleep. Absolutely. Self-compassion has been linked to having more adaptive coping skills. So adaptability is a good thing. If you’re ever working with somebody that is not adaptable, they can come off as more rigid and more callous. Adaptability is like a tree in a windstorm. If that tree branches can’t move a little bit, it’s much more likely to come crashing down. So adaptability and flexibility- very important. It’s also been linked to getting better sleep. So if you have sleep problems, several studies have shown if you start practicing self-compassion, that could be a potential intervention to help maybe manage insomnia a little bit better if you have central nervous system dysfunction. So people that have had these extensive traumas in utero, exposures to drugs, alcohol, more likely to have nervous system dysfunction. Self-compassion may help calm down the nervous system. So if you have a lot of irritability, rumination, you just feel really dysregulated in your body, practice this. It could help calm the body down a little bit. If you’re ever working with people who have problematic problem-solving or decision-making abilities, where they have a really hard time making healthy decisions, and solving problems, and they really struggle with conflict management issues, self-compassion has been shown to improve problem-solving abilities as well. And if some people struggle with self-soothing, like the ability to just tap into their own resources and learn how to calm ourselves down, self-compassion is linked to improved self-soothing abilities as well. And if any of you are working in the criminal justice system or are raising a child or teenager who is starting to engage in criminal activity or violent aggressive behavior, a good handful of studies are now looking at the use of self-compassion interventions in reducing criminal thinking behavior as well as aggressive behaviors. And self-compassion too, interestingly, is also linked to an increase in emotional recognition, empathy, and perspective-taking abilities. So that’s just a few of the benefits associated with this. So the list goes really on and on and on. But it’s really worth, I think, learning about this topic. And I do a lot of work in the area of like, forensic mental health. There’s some studies too, that show that self-compassion can actually lower narcissistic tendencies. So if you ever work with people that are narcissistic might be a helpful intervention to try as well. And self-compassion has also been linked to engaging in more healthy eating habits. So if people have just really problematic patterns with eating really unhealthy foods, there’s some evidence too that if you infuse self-compassion interventions into it, it can really be helpful in improving our overall eating habits as well as our health and wellness. And I would say too, that when we’re looking at this through like a lens of mindfulness-based parenting, again, remember, anytime we practice mindfulness, that is a component of self-compassion. And if you are wanting to become more mindful in your parenting, self-compassion is a component of it. Active listening, having really nonjudgmental acceptance of yourself and your child. Part of that too is having better self-regulation as a parent. So if you are more regulated when you’re stressed out, you’re modeling that behavior to your child. And I think too, it can really help increase just our overall thinking, our problem-solving decision-making as a parent, especially during really difficult stressful times.
Well, I wrote them all down. That’s 14 things so far. That’s why I was quiet for a minute. I was writing that overall thinking one down because that is a lot, that is a lot of things that having self-compassion affects. It’s such a strange concept to think if I am nicer to myself and I am more forgiving of my mistakes and my missteps and my I ate too many donuts last night or I yelled at the kids and I need to get back on track. If we are more patient with ourselves and more forgiving with ourselves, that we have all of these benefits, yeah, we have absolutely all of these benefits. And I have seen like with teenage boys, in my experience, just working with them when you were talking about if they’re going to get into trouble with the law, which we don’t want them to, I have found that those boys were harder on themselves than anyone was. Like, I just messed up, I did it wrong, I’m stupid, I’m dumb. And so this is huge for them.
Absolutely. I think anybody working in the criminal justice system or mental health or human service or child protection arena getting training in this, being aware of it is only going to help you be more effective working with complex cases. And you’ll probably feel better yourself and lower burnout because a lot of professionals who work in those helping professions are much more prone to burnout as well. So there’s so many benefits of this, right?
And I feel like with the teenagers, the message to them in our culture, not from me personally or you, but just in our culture is get back in line, behave. You messed up, do it right. And that’s not helping them usually, especially if we’re talking about neurodevelopmental disorder kids or teenagers, because traditional approaches and just saying hey, get better, do this, it doesn’t land. And part of the reason why it doesn’t land is a lot of these individuals may deal with abstract thinking deficits where they struggle with understanding how and why questions and connecting the dots. So we could talk about that in another segment, like just really becoming abstract reasoning informed through a parenting lens. It will change your paradigm in terms of how to talk to your kids and how to use consequences more effectively. I don’t want to open that too much today, but definitely something to think about.
Yeah, that’s definitely a podcast that I would like to record, but we need to finish up for today. So are there any last words that you have for our listeners on this topic?
I would say, too, if you look at the empirical based literature on self-compassion, it has also been shown to be positively correlated with higher levels of optimism. So when you study self-compassion, learning about optimism and gratitude and hopeful thinking really is a component of this. Self-compassion has also been linked to having better social connectedness, and it’s also been linked with having higher levels of emotional intelligence. Several studies have shown that too. And I know in a previous segment you and I talked about emotional intelligence and formed parenting, I believe. So part of that would be learning about self-compassion and emotional intelligence, we know is one of the best predictors of success in life. So a lot of these things definitely overlap and link together.
Well, thank you. And thank you for joining us again today.
You’re welcome. Honor to be here. This is wonderful. And I think this was a very valuable topic, and I hope your listeners get a lot out of it.
how to have peace
WHEN YOUR KIDS ARE IN CHAOS free guide
other resources
Childhood Messages And Inner Child Healing With Tina Hamilton
3 Childhood Messages That Become Beliefs And Triggers
5 Habits Every Trauma-Informed Parent Needs To Practice