Self-Esteem Starts With Self-Compassion

When faced with hardship and failure, people fall roughly into two groups: those who "roll with life's punches, facing failures and problems with grace," and those who "dwell on calamities, criticize themselves and exaggerate problems."

What differentiates these people? And how to help dwellers turn into rollers? The answers, suggest a study published in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, don't involve self-esteem -- the target of many behavioral interventions -- but rather self-compassion: the ability to forgive yourself, to see your failings as universal rather than uniquely personal, and to see bitterness and anger in a detached manner.

The experiments involved measuring participants’ reactions to recalling actual negative experiences, imagining negative scenarios, receiving unflattering feedback from another person, comparing their evaluations of themselves doing a task and someone else doing the same task, and measuring reactions of participants who were prompted to have a self-compassionate attitude.

In three of the experiments, researchers also compared reactions of people with differing levels of self-compassion to people with differing levels of self-esteem. The findings suggest that fostering a sense of self-compassion may have particularly beneficial effects for people with low self-esteem, the researchers said.

The researchers found that:

* People with higher self-compassion had less negative emotional reactions to real, remembered and imagined bad events.
* Self-compassion allowed people to accept responsibility for a negative experience, but to counteract bad feelings about it.
* Self-compassion protects people from negative events differently
–- and in some cases better -- than self-esteem. In addition, the positive feelings that characterize self-compassionate people do not appear to involve the hubris, narcissism or self-enhancing illusions that characterize many people with high self-esteem.
* Being self-compassionate is particularly important for people with low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem who treat themselves kindly in spite of unflattering self-evaluations fare as well as, if not better than, those with high self-esteem.
* For self-compassionate people, their view of themselves depends less on the outcomes of events, presumably because they respond in a kind and accepting manner toward themselves whether things go well or badly.

The results, admit the researchers, leave many questions unanswered:
are self-compassionate people "simply less likely to examine themselves deeply"? Might self-compassion "make people complacent and discourage them from taking action to prevent future mistakes"? And do the study's results, gathered in an experimental setting, hold true in response to serious, real-life events?

Open questions, all of them -- but they do suggest a direction for future research. And in the meantime, in those moments when life rears its ugly head, it can't hurt to be good to yourself.

Treating Oneself Kindly When Things Go Badly Could Be A Key To Weathering Life's Challenges, Researchers Say [press release]

Image: Syma Sees