Kind & Compassionate With Myself

I am on my own side.

I am consistently kind and compassionate with myself. I don’t turn on myself when something “goes wrong”. I intimately know myself and I am on my own side.

That is not true for most people. It has not always been true for me. How does someone get from the usual internal atmosphere of inner critic, social anxiety, fear, hypervigilance and core deficiency beliefs, to feeling at home in oneself?

We all have basic goodness and we all live in mammal bodies. We know that life is fragile. We have nervous systems that are not well suited to the stresses and threats of modern day life. We live in a culture where we are highly conditioned to believe that we are not good enough unless we are rich and successful by society’s (impossible) standards.

We are fed a Disney version of what life should be like, and that we are a failure if we don’t have secure attachment in our family, well adjusted and behaved children, a group of loving friends, and a meaningful job.

Our basic set up is impossible. Life actually isn’t like that. Pain and loss are a normal part of human life, not the result of something we did wrong.

Some people were fortunate to have a “good enough family” where they developed secure attachment and a basic feeling of being…