Why neutrality can be even more powerful than self-compassion

Now, before you start to get up in arms that I’m anti self-compassion, hold on. I’m not! I like self-compassion and find it a useful tool when appropriate. That being said, at times I feel frustrated by the portrayal of self-compassion as the panacea cure. I notice that self-compassion is often used alongside ideas like “let it go,” “move on,” “be kind to yourself,” “fall in love with yourself,” “love and light,” etc. To be clear, I’m also not anti any of those statements! My whole exploration is to support people in connecting more with themselves and their own resilience. That being said, for many, many people, self-compassion is not their first stop in exploring.
Before we dive into what I said above, let’s talk about what self-compassion is.

First, think about what it means to offer compassion to others. Maybe you offer understanding to a friend when they fail or be kind to them rather than judging them harshly when they make a mistake.

Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, failing, or noticing something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself at this moment? (Dr. Kristen Neff / www.self-compassion.org).
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Dr. Neff provides wonderful free resources on her site to learn more about how to practice self-compassion. Some things she invites us to consider are:

How would you treat a friend?
How do you think things might change if you responded to yourself in the same way you typically respond to a close friend when he or she is suffering?
Changing your critical self-talk
By acknowledging your self-critical voice and reframing its observations in a more friendly way, you will eventually form the blueprint for changing how you relate to yourself long-term.
Identifying what we really want
Remember that if you really want to motivate yourself, love is more powerful than fear. Reframing your inner dialogue so that it is more encouraging and supportive helps get you there.
What self-compassion isn’t: a cure-all for stress, trauma, anxiety, mental health issues, etc.

So why is self-compassion not for everyone?

Many of us may have learned through our environment, school, family, or job that we are not worthy of self-compassion. ​ We may not have seen it modeled for us or may have been told that we are not deserving of care.

We may have also been rewarded for achieving big things or being "perfect" and thus learned that our worth is only tied in with being "good." As adults, we know that it is rare that something will actually be perfect, but we stay stuck on the hamster wheel, convinced we must attain the unattainable before we can be kind to ourselves or before we deserve compassion.

Many of us also believe that if we are kind to ourselves, we are being self-indulgent and will no longer carry out our responsibilities, complete tasks, or do things well. We may think we will become "lazy." In fact, by speaking negatively to ourselves, criticizing ourselves, and treating ourselves as less than others, we block ourselves from truly being the best, most authentic version we can be.
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We get in the way of our own agency to go after what we want, shy away from new opportunities, create anxiety in our lives by telling ourselves we aren't good enough, and generally create an increased stress load on our minds and bodies. Paradoxically, this increased stress can actually cause us to underperform, feel distracted, not complete tasks, feel angry or irritable, and have difficulty connecting to others. It can also lead us to stay in situations that make us unhappy or unfulfilled because we subconsciously believe we don't deserve anything different.

Ok, so we want to move forward toward good things, and stop getting in the way of what we want, yet, when we try to practice self-compassion, it can seem to make things worse. Why? Go back and read my previous post about our survival strategies and how they kept us safe! If you have learned to function, to keep going, to manage by criticizing yourself, then trying to jump into self-compassion and kindness is actually going to make that subconscious part of us more scared.
It wasn’t safe in the past, whether literally or figuratively, to let ourselves feel relaxed enough to be self-compassionate. (Remember, many times physical safety was not actually the threat, rather we learned that others around us responded better when we were quiet, perfect, had no needs, etc.). This doesn’t mean we can NEVER ever be self-compassionate or that we can never learn to practice self-compassion. We can! But telling someone that if they just keep practicing self-compassion and self-love, then they will feel better is a recipe for disaster.

Why I’m the world’s biggest fan of neutrality.

For many of us, self-compassion is a mountain that seems impossible to climb. So where do we start to begin to alleviate the stressful burden of criticizing ourselves?

Neutrality.

Neutrality - let me tell you - is like having a superpower in your back pocket. It's not about being indifferent or aloof or disconnected; it's about being curious and observing. In fact, neutrality is also what I call a master skill - meaning it is an overarching skill to be learned that applies to many other things in our lives (like reading - reading is necessary for enjoying books, reading a restaurant menu, doing our taxes, corresponding via text with friends, etc.).
Much like reading, neutrality isn't just some lofty concept; it's a practical skill that can change the game when it comes to dealing with our internal and external challenges, communication with others, moving toward what we want for ourselves, and noticing what’s getting in the way of that moving forward.

Neutrality itself is a step on the road of self-compassion. Neutral asks us to simply observe what we are doing and what we are saying to ourselves or about ourselves. Rather than indifference, neutrality is a curiosity that allows us to stay present to what is happening at any moment and start to interrupt the patterns in our brain that taught us that we didn't deserve kindness or that criticism was the only way to motivate us.

Neutrality is also the ultimate ninja move against self-criticism. You know that little voice in your head that's always nagging you about how you're not good enough or how you messed up? Neutrality lets us observe that voice and be curious about it rather than beating ourselves up internally. It interrupts those neural pathways in our brain that are so used to criticizing and speaking to ourselves negatively and pops us up into our observer state. Over time, by practicing neutrality we strengthen that new pathway of observing and slowing things down which, in turn, gives us so much more space to see things as they are rather than tinged with old beliefs. How cool is it that we can literally change our brains by practicing this neutral observation?
So - how do you practice neutrality? Next time you notice that you're criticizing yourself, try this simple activity. Pretend that you are a scientist in a lab or a wildlife expert on safari. Narrate what is happening for you at that moment.

"There she goes again, telling herself that she's terrible at public speaking and is going to mess up this presentation and lose her job."

"Ah yes, she's yet again telling herself she's a bad Mom after looking at Instagram while her baby is eating."

"I'm noticing that she is again telling herself she doesn't deserve to have pizza for dinner with her friends because she needs to look good for her wedding."
“I see she’s criticizing herself because she spent six hours scrolling on her phone after work and didn’t do any of the things she needed to do for the evening, telling herself that she’s totally worthless and will never get it together.​”

Notice how it feels to observe with neutrality. Notice how it interrupts your pattern, even if just for a moment. Over time, this process begins to rewire your brain, taking you out of the old pattern of criticism and shifting you into a curious, nonjudgmental stance. You can even try adding on one of my favorite phrases “it makes sense.”

It makes sense that I’d spend all that time scrolling on my phone instead of making dinner and cleaning up when I’m overwhelmed by what’s happening around me. I wish that weren’t the case, I wish it was easier to take care of myself, but right now things feel hard.

As we try on a more neutral way of observation, we are less likely to jump back into old predictive patterns in our brains.

Our brain creates these patterns based on what has happened to us in the past so that it can predict what is going to happen in the future.

So you can think of the roadways in a city. They're not going to make beautiful big paved highways out in the rural country where not a lot of people go. They might have one, two-lane rural state highway. They're not going to have a big, beautiful, gorgeous 12-lane interstate. They make the interstates around the major cities where there are a lot of people going, and our brain works the same way.
The brain builds these pathways to say, this is something that's happened in the past. It's likely something that will happen in the future. It's something that I need to be able to access regularly. So I will build a roadway around it. It doesn't matter whether it's something that we like, or something we don't like. It's all about what is going to keep us safe, keep us going, and what we have done repeatedly in the past. When you want to make a change in your brain, you are saying, I want to go off of this interstate highway that I drive on every single day, and I want to go out into the Amazon jungle. That's what it's like in the rest of our brain outside of these neural pathways and predictive patterns.

So when you want to, for example, be more compassionate or take better care of yourself, you are getting off the interstate and you get off the exit, and not only is there not a road there, but there's a dense, dense, dense jungle. So it's not realistic to expect that you're going to be able to make a sudden change, especially in times of stress, because when you get off the interstate and you're in the jungle, it's like, huh, I can't even I can't even drive my car. I'm gonna have to get out of my car and start walking and start hacking down vines.

That's what it's like when we want to make a change in our brain. So you can see why it's simply unrealistic to expect that when we’re highly stressed we're going to be able to make a big change consistently. Very often when we start to make a change, we have some initial excitement about making the change, so we're able to override and go out into the jungle. But after a while, our brain gets fatigued and wants to go back to that old pathway of being self-critical or not taking care of ourselves.

Over time, by making the change far, far smaller (tiny, like 1% or .01% change), like trying to observe with neutrality or curiosity, we can start to build new roadways and change our patterns. As we do so, maybe our old friend, self-compassion, will slowly (slowly) begin to emerge.