Four Elements of Self-Love: #3 Self-Compassion

If you're working on self love, I invite you to watch this four part series on the four elements of self love. Today I'll be talking about the third element, self compassion. So if you haven't had a chance to watch the first two, I highly recommend going back and watching them. But if you don't watch them in order, that's okay, you can still get benefit from this video. My name is Rachel Havocost, I'm a writer and mental health advocate. And today I'm gonna talk to you about self compassion. Self compassion is really about how we treat ourselves and how we talk to ourselves.

So it's a lot about our inner dialogue and how we respond when things happen in our lives, whether they're good or bad, positive or neg. So it's about having a lot of kindness, tenderness, a lot of grace, a lot of self forgiveness, a lot of empathy, removing judgments. So this is really a lot about our internal dialogue and how we're talking to ourselves both throughout the day and in response to things that happen in life. So, for example, let's say I'm really struggling with an exercise that my therapist has given me.

And I told her I was going to do this exercise every day and I didn't do it. I could get really, really down on myself and I could say things to myself like, you're such a f*** up, Rachel. Like, you never do anything you say you're gonna do. You're such a failure. Like why? Why even bother going back to therapy? You clearly aren't doing a good job. Whereas self compassion would say, Rachel, I know that it's been really difficult for you to get started with this exercise. And you know you're just going back into therapy for the first time in a while, so you're really out of practice.

And it's also really scary to engage in these activities because it means you have to really look at yourself. So I know it's really hard and I know that when you're ready, you're gonna begin. And it's okay if you only do it one time a week. You're still a lovely, wonderful human being and you still have value. So self compassion is really how we talk about ourselves. And to talk to ourselves, a really great way to start practicing. Self compassion is a start to notice when you have that negative self talk and try to interrupt it.

So if you notice yourself starting to berate yourself or be critical or judgmental on yourself, notice that come up. Also notice an instinct to criticize yourself or judge yourself for having those thoughts. And then ask yourself, is there a more gentle way I can respond right now? And try and interrupt those patterns when you notice them coming up. Another great exercise is to write a letter to yourself. So oftentimes, writing a letter to ourselves from the perspective of someone who loves us can help us formulate some language in that self compassion part of our brain.

So, for example, writing a letter to ourselves from our best friend and saying, if I was my best friend, what would I tell myself about this difficult situation I'm going through? And writing yourself a letter from that perspective. And that can give us some language to work with and also help us see that we are seen by other people as such a different light than we see ourselves. I hope this was helpful, and please be sure to check out the final video on the last four of the four elements of self love.